Machines and Education

From the Guardian an interesting long read on how technology is revolutionizing learning,

When we met, Li rhapsodised about a future in which technology will enable children to learn 10 or even 100 times more than they do today. Wild claims like these, typical of the hyperactive education technology sector, tend to prompt two different reactions. The first is: bullshit – teaching and learning is too complex, too human a craft to be taken over by robots. The second reaction is the one I had when I first met Li in London a year ago: oh no, the robot teachers are coming for education as we know it. There is some truth to both reactions, but the real story of AI education, it turns out, is a whole lot more complicated.

....

Huang had begun his English course, which would last for one term, a few months earlier with a diagnostic test. He had logged into the Squirrel AI platform on his laptop and answered a series of questions designed to evaluate his mastery of more than 10,000 “knowledge points” (such as the distinction between “belong to” and “belong in”). Based on his answers, Squirrel AI’s software had generated a precise “learning map” for him, which would determine which texts he would read, which videos he would see, which tests he would take.

....

The answer, Li decided, was adaptive learning, where an intelligent computer-based system adjusts itself automatically to the best method for an individual learner. The idea of adaptive learning was not new, but Li was confident that developments in AI research meant that huge advances were now within reach. Rather than seeking to recreate the general intelligence of a human mind, researchers were getting impressive results by putting AI to work on specialised tasks. AI doctors are now equal to or better than humans at analysing X-rays for certain pathologies, while AI lawyers are carrying out legal research that would once have been done by clerks.

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 44): McGraw Hill Education, Pearson Acquires, Open Access, TIme Mag's Education + More

Brian Kibby, President of McGraw Hill Higher Education interviewed in Inside Higher Ed

Question 4: It seems to me that in your position as president of McGraw-Hill higher education you have before you the very difficult task of leading an enormous change in how your company operates. For many many years the big educational publishes have made very good money with a model of printed books and digital add-ons. You are saying that by 2015 that traditional educational publisher model will be as dead as Blockbuster video, as dead as the old record stores. How are you going to transform your corporate culture and lead your employees to embrace this change? And why should we expect that any big traditional publisher will be able to evolve to embrace this new digital world, as there are not many very good models in other industries of other legacy companies making similar transitions.

Answer 4: McGraw-Hill Education is a company with over 100 years of experience in education, so obviously it’s a place with some history. But the world and the needs of our customers have changed dramatically, as has the technology now available to help satisfy their demands. Our team has embraced this change whole heartedly. Our culture has become one where we have a passion for creative disruption, especially as it relates to what is important to our customers: improved results, retention, and the ability to become even more competitive in the marketplace.

We’re focused on technology now in a way that we’ve never been before, but we still have that deep respect for content, and I think that our employees really appreciate that.

With regard to other models/industries, I think we’ve had something of a late-mover advantage. A lot is made about how education has lagged behind other areas in adopting technology, and I won’t go into that but to say that the more gradual transition in our space gave us the chance to sit down and really figure out the best way to do digital from a business perspective. Newspapers had to make that choice back in the mid-90s, and the music industry had to face it in the early 2000s. Like everyone else, we needed to figure out how to get people to think about digital as something you pay for, and our answer to that was to make digital products that were worth paying for. I think we’ve been able to do that pretty successfully, and the market has responded well.

Pearson announced its largest acquisition in over five years on Tuesday with the purchase of EmbanetCompass, a provider of digital services such as online degrees to leading non-profit colleges and universities in the US (FT).  From Embanet's website:

EmbanetCompass is the premier provider of online learning services and technological solutions for top-tier academic institutions. We are acutely aware of the dynamics that drive higher education and utilize our experience and expertise to assess, finance, develop, recruit for, market and support online learning solutions for our academic partners.

 A new study suggests that open access publishing is larger than expected (Guardian):

They should be encouraged by Laasko and Björk's study which, fittingly, is published in an open access journal. The Finnish researchers found not only that nearly 17% of research papers worldwide are now published in open access journals, a figure that is two to three times higher than was previously supposed, but also that the exponential rise in open access publishing shows no sign of slowing down.

In the UK, since about 35% of papers are reckoned to be made available through deposition in repositories — the green route — the total percentage of open access papers (52%) looks like it has crossed the half-way mark.

