Undecipherable Notes from CES 2010

Kids@play
Alan Kay
Children want to learn the human universals
To be successful, a product or service must "amplify" one or more of these universals
Look at towards a theory of instruction by Jerome bruner

Low-pass filter idea? Many good
Ideas of The 1960s still lay dormant

Michael resnick
As if students had learned to read but not write

***too much of teacher education emphasises mastering of knowledge and knowledge specialization, while this is fundamentally important, the vital activity in the teaching of students is not specialized knowledge transfer, but an understanding and appreciation of the variety of activities and uses that might allow students to engage and deconstruct it.


Follow-up: scratch.MIT.edu

Family story play by sesame workshop and nokia. Appears as heavy covered book with two screens, one with video-conferencing capabalities. This allows for a partner on the other side with the same book to engage in paired reading facilitated by Elmo.

Disney is working on flash based vision recognition software that can recognize movement and text, using a webcam to interact with online
Environments

****robots are huge here, as is hardware skins and customizations, and 3D hi-def tv with glasses

Disney toybridge allows for universal
Interfaces, suggests the ability of extra-user or actor using the flash based cloud based programmer to control one of their motion sensing robots

Zoodles and leapfrog toys and sites provide parents with usage feedback - how similar is this to the feedback in students provided to teachers in our LMS?

Kevin Clark George mason university
Black college football experience
On doing social outreach: It's a long haul. You can't just build it, copy it and hand it out.

Followup: Common Sense Media

Karen cator: Obama considers education a civil rights issue and the social justice issue of our time.
Want to move to continuous improvement based on immediate data collection ***how will they do this?
Preliminary draft forthcoming online

Cator: calling for more social network use in schools to further digital citizenship developmet

FCC chairman: calls broadband penetration the engine of future economic activity

***seems to be a disparaging trend to feel that computer technology is being used primarily for entertainment and not education - this is really no different than any other piece of information technology. What, after all, is the ratio of published works of fiction to non-fiction?

Higher Education Technology
***if someone steals all my personal information, in terms of behaviours, preferences, and physical attributes but not my name and address, if they use this to create a bot that impersonates these features, have they stolen my identity? Is there not a doppelgänger out there who behaves in the online world the same as I do, but simply does not reference itself as me?

However, statistically speaking, how many other people online naturally have these attributes? What then is te difference between them, me, and my doppelgänger?

***full room, slightly older crowd, higher ed must be big money

Undersecretary of education dr. Margaret cantor
Obama Administration has the ambitious aim of producing the most college graduates worldwide by 2020
Looking to expand (introduce?) early childhood learning to prepare students for kindergarten. ***what does this look like? Is this pre-school?

**video-congerencig capabilites needs to be ubiquitious. Time for Alberta Supernet 2.0, to provide the massive amounts of bandwidth required.

***If we have the bandwidth, we could partner up with senior centres for reading partnerships, or high schools, or hospitals, or even parents at work

**is it a question of bandwidth per se, or is it a question of piping and distribution? If we treat the school like an apartment building, would we do things differently?

Follow-up: race to the top, achieve.org
**want to update graduation requirements by 25%, how will this impact graduation rates?

***part of the issue is that contemporary schooling seems out of synch with the public's desire for education as an aspirational goal. Before, in the early days of the last century, the education system was not expected to graduate everyone, and I do not beleive that every parent sent their child to school with goal of graduation in my mind, consider that none of my, or my wife, have grandparents with high school diplomas. There's a lot of talk of 1/3 of children not being ready for kindergarten, primarily in terms of language acquistion and socialization. Cantor is suggesting that these children are at risk for falling behind and finally falling out if the school system. I'm not sure this is significantly different than 100 years ago, only that no expected the Italian or Ruthenian students who spoke solely Italian and Ukranian at home to graduate, so these students lagging behind educationally and dropping out, or being shifted out of an academic track and into a technical one, was not seen as a bad, or less worthwhile, thing.

Obama adminstration is considering income based student loan repayment schemes as well loan forgiveness for students who enter careers in public service for ten years.
***might this encourage young graduates to teach for ten years before moving on to other careers? Would this higher teacher turnover promote innovation?

***is it time to push for an on-going teacher training professional development system that ties into mandatory periodic re-certification of teachers?

***follow-up: Dreyfus initiative for civics, is it possible to consider that former ideals of citizenship, nationalism and patriotism are based on printing press techonology?