The MacArthur Foundation is sponsoring a competition for innovative Digital Media and Learning applications. I had learned of it through my colleague Derek Lomas who won last year for his Playpower project.

This year the applications are posted online with open commenting. The word limit on applications is 300 words (not the abstract, the whole application) which makes it easy for anyone to read through it and give feedback. It also makes it easier to write one and they have over 1,000 submissions last I checked. Judges will select which entries advance to the second phase for which a demo video is required.

With research partners I proposed Qrumbs, a system for social collaborative learning around any web resource. I’m glad to be working with Connexions, Curriki, and the PSLC DataShop, leaders in open educational resources and educational data mining. Below the fold is the full text of the proposal, springing from my work in question authoring. With so few words to work with, I used a narrated scenario to communicate concisely how the system works. I’m including the full text below and encourage you to leave comments both here, or even better on the application’s page.

Qrumbs: Collaborative reflective learning and self-assessment on any web page

Qrumbs turns questions into social media to help learners reflect upon and improve their understanding of anything on the web, including videos, books, articles and individual blog pages. The web is becoming a vast learning environment in which youth can easily reach the information they seek. Qrumbs completes the pedagogical picture with assessment, providing a data-based laboratory for learners, teachers and researchers.

Consider Catrina, who is writing an essay on eradicating malaria. She finds a video of Bill Gates’ TED talk and watches it. To check whether she understood the key points, she clicks the Qrumbs button in her browser and answers the highest rated questions that pop up. Some questions challenge her and she reviews the video. Some are multiple choice and she receives immediate detailed feedback on her answers. Some are funny and she smiles. To learn more she reads Wikipedia on malaria, scrolling to the relevant section. Clicking Qrumbs shows no questions on this piece. She thinks about her favorite questions from the TED page and clicks to add her own.

With Qrumbs helping her focus and reflect, she writes her essay and forgets about it. Two weeks later, she gets an e-mail from Qrumbs, “What do you remember?” She clicks the link and answers the questions again. She then sees a comparison of her answers from now and before. She’s glad she retained most of what she learned and posts it to Facebook, challenging her friends to match her. She sees comments on the questions she wrote and some new additions which she also answers. Her teachers begin using Qrumbs with free online textbooks at the start and end of lessons, mixing select student questions with their own.

Qrumbs builds on the QCommons, Curriki, Connexions, and DataShop platforms, and a decade of experience programming web-based tools for learning.

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The TED Talks lecture series is a wonderful intellectual and cultural resource. I’ve been a fan for years and on this long weekend relished the opportunity to catch up on some I’ve had in my queue. One of my favorites is by Ken Robinson, because it highlights both a goal and a challenge of my research.

First, the challenge:

I have an interest in education — actually, what I find is everybody has an interest in education. Don’t you? I find this very interesting. If you’re at a dinner party, and you say you work in education — actually, you’re not often at dinner parties, frankly, if you work in education. (Laughter) You’re not asked. And you’re never asked back, curiously. That’s strange to me. But if you are, and you say to somebody, you know, they say, “What do you do?”and you say you work in education, you can see the blood run from their face. They’re like, “Oh my God,” you know, “Why me? My one night out all week.” (Laughter)

Education, to many, is a very dry topic. That’s because, for many, the practice of education is very dry. If you ask a space alien what education is for, he posits, they’ll say it’s training to be a university professor. That’s the pinnacle of the process, right? But it takes much more than university professors to make the world go round, of course. How can our system of education support the diversity of needs and foster the diversity of talents of a rich and dynamic society? That’s the goal.

I ask “how” not “if” because I don’t see it as a choice. Globalization, mechanization, intelligent machines… these demand that we develop human resources, fostering the gifts of each person however they may manifest. Motivated by the example of Gillian Lynne (starting 2:30 in the talk), Robinson argues that we increase the amount of education in the arts, even specifically teaching dance to everyone. Such sentiments underestimate the constraints on time, money and attention for and of students. I would imagine Robinson is not a fan of intelligent tutoring systems, how they involve sitting at a desk and developing, most often, a laser focused set of skills.