Time Magazine devotes most of its current issue to education.  Here is a sample on MOOCs (TIME)

To compare my online experience with a traditional class, I dropped into a physics course at Georgetown University, the opposite of a MOOC. Georgetown admitted only 17% of applicants last fall and, with annual tuition of $42,360, charges the equivalent of about $4,200 per class.
The university’s large lecture course for introductory physics accommodates 150 to 200 students, who receive a relatively traditional classroom experience — which is to say, one not designed according to how the brain learns. The professor, who is new to the course, declined to let me visit.
But Georgetown did allow me to observe Physics 151, an introductory class for science majors, and I soon understood why. This class was impressively nontraditional. Three times a week, the professor delivered a lecture, but she paused every 15 minutes to ask a question, which her 34 students contemplated, discussed and then answered using handheld clickers that let her assess their understanding. There was a weekly lab — an important component missing from the Udacity class. The students also met once a week with a teaching assistant who gave them problems designed to trip them up and had them work in small groups to grapple with the concepts.
The class felt like a luxury car: exquisitely wrought and expensive. Fittingly, it met in a brand-new, state-of-the-art $100 million science center that included 12 teaching labs, six student lounges and a café. It was like going to a science spa.
Elite universities like Georgetown are unlikely to go away in the near future, as even Udacity’s co-founder (and Stanford alum) David Stavens concedes. “I think the top 50 schools are probably safe,” he says. “There’s a magic that goes on inside a university campus that, if you can afford to live inside that bubble, is wonderful.”

Where does that leave the rest of the country’s 4,400 degree-granting colleges? After all, only a fifth of freshmen actually live on a residential campus. Nearly half attend community colleges. Many never experience dorm life, let alone science spas. To return to reality, I visited the University of the District of Columbia (UDC) — a school that, like many other colleges, is not ranked by U.S. News & World Report.

Disruption in the news business from Nieman Report:

With history as our guide, it shouldn't be a surprise when new entrants like The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed, which began life as news aggregators, begin their march up the value network. They may have started by collecting cute pictures of cats but they are now expanding into politics, transforming from aggregators into generators of original content, and even, in the case of The Huffington Post, winning a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting.

They are classic disruptors.

Disruption theory argues that a consistent pattern repeats itself from industry to industry. New entrants to a field establish a foothold at the low end and move up the value network—eating away at the customer base of incumbents—by using a scalable advantage and typically entering the market with a lower-margin profit formula.

It happened with Japanese automakers: They started with cheap subcompacts that were widely considered a joke. Now they make Lexuses that challenge the best of what Europe can offer.

It happened in the steel industry, where minimills began as a cheap, lower-quality alternative to established integrated mills, then moved their way up, pushing aside the industry's giants.

In the news business, newcomers are doing the same thing: delivering a product that is faster and more personalized than that provided by the bigger, more established news organizations. The newcomers aren't burdened by the expensive overheads of legacy organizations that are a function of life in the old world. Instead, they've invested in only those resources critical to survival in the new world. All the while, they have created new market demand by engaging new audiences.

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 39) Coursera, Changing Academic Publishing, Project Muse, Libraries + More

MOOC Coursera continues to add providers to its platform with a big expansion noted in the Chronicle of Higher Ed.

The new partners come in a mix of shapes and sizes, comprising state flagships like the University of Maryland at College Park, liberal-arts colleges like Wesleyan University, specialized institutions including the Berklee College of Music, and foreign institutions like the University of Melbourne, in Australia. The speed at which colleges are joining is remarkable: The company began operations only in January.

Most partners will offer only a handful of free courses each to start out; Coursera officials recommend that each partner offer five at first. The colleges consider the efforts an experiment, with plans to review them in the near future and decide whether they want to continue to offer the free courses. The agreement between each institution and Coursera is nonexclusive, so the colleges are free to work with other MOOC providers as well.

One benefit for participating colleges is marketing: Coursera courses typically attract tens of thousands of students each. So far, the company says, more than 1.3 million students have signed up for at least one course. Many of the students sign up but then never watch the lecture videos or complete the homework assignments, but even so, the colleges are offering a sample of their best professors’ teaching to a wide audience.

