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Overselling educational software

Admin — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 02:30:22 +0000

Tomorrow’s New York Times carries the second installment in the paper’s series “Grading the Digital School.” Like the first installment, this one finds little solid evidence that popular, expensive computer-aided instruction programs actually benefit students. The focus of the new article, written by Trip Gabriel and Matt Richtel, is Cognitive Tutor, a widely esteemed and much coveted software program for teaching math in high schools. The software was developed by Carnegie Learning, a company founded by Carnegie Mellon professors and now owned by Apollo Group, the same company that owns the University of Phoenix. Carnegie Learning promotes its software as producing “revolutionary results.” It is widely used, and has been applauded by respected thinkers like the Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen, who in an article published by the Atlantic two weeks ago used Carnegie Learning as the poster child for the power of software-based education: Carnegie Learning is the creation of computer and cognitive scientists from Carnegie Mellon University. Their math tutorials draw from cutting-edge research about the way students learn and what motivates them to succeed academically. These scientists have created adaptive computer tutorials that meet students at their individual level of understanding and help them advance via the…

The age of deep automation

Admin — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 16:30:23 +0000

Thanks to interconnected computers that are able to compute and communicate at incredibly low costs, we have entered a time of what I’ll call deep automation. The story of modern economies has always been a story of automation, of course, but what what’s going on today goes far beyond anything that’s happened before. We don’t know what the consequences will be, but the persistent, high levels of unemployment in developed economies may well be a symptom of deep automation. In a provocative article in the new issue of the McKinsey Quarterly, W. Brian Arthur argues that computer automation has in effect created a “second economy” that is, slowly, silently, and largely invisibly, beginning to supplant the primary, physical economy: I want to argue that something deep is going on with information technology, something that goes well beyond the use of computers, social media, and commerce on the Internet. Business processes that once took place among human beings are now being executed electronically. They are taking place in an unseen domain that is strictly digital. On the surface, this shift doesnt seem particularly consequentialits almost something we take for granted. But I believe it is causing a revolution no less important…

Whose book is it, anyway?

Admin — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 02:30:21 +0000

Even after I wrote a couple of posts about Amazon’s Kindle announcements last week, something still nagged me – I sensed there was an angle I was missing – and two nights ago it finally hit me. I woke from a fretful sleep and discovered a question pinballing through my synapses: What the heck does Kuzuo Ishiguro think about this? Or, more generally: Whose book is it, anyway? You might have thought that question was put to rest a few hundred years ago. For quite a while after Gutenberg invented the printing press, the issue of who controlled a book’s contents remained a fraught one. As is often the case, it took many years for laws, contractual arrangements, business practices, and social norms to catch up with the revolutionary new technology. But in due course the dust settled, and control over a book’s contents came to rest firmly in the hands of a book’s author (at least through the term of copyright). Which seems like the proper outcome. You probably wouldn’t, for instance, want book retailers to be able to fiddle with the text of a new book at their whim – that would be annoying, confusing, and wrong. And…

Farewell

Admin — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 06:30:11 +0000

Matter-eater lads

Admin — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 02:30:23 +0000

Now here’s a sight for sore eyes: Guided by Voices in its original (more or less) lineup recording Let’s Go Eat the Factory, its first new album since 1996’s Under the Bushes Under the Stars, in a basement rec room, with Robert Pollard singing in a doorway and bass player Greg Demos monitoring the TASCAM four-track cassette recording deck while sitting in a chair that appears to have been stolen from a kindergarten: Pollard is one of the great American artists of the past 50 years, though I suspect it will be another 50 years before that begins to be acknowledged. There are more things in heaven and earth, Lightning Boy, than are dreamt of in your philosophy….

The remains of the book

Admin — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 02:30:20 +0000

One of the essential characteristics of the printed book, as of the scribal codex that preceded it, is its edges. Those edges, as John Updike pointed out not long before he died, manifest themselves in the physical form of bound books – “some are rough-cut, some are smooth-cut, and a few, at least at my extravagant publishing house, are even top-stained” – but they are also there aesthetically and even metaphysically, giving each book integrity as a work in itself. That doesn’t mean that a book exists in isolation – its words, as written and as read, form rich connections with other books as well as with the worlds of nature and of men – but rather that a book offers a self-contained experience. The sense of self-containment is what makes a good book so satisfying to its readers, and the requirement of self-containment is what spurs the writer to the highest levels of literary achievement. The book must feel complete between its edges. The idea of edges, of separateness, is antithetical to the web, which as a hypermedium dissolves all boundaries, renders implicit connections explicit. Indeed, much of the power and usefulness of the web as a technology derives…

Beyond words: the Kindle Fire and the book’s future

Admin — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 02:30:21 +0000

The future arrives wearing the clothes of the past. The first book that came off a printing press – Gutenberg’s Bible – used a typeface that had been meticulously designed to look like a scribe’s handwriting: The first TV shows were filmed radio broadcasts. The designers of personal computers used the metaphor of a desk for organizing information. The world wide web had “pages.” The home pages of online newspapers mimicked the front pages of their print editions. As Richard Goldstein succinctly put it, “every novel technology draws from familiar forms until it establishes its own aesthetic.” It’s tempting to look at the early form of a new media technology and assume that it will be the ultimate form, but that’s a big mistake. The transitional state is never the final state. Eventually, the clothes of the past are shed, and the true nature, the true aesthetic, of the new technology is revealed. So it is with what we call “electronic books.” Amazon’s original Kindle was explicitly designed to replicate as closely as possible the look and feel of a printed book: When Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, introduced the Kindle in late 2007, he went out of his way to…

Facebook’s business model

Admin — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 16:30:21 +0000

The desire for privacy is strong; vanity is stronger….

Raise high the paywalls, publishers

Admin — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 06:30:14 +0000

This is the third in a series of occasional pieces on the transformation of the newspaper business. The first two pieces, both published in 2009, were The Writing Is on the Paywall and Google in the Middle. Information doesn’t want to be free. Nor does it want to be expensive. Information wants to be reasonably priced. And when it’s reasonably priced, it gets purchased. The internet has changed patterns of supply and demand in media businesses in profound ways. We’re not going back to the way things used to be. But it’s a mistake to assume that the contours of the landscape in the immediate aftermath of the disruption are the permanent contours of the landscape. New patterns of supply and demand – and, in turn, new ways of doing business – emerge to replace old ones, though it can take a long time for those patterns to mature and become stable. And in the meantime, there can be a whole lot of wreckage to clean up. The arrival of Napster and its various progeny gave rise to the assumption that the recorded music business was doomed, that no one would ever pay for music again. That assumption, which at…

Great concept for a new reality TV series

Admin — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 16:30:16 +0000

Put Mike Arrington, Tim Armstrong, and Arianna Huffington in a beach house together for six months and film the proceedings. The hijinks would be primo. And if the action ever flagged, you could always helicopter Paul Carr in for a sleepover. Can I patent this idea?…