But I think research in intelligent tutoring systems and other computer supported learning can help address the diversity he speaks of and even help students learn to dance, if that’s something a community values. Firstly, they can help increase the efficiency with which “maths” (he’s British) and other “left brain” skills are learned, leaving more time for other enrichment.  Secondly, and this is a goal of my research, computers can help personalize instruction to each student’s needs and interests. The computer can devote its unblinking attention to the individual, drawing on a wealth of data about their prior interactions with the system, and that of other learners like them, to deliver an effective and engaging learning experience. Technology isn’t the answer, but it is part of the best solution.

Thanks for reading. I encourage you to watch the whole talk as it has many more gems than I’ve noted here, and several laugh out loud moments.

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Today I rolled out a big update to QCommons, implementing  support for many more content areas than Chemistry.

The key new feature is groups. Each group has its own set of content, its own forums, and its own classification terms. (Because “rational” doesn’t mean the same in Economics as it does in Algebra.) Each group can also have its own permissions system and administrators to support more private uses such as school district curriculum committees. If you would like to host a new group, please contact admin@qcommons.org.

To keep a handle on the growth of the site, I’ve switched registrations to requiring administrator approval. Please register and sign up for the mailing list. You’ll go into a queue that I’ll process regularly to allow more users.

Stay tuned to this blog for more!

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It looks as if our open letter to President Obama
isn't alone. A recent post on Ars Technica kindly points us to another open letter from a group of open source vendors and advocates calling for the new administration to consider open source software in government IT initiatives and infrastructure.

Of course, we've been thinking about open source software's power and potential in education for quite a while. Our recently described vision for educational technology depends vitally upon open source materials and the value of community input. That's why we release our software as open source and invite you to visit our source code library to download any or all of it, examine it for yourself and – we hope – submit your own ideas, suggestions or improvements.

Ruby is a powerful and dynamic open-source object-oriented language we have been using extensively at CC in the last few years for the web applications that manage and coordinate authoring and deployment of activities based on the SAIL/OTrunk framework .

The standard Ruby VM is written in C and we've been using version 1.8.6, the latest stable release on our servers. A beta version of the next major release, version 1.9.1 has recently been released.

Ruby 1.9 looks to be about twice as fast as Ruby 1.8.6.

I'm even more impressed by the recent performance increases in JRuby however. This is a version of Ruby that runs in Java. Programs written in JRuby can easily access code written in Java which makes integration with the rest of our Java codebase much easier.

A year ago programs written in JRuby were often slower than ones written in version 1.8.6 of C Ruby. Now for some benchmarks JRuby is twice as fast as Ruby 1.9.

More details about some of these measurements are here: 

Ruby 1.8.6, 1.9, and JRuby running on Java 1.5, 1.6, and 1.7 compared

 

 

 

Welcome back.

As we at the Concord Consortium begin to make more regular posts to our blog, I'm not exactly certain whom I'm welcoming back more: you as our readers, or ourselves as bloggers. Either way, we're pleased to have you as part of the conversation.

And we have plenty to talk about, as our most recent version of @Concord shows. Whether we're giving advice to President Obama, imagining a world beyond textbooks, or giving you free online lessons to use next Monday, we're interested in asking good questions about what technology can do for education. And as a new face around our halls, I'm personally thrilled to be a part of it all.

But, frankly, a conversation gets pretty boring with only one side, so we're interested in hearing your thoughts as well. We hope you'll bring your perspectives to our posts, tell us about software you love or want improved, and share your vision of how technology can help students learn better.

So welcome back. And stop back often, to help us turn good thoughts into a great dialogue.

The next version of Java being developed is v1.7.0 and the OpenJDK version is being released as open source under the GPL license.

 I've written a wiki page describing how to build and install this new version of Java on Mac OS 10.5.6.

Build OpenJDK Java 1.7.0 on Mac OS X 10.5