Commentary by Hugh Gusterson in the Chronicle under the title "Want to Change Academic Publishing?

When I became an academic, those inconsistencies made a sort of sense: Academic journals, especially in the social sciences, were published by struggling, nonprofit university presses that could ill afford to pay for content, refereeing, or editing. It was expected that, in the vast consortium that our university system constitutes, our own university would pay our salary, and we would donate our writing and critical-reading skills to the system in return.

The system involved a huge exchange of gifted labor that produced little in the way of profit for publishers and a lot in the way of professional solidarity and interdependence for the participants. The fact that academic journals did not compensate the way commercial magazines and newspapers did only made academic publishing seem less vulgar and more valuable.

But in recent years the academic journals have largely been taken over by for-profit publishing behemoths such as Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley-Blackwell. And quite a profit they make, too: In 2010 Elsevier reported profits of 36 percent on revenues of $3.2-billion. Last year its chief executive, Erik Engstrom, earned $4.6-million.

One reason those companies make good profits for their shareholders and pay such high salaries to their leaders is that they are in a position to charge high prices. The open-access debate has focused mainly on the exorbitant fees for-profit publishers charge libraries for bundles of journal subscriptions, but I am struck by what they charge ordinary citizens to read my individual articles.

For example, anyone without access to a university library who wants to read a nine-page article I wrote (free) for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists last year will have to pay Sage $32 to get electronic access to it for one day—more than it would cost to buy and keep a printed copy of either of my most recent books. Needless to say, Sage passes none of the $32 on to me.

Also interesting is this exchange in the comments about Project MUSE:

ieubanks: This is a great article, and it's about time someone mentioned this elephant in the room. I do, however, agree with the comments here that question the wisdom of charging referee fees. The problem, as I see it, is not always the fault of the journal or the publishing house.

I edit a peer-reviewed journal, and we have precious little income. What we garner from subscriptions goes to the publishing house, which is a university press that subsidizes much of what it publishes.

The problem here is that the databases, such as ProjectMuse, JSTOR, and worse still, Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, and others mentioned in the article, often pay a relatively small fee to the publishing houses and then turn around to charge libraries tremendous access fees. Therefore, the best solution would be for the authors of the articles to grant one-time printing rights and NON-TRANSFERABLE electronic rights to the journals and publishing houses. This would protect both open-access and subscription-only journals while preventing the databases from making a profit off free labor without violating intellectual property rights.

Furthermore, there should be a class-action suit against the databases. I feel certain that they are selling work they don't have permission to sell. I have found some of my own work in those databases, when I am sure that I never signed away electronic rights for those works. Meanwhile, large portions of library budgets go to the databases as tuition continually rises and faculty are downgraded to armies of over-qualified adjuncts.

Sand6432: This statement is misinformed about how what are incorrectly called "databases" like Project Muse operate. In fact, as I can testify as former director of Penn State University Press, which put all of its dozen journals into Project Muse as soon as it became open to journals from other publishers besides Johns Hopkins, that aggregation soon came to provide two thirds of the overall revenue for operating our journals program, which could not have transitioned into e-publishing without it. Project Muse limits its content to journals published by non-profit entities, by the way. I have never heard any librarian complain that its subscription fees were excessive. After all, it was established as a joint project of the press and library at Johns Hopkins, so has always been library-friendly.---Sandy Thatcher

ieubanks: Thank you for clarifying. My point is that people are selling the intellectual property of others without compensating them for it. I work with Project Muse, and they are guilty of it, although I agree that they are perhaps one of the least unscrupulous aggregators. The way it works is pretty simple, as far as I can tell. Here is how it works with the journal I edit: Libraries pay for access to material provided by Project Muse, who in turn pays a small sum to our publishing house for each journal. Neither the journal nor the authors ever see a penny of that. On the contrary, the authors must fund the journal themselves by joining the academic society responsible for producing the journal (i.e., the authors must subscribe in order to publish), and that money must be handed over to the publishing house to pay for publishing costs.

abbistani: While I was almost willing to accept the title of "least unscrupulous aggregator," I'm afraid that a little more information about how Project MUSE works might be in order. We currently return more than 75% of our gross revenue to our participating publishers. How much they pass on to their journals depends on the agreement between the publisher and the the journal. The amount of money that each journal earns for it's publisher is the result of a formula that includes things like usage, and as you might expect, there is a wide variance. I will submit that we return significantly more money to our journals than any other aggregator, and many earn more money from us than they do from selling subscriptions. ieubanks, email me if you want to talk about your particular situation.

