Posts tagged ‘Education’

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April 24, 2013

Disruption in how we learn

Fat Tony

Fat Tony (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I always enjoyed being a student and that is one of the main reasons why I wanted to teach… that did not pan out as planned because I wanted to do so much more. There are so many fantastic possibilities opening up with the connected world. Fred Wilson had a post a couple of days back of Startup Grind where Mark Suster was interviewing Clay Christensen. I have written a lot about Clay Christensen’s work around “The Innovators Dilemma”, where Clay talks about why disruption happens. The interview was about the disruption happening to higher education and venture capital. In my opinion the biggest disruption of all is going to happen to how we learn. I have to be honest, I am learning more about Price Actions, Reading Stock Charts and Technical Analysis from a very experienced trader, Dan Fitzpatrick, who is running an education website called StockMarketMentor.com and OptionMarketMentor.com. I am hooked I wake up every morning to watch his video analysis of the market, his perspectives on a number of stocks and how he thinks as a trader. This knowledge was usually locked up, but with the advent of the internet anyone can invest the time, learn a new trade or just learn about anything. This is just so mind blowing to me that I am surprise not many people are taking advantage of this. I wish there was more than 24 hours in a day for us to be able to learn all these new things that you always wanted to learn. Do you want to learn to play the Guitar? sure there is GuitarParty.com, do you want to learn to cook? sure there is LearnToCook.com, I am not vouching these are the best educational material out there but it makes education accessible to anyone who has access to an Internet Connected display device.

What the internet based education brings is engagement as opposed to watching a video in a TV or something similar. If you could put together a forum where there is interaction of the community, have a daily/weekly video feed of your thought process and a subscription model then you can start an education business. I have been extremely happy to pay $170/month to learn how to think like an experienced Stock Trader. No, I am not betting my house in the Stock Market and yes, I think the Market is rigged to be biased towards Institutional investors but the price action is fascinating to analyze and learn from, what is even more interesting for me is to learn how a stock market trader thinks, the experienced ones like Dan Fitzpartick admit to their follies, are very good risk managers and do not bet their house on what they know. They are nimble, street smart, think survival and usually are not too much into book learning. Much like how Taleb talks about Fat Tony in his books Antifragile, The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness. So, what do you want to learn about? what is stopping you? I am sure if you look hard enough you will find a service on the Internet that teaches you something.

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March 3, 2013

Build a School in the Cloud

I have not been more excited than after watching this video. Here is proof of something that I have always known, given the tools and the right questions anyone of us can learn complex, difficult and soul searching answers. Here is my vindication. I have been writing about how kids can learn to code, I am going to say kids can learn anything if we provide them the tools, let them collaborate and give them a lot of love and encouragement, then stand back and watch the magic. They don’t need instructions, they don’t need exams or punishment, all they need is someone encouraging their curiosity. Schools as we know them are obsolete.

Here is a brief description of what Dr.Sugata Mitra has been doing for the past decade.

Source: worldchanging.com

Educational researcher Dr. Sugata Mitra’s “Hole in the Wall” experiments have shown that, in the absence of supervision or formal teaching, children can teach themselves and each other, if they’re motivated by curiosity and peer interest. In 1999, Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an Internet-connected PC, and left it there (with a hidden camera filming the area). What they saw was kids from the slum playing around with the computer and in the process learning how to use it and how to go online, and then teaching each other.

The “Hole in the Wall” project demonstrates that, even in the absence of any direct input from a teacher, an environment that stimulates curiosity can cause learning through self-instruction and peer-shared knowledge. Mitra, who’s now a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University (UK), calls it “minimally invasive education.”

At TED2013, Sugata Mitra made a bold TED Prize wish: Help me build a place where children can explore and learn on their own — and teach one another — using resouces from the worldwide cloud.

Download the Self Organized Learning Environment (SOLE) Toolkit >>

“Education-as-usual assumes that kids are empty vessels who need to be sat down in a room and filled with curricular content. Dr. Mitra’s experiments prove that wrong.”

Linux Journal

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February 27, 2013

Coding

My daughter hacking

My daughter hacking

I have been hammering the notion of Software development for as long as I can remember. I took up Computer Science when I was 14, it was just fun to do but I was never that good in programming what I was really good at was Strategizing on what computing could do to our lives. I stuck to Software through out my career, understanding how computers and software works in a global network is a life skill. Here is a video explaining why this is important to get our kids involved in this exercise.

