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The Art of Learning from a Peer, Colleague, or Friend
Came across this article, entitled "The Art of Learning from a Colleague" HBR by Steven DeMaio about learning from a colleague.
Here's the A-ha moment in the passage:
comment Indeed, my best learning experiences are when I get to see how someone else's mind works. That usually doesn't come with marveling at a finished document, presentation, or project. Nor does it come in typical collaboration venues, face-to-face or otherwise, where teams share ideas and figure out how to achieve common goals. Those learning opportunities have great value, there's no question. But, for me, the real a-ha moments are the more intimate ones — when I witness a colleague's thought processes in the raw, when she's not in "collaboration mode" but in her own mode. Strange as it may sound, that means getting invited into her space — and inviting her into mine — to watch the wheels spin, to listen to them whir.We do pair/extreme designing quite a bit on BettrAt. In fact, we noticed a huge shift in productivity when we changed from a cubicle/table sitting away from each other to being able to give each other feedback on what we were working on, in situ. Naturally we see BettrAt as a place for self-reflection and peer learning, but it's interesting to think about combining the two into one. How do we create the situated learning, pair programming experience within our platform? I'm going to spend some quiet time thinking about this.
Addressing the Teacher Shortage using virtual learning tools
For the past 10 years, educational pundits have been warning of a massive teacher shortage that's the result of a perfect storm of budget cuts, attrition, and retirement from baby boomers.
This article, Class Dismissed: The Teacher Shortage, corroborates much of what we heard at the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship conference on Education last month.
Some tidbits from the teacher shortage article:
comment High-achieving countries like Singapore provide their teachers with 100 yearly paid professional development hours and 20 hours a week to collaborate with colleagues. Such benefits are almost unheard of in U.S. schools.
The next decade will see a tsunami of boomer-teachers approaching the average retirement age of 59, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. The study predicts that 95,000 teachers will start collecting pensions every year until 2020, creating the largest mass retirement of teachers since the 1950s. At the same time, teacher attrition, or turnover, has been increasing. One in five new teachers leaves the profession within three years. In urban areas, 50 percent have moved on after five years. Many researchers argue that a radical solution is needed in order to save public education.
Teacher Brian Beaudet also believes that support and student behavior are important in a new teacher's experience. "Schools need to support new teachers more substantially," he explained. "I was given no access to a mentor, and often learned about the job through mistakes. When you have class sizes that regularly exceed 40 students, [that] means that disciplinary issues become much more of a distraction."Using virtual tools as a scaffold to bridge the gap between meaningful learning with a teacher in a situated setting and online learning where people sit in a vacuum looking at a computer screen is essential. The debate is over, and hybrid learning has won. At BettrAt, we're trying to envision what this future looks like, and work with teacher training programs (starting here in Chicago with Teach for America). If you run a teacher training program, let us know how you can get involved with our pilot programs.
25 Ways to Rebuild America: Education gets high marks
Apologies for the blog hiatus, Kevin and I (Ash) went away on an international trip and got back a week ago and just getting back into the swing of things here at BettrAt. We continue to push forward and will be piloting BettrAt with some local groups. We're not at liberty to disclose everything just yet, but we're extremely excited about the possibilities.
2009 was a year of instability and uncertain future, and many of us were happy to see it end. As our nation's leaders look to the future, it's interesting to see that education displays prominently as part of the plan. BusinessWeek recently reported about Obama's 25 Ways to Rebuild America.
It's a great time to be part of the solution. Come talk to us about BettrAt.
comment - Online Learning For All Release world-class, freely available online courses.
- Immersive Teaching Software Build educational software that's as compelling as the best video game—and as effective as a personal tutor.
It's a great time to be part of the solution. Come talk to us about BettrAt.
Tech the Halls Chicago — Jelly
We're extremely proud to be a part of and contribute to the vibrant Chicago startup community. BettrAt is sponsoring Tech the Halls this Friday, December 11th @ 10pm at the Noble Tree Coffee. If you're about tech startups in any way, come by and chat with us to learn more about BettrAt.
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MacA Spotlight on Museums and BettrAt
We came across this, Selling Museums to a Tough Audience: Teens, from the MacArthur Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning and it quite intrigued us, because we've been tossing around these issues as well for the past year now.