Brian Harrington
Project MUSE
brian@jhu,edu

Barbara Fister wrting in Inside Higher Education on What Libraries Should Be:

In the case of libraries, I worry that we are abandoning or at the very least absent-mindedly mislaying our values and our capacity to improve the lives of those who use our libraries by taking too utilitarian an approach (“our job is to deliver the information people want”). We design our systems to deliver the goods and bolster “productivity,” but not necessarily to encourage making connections or thinking deeply and critically. Consuming and producing take the place of creation and contemplation (such old-fashioned terms). As Don M. Randel put it in a recent issue of Liberal Education, “The Market Made Me Do It.” We compete against one another as businesses and sports teams do and, in the process, we contribute not to the habits of mind and heart that Delbanco lays out, but instead to widening inequality. When we put delivery of information to our communities first, we neglect our broader interest in equalizing access to information.

In the Atlantic Maria Konnikova contemplates how easy it is becoming to erase books that cause problems (Atlantic):

Readers are increasingly reliant on digital sources for information—and they are increasingly reliant on these sources to be accurate. Of course, it's impossible to wipe out altogether the digital record of a book's existence. There will always be articles, analyses, used copies (you can still, for instance, get Imagine at Indiebound and Powell's). But the principle itself is a frightening one. Not only can you remove physical content—Orwell hasn't been the only one to disappear off of a Kindle device—but you can change, in a sense, the digital record. And what happens when there actually aren't any physical books behind those electronic versions—and then a publisher or retailer not only removes all links to the book in question, but then proceeds to remove the already purchased book from your reading device? Imagine: When all of your books are in digital form, what is the backup system if they are of a sudden removed?

From Twitter:
Apple Exec Jony Ive to Design One-of-a-Kind Leica Camera Mashable

Google Teams Up With Harris Interactive To Launch New Self-Service Consumer Research Tool Techcrunch

Book sculpture flows out of Museum Meermanno Flickr

Chart: Top 100 iPad Rollouts by Enterprises & Schools (Updated Sept. 15, 2012) ZDNet

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 30); MOOCs, Online Higher Ed Courses, Library Ideas, Research Needs,

Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs are really getting some people excited and the sheer numbers are amazing - although is this a fad and or a function of supply?  From the NYTimes an interview with Anant Agarwal of MIT who's first class enrolled 150,000 students (NYTimes)

Did you expect so much demand?

With no marketing dollars, I thought we might get 200 students. When we posted on the Web site that we were taking registration and the course would start in March, my colleague Piotr Mitros called and said, “We’re getting 10,000 registrations a day.” I fell off my seat and said, “Piotr, are you sure you’ve got the decimal point right?” My most fearful moment was when we launched the course. I worried that the system couldn’t handle it, and would keel over and die. 

...

Most students who register for MOOCs don’t complete the course. Of the 154,763 who registered for “Circuits and Electronics,” fewer than half even got as far as looking at the first problem set, and only 7,157 passed the course. What do you make of that?

A large number of the students who sign up for MOOCs are browsing, to see what it’s like. They might not have the right background for the course. They might just do a little bit of the coursework. Our course was M.I.T.-hard and needed a very, very solid background. Other students just don’t have time to do the weekly assignments. One thing we’re thinking of is to offer multiple versions of the course, one that would last a semester and one that could stretch over a year. That would help some people complete.

