Customized Education

ASU grad Stephen Dubner, coauthor of Freakonomics with Steven Levitt, is now doing a regular Freakonomics podcast for the New York Times (see the Freakonomics blog here). The latest freakonomics radio broadcast is a fascinating look at how we can customize education through an algorithm similar to how Pandora picks our music. This episode centers on “the thrill of customization” — that is, how technology can enable each of us to get access to what we want, whether it’s music, or education. The focus of the podcast is a very creative New York City Department of Education pilot program called School of One. The School of One is an experiment that is currently only being used in an after school setting, but it brings us to the edge of a very exciting time in education. It moves technology to the center of decision making about what works best for a given student, and then partners technology with excellent teaching to optimize the best teaching and learning modalities for each kid. Can this algorithm really work for millions of school age students? Does Pandora work for you?

You can go here to listen to this great podcast.

You can learn more about School of One here.

Individual Project - A Virtual Book Club for Kids and Teens

This individual project for web 2.0 is something I would love to pursue in more depth over the summer. I admit that I have not given it the time or attention to detail that it deserves. My basic idea is this: create a virtual spot for kids and teens to share ideas about books with friends and peers. This site would include a variety of tools already in place on the web, but not coordinated, not necessarily easy to find, and certainly not as user friendly and intuitive as kids need them. Some of the key activities I hoped to integrate were crowdsourcing in the form of sharing knowledge about books, audio and video development in the form of book trailers with sites like animoto and prezi. I would like the site to be a social networking hub in the form of things like messaging, chatting, creating groups, sharing favorites, reviewing, and ranking. I also wanted to incorporate blogging and microblogging, creating mash-ups, the use of tagging and sharing bookmarks, and geotagging, and use existing web-based applications that kids will enjoy, and most importantly foster collaboration.
Now, if I knew how to make all that work, I would not be in this class. I have learned a lot, but have a lot more to learn. So, I created a simple mock up of a site, made my own logos, and linked to sites that do some of the things I would like this site to accomplish. I introduce to you Literati.org. Stay tuned for more updates.