Kids hacking RasberryPi and GreenQloud

Kids hacking RasberryPi and GreenQloud

I have had arguments with my wife about the utter lack of understanding in my daughters school on what they should be teaching them about computers. Wait for it… WORD!!! yes, they are teaching my daughter how to use WORD! arrg…the humanity! I still cannot contain my frustration. We don’t want our kids to be consumers of software, we want them to be creators and innovators and problem solvers. I am on a mission to get the power of cloud computing to every class room in Iceland. The video is aptly named “What they don’t teach in schools” and that is computer programming. It is understandable but sad. Teachers could learn something from the kids now a days. No teacher that I have met has taken the initiative to understand how the world of software works and included it in the curriculum. That is why I believe Entrepreneurs will solve this problem. I have written about Skema a startup that is teaching kids especially girls about computers and software. I believe this is the future, everything we do is going to involve computers or software or machine language. I urge you to allow your kids to learn this skill, they will thank you for it. The great programmers of the future are going to be the Rock Stars. I am buying a cool computer for my daughter soon, she is every interested and has taken a number of classes with Skema.

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February 21, 2012

Skolapulsinn.is – Mashing Technology, Education and Psychology

Brian Suda, does not need any introduction in the Icelandic Startup Scene. He also writes a pretty well read blog @optional.is. I stumbled upon this post by Brian on Skolapulsinn.is which he and a couple of other hackers put together for solving a big problem in Schools, to gauge the pulse of the students. Typically this is captured by asking the students through Surveys, but Skolapulsinn.is makes that feedback look much shorter and allows for School Administrator and Teachers to react in real time on what is going in the school system. He has written a very detailed post on this in his blog here. I have to be honest I was not aware that this tool was hacked together in 2008 and has surveyed more than 12000 students, thats pretty impressive data set. I need to talk to Brian today and understand where is this data and what can we learn from it.  I bet you could ask a whole lot of questions and this data can be used to understand the living breathing student community in Iceland in real time. I like how Brain refers to the school system as a living breathing thing rather than a stoic institution. We could ask important questions like how involved are the parents in the school work of the students, because time and time again it has been proven that kids whose parents are more involved with their kids work, make better students. We can actually give a more real-time report card rather than wait for the year to be over or solicit the opinion of the teacher. It is the kid who knows whether their  parents are involved in the home work or not. In addition, we could ask questions about the general feeling of the students to access whether they are feeling positive about school, their self confidence etc. This tools is a fascinating introduction to me and I obviously am going to bug Brian about how this is used in the Icelandic School System. If it is not used, then I want to lobby to the Ministry of Education and get them to use it. We need innovation like this to Tinker and Learnto improve our educational system, after all is’nt Education about Learning?

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February 12, 2012

Disruption in Education

Education is one of the most valuable bequeaths that we can pass along to our next generation. It was hammered into my head when I was growing up that there is only one way out of poverty and that is education. I am doing ok following that advice, what is exciting to me with the advent of the internet is that education is no longer confined behind the walls of an institute. There are disruptions happening that could fundamentally change the dynamics of competitive advantage, productivity, understanding and knowledge dissemination in the entire world. I signed up with Khan Academy yesterday and watched about 40 minutes of Python Programmingvideos, I have to admit I have done my stint with coding and I am a geek. I thought the instructions were very clear, and I actually felt like I relearnt a lot of the basics very quickly. I think what Sal Khan is doing is fascinating and he is really defining his legacy. This is by no means an advertisement for Khan Academy, but the number of videos that is available in the library is close to 2800 thats a lot of learning in various subjects. I am going to continue my learning in the Python Programming and anything else that I want to learn. The freedom to choose your learning by watching a good teacher is a great motivator, it gives you confidence and the of course the learning. So, what are you going to learn?

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February 2, 2012

Skema – A Startup Profile

I am a strong believer that kids can learn to program very early in their lives. I have been a big fan of the late Dr.Randy Pauch and his legacy of Alice. My daughter and I have played with Alice a bit and I am planning to set some time with her every week to do Alice, she has all these screen plays that she creates in her note book and she is very motivated to be in the performing arts. Here is an idea, she could use Alice to make her stories there by learn computer programming. This is exactly what Laufey Dís Ragnarsdóttir and Rakel Sölvadóttir—computer scientists and psychologists at the Reykjavík University have started doing. Here is an article about them in Reykjavik Grapevine. They have a startup which actually won the award for being the “Seed of the year for 2011″ here in Iceland, the name of the company is Skema but as always the website is in Icelandic and I have to rely on Google Translate to tell me what they are really trying to do. The just started offering programs for kids a couple of days back. I am going to try to meet with them. There has been no innovation in education per se and I believe these kinds of tools and startups can really change the way we learn.

What is fascinating about teaching kid computer programming is that I believe it could help kids with Attention Deficit Disorder and Dyslexia, I am not a medical doctor but I would guess it actually help kids learn better with computer programming because the feedback loop of what you do is immediate and they actually start paying more attention to the task at hand.

Here is Rakel talking about the concept in TEDxReykjavik.http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxReykjavik-Rakel-Solvadottir/player?layout=&read_more=1

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