How can museums and other informal learning institutions create compelling experiences that can compete with video games and the fast-paced, Pavlovian dopamine inducing experiences that Hollywood (and increasingly, web experiences) can churn out routinely?
Our sister project at the Institute of Design, also grant funded by the MacArthur foundation, is called Thinkering Spaces, and is working with informal learning institutions to create interesting collaboration spaces that small groups can convene around to learn and solve problems.
I'm going to hold off on the official BettrAt take, but this article hints at some notes we really like, like peer curatorship. (You might hear us reference BettrAt as a "curation engine").
The article also refers to making connections between the different learning episodes and content that people traverse through on a regular basis. We think we can/want to do it in a way that's a little different than specified here, but connects with a specified user need: sensing and conveying patterns from a seemingly large "stream" of situated learning experiences.
comment Dr. James Paul Gee, Prof. @ Arizona State
This excellent video came across our radar by James Paul Gee, Professor at Arizona State University. We concur with his arguments here. The clip is entitled "hands on learning with video games," but it discusses a lot more that needs to happen in education besides video games.
It's hard to watch this video without getting incredibly excited about the potential here to change the way people learn and get better.
comment - All a video game is just problem solving -- All you do is get assessed every moment. Games essentially are a form of assessment - the most painful and ludicrous part of schooling. Games don't separate learning and assessment
- "Seeing learning not just knowledge as facts but knowledge you produce collaboratively"
- He talks about the importance of situated learning and compares the use of a chemistry textbook with the normal use of a --game manual-- You use it as a reference only when you've actually experienced something.
- He references the Sid Meier game Civilization (my all time favorite game growing up). In Civ, there was a "Civopedia" if I remember correctly that you could learn about countries and wonders of the world while you were playing the game, not as a reference text that you would read before playing.
- Kids want to produce, they don't just want to consume.
- Schooling in the ability to solve problems and contribute to them collaboratively.
- People organize into groups faster than ever into passion communities -- They're way different than school.
- In passion communities you are often mentoring and also being mentored
- Modern kids see technology converging -- cross media savants.
- Games are engaging kids in reading and writing more and more, contrary to popular belief.
- Many schools are just "test-prep" academies
- Teachers have to be rewarded for innovating themselves and bringing new tools into their classrooms.
- We've effectively deprofessionalized teachers - We've supervised out all of their creative responsibilities. Professional responsibilities as teachers need to be reintroduced.
- People who are going into teaching are not digitally savvy. This needs to change
- We have to make teaching a lot more sexy than it is.
- Creating radically new learning environments (the actual physical spaces, as in schools and museums). He suggests that we solve REAL problems in the world with students? I ought to show him BettrAt Challenges.
- Schools now have new competition from India and China that will put more pressure on them and contributing to the innovation crisis - could bring about a paradigm shift in college.
- Kids are learning 24-7 and more focused on the creative and collaborative.
The School of One is one of Time magazine’s 50 Best Inventions of 2009
The School of One is one of Time magazine's 50 Best Inventions of 2009
comment This past summer, in a sixth-grade math class, New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein piloted a small program in which individualized, technology-based learning takes the place of the old "let's all proceed together" approach. Each day, students in the School of One are given a unique lesson plan — a "daily playlist" — tailored to their learning style and rate of progress that includes a mix of virtual tutoring, in-class instruction and educational video games. It's learning for the Xbox generation.And to think, none of the people in our usability test understood the word "playlist". Geez, get with the times, folks. ;)
Meetings
Sorry - We haven't fallen off the face of the earth, we're still here! Over the past several weeks, we've had some meetings with some potential partners that might make the BettrAt ecology a lot more robust and a way better user experience. Very exciting potential here, now if the follow-through is just as smooth. Come back soon and cross your fingers for us to read about these partnerships.
In other news, Ash went to YCombinator's #startupschool and #failcon last week -- check out notes from the conference on Yakshaving.
By the way, if you haven't received an email from us about the private beta, I'm sorry... We've had some issues with the sign up (I know, that's kind of a major fail, right).
Not surprisingly, we've had lots of spammers sign up for BettrAt already and I have to go through to separate the wheat from the chaff. Feel free to email us personally, [team At Bettr.at] and we'll get you a code to get in.
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