And from The Atlantic a profile of Coursera which they suggest is the "Single Most Important Experiment in Education" (Altantic):

But the deals Coursera announced Tuesday may well prove to be an inflection point for online education, a sector that has traditionally been dominated by for-profit colleges known mostly for their noxious recruitment practices and poor results. That's because the new partnerships represent an embrace of web-based learning from across the top tier of U.S. universities. And where the elite colleges go, so goes the rest of academia.
Coursera has previously teamed with Stanford, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, and University of Michigan to offer 43 courses, which according to the New York Times enrolled 680,000 students. It now adds to its roster Duke, Caltech, University of Virginia, Georgia Tech, University of Washington, Rice, Johns Hopkins, University of California San Francisco, University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne, University of Toronto, University of Edinburgh, and Switzerland's École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.
Only one school, the University of Washington, said it will give credit for its Coursera classes. But two others, University of Pennsylvania and Caltech, said they would invest $3.7 million into the enterprise, bringing the company's venture funding to more than $22 million. Literally, colleges are buying in.

Suggestions that independent bookstore protectionism works in other countries - should it be implemented in the US? (Atlantic)

Here in the U.S., most bookstores survive in tales of grassroots preservation or community campaigns. Price-fixing is undoubtedly the least likely American solution, though as Jason Boog has pointed out at NPR, booksellers and publishers actually did persuade FDR to enforce a price floor to prevent Macy’s from undercutting small book retailers with loss-leader pricing on Gone with the Wind during the Great Depression. (That policy was later declared unconstitutional, but it did throw a wrench in the Macy’s strategy.) This April, though, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit accusing Apple and several publishers of colluding to raise the price of e-books to compete with Amazon’s price-discounting. Don’t expect to see federal protection of local bookstores via price-setting anytime soon.

Possibly the worlds most bizarre library carrel but some interesting ideas for the future of libraries (Harvard):

In the seminar’s freewheeling atmosphere, ideas flew like cream pies at a food fight. What if behind-the-scenes work could take place in the open instead, suggested Matthew Battles, a fellow at the Berkman Center. “What if you set up somebody processing medieval manuscripts in Widener or Lamont—a processing station in a public space?” Battles had just come from a used-furniture depository, where he’d been scavenging for shelves that could be repurposed for use as curator stations, places where faculty members or librarians could be asked to curate small collections of books. “What about a mobile, inflatable library?” suggested Goldenson. “What would that do?” Or how about an “Artist in Reference,” he continued. “We could bring in experts in a particular subject to serve as guest reference librarians in their area of expertise.” Schnapp, running with the idea, noted that “Widener contains collections in fields that haven’t been taught at Harvard in a hundred years, where we have the best collections of materials.”

Is wikipedea looking to set up their own travel information and guide site (Skift):

Imagine a free TripAdvisor focused on travel destinations, where masses of travelers could update information during or after their hotel stay, tour or private meanderings around town, and share it with the world under the supervision of seasoned administrators.
The foundation’s board of trustees on July 11 approved a proposal [see Update below] to launch an advertisement-free travel guide [see Update below] and community members noted that 31 of the 48 administrators of the Internet Brands-owned Wikitravel have expressed interest in joining forces with the Wikimedia Foundation’s travel guide website.
Wikitravel is considered the current leader in travel wikis, but its advertisements and monetization efforts may turn off travelers and would-be contributors.
In addition, the introduction to a community discussion about the travel guide proposal argues that Internet Brands has failed to keep pace with the times and that Wikitravel suffers from a “lack of technical support/feature development.”

The Guardian Higher Ed team reports on a JISC study on student research needs 

The report's findings indicate that the greatest challenge to researchers is the difficulty of access to e-journals. It is easy to see why: doctoral students across all subjects told us that they predominantly look for secondary published resources to inform their research, and for over 80% of researchers, this means accessing full text journal articles.
These same materials are often subject to licensing restrictions and other limitations imposed by e-journals publishers and other information service providers. This appears to be an area of sharpening tension in the doctoral and broader research community, with the majority of students surveyed describing it as a 'significant constraint' in the research process, and one of the biggest frustrations affecting their work.
Despite the ongoing debate around open access in the media, the report's findings have told us that there is a significant level of confusion among researchers around what open access means, or even how reliable open access materials are.
Another finding from the report shows that as many as 35% of those researchers surveyed in 2011 did not receive any face-to-face training in research and information-seeking skills in the previous academic year, even though 65% of researchers ranked it as their most important training need. These outcomes are concerning, but fortunately they are also an area where significant improvements can be made, through increasing face-to-face training and support for researchers when they start their PhD programmes, but also much earlier as they enter higher education.