Archive of posts with tag 'Education'

Comfort with Contradiction →

April 2, 2024 • #

From my latest issue of Res Extensa:

One of the most important things we can teach our children as they’re coming of age is to cultivate a comfort with contradiction. Sometimes good things come at the expense of other good things. You can’t always get your way. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

As we grow up, we discover the contradictions of everyday life: one benefit requires giving up another.

In fact, we do teach these things as parents trying to raise well-adjusted kids: Share and help others. Tell the truth, even when there’s a benefit to not doing so. Delay gratification. What’s great for you might not be great for the group. These are all ways of preparing a human for participation in a polite, but complicated, society.

Thinking we can avoid grappling with the inevitable contradictions of everyday life lead us to bad places:

Utopian ideas of the future require one to think in radical terms, and to lose hard-won progress. Radicals want to ignore trade-offs, to start over, to rebuild, to avoid the contradiction in the first place rather than grapple with it, ignoring Chesterton’s fences. If anything, school these days fosters more of this kind of radical thinking than its opposite.

The irony is that a discomfort with contradiction doesn’t get rid of it anyway. Just because we shouldn’t have to live with imperfections doesn’t cause a bulldozed, greenfield solution to actually work. We often end up tearing things down and still have the same negative outcome we had before. It’s George Orwell’s “Where’s the omelet?” every time.

I first heard this idea from Jonah Goldberg, and it’s been bubbling around in my head ever since.

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Teaching Iteration →

October 13, 2023 • #

Jason Fried has an idea for improving education that I couldn’t agree with more — teaching kids how to iterate:

Making anything better is iteration. When you put something out there, it’ll often land right back in your lap. Sometimes that feedback boomerangs back directly, other times you have to infer the problems by deciphering other people’s behavior when they interact with the thing you gave them. This customer struggled with this, this manufacturing tolerance didn’t line up with that, this printing process looked better on the screen than it did on paper. Or after a certain amount of time passes while working on something, you reflect on what you’ve done and don’t like the reflection.

The idea that work is done and thrown over the fence and never touched again is the exception, not the norm. Like Jason said: in professional life, iteration, improvement, and ongoing projects are the default.

Plus the way you approach building things will be different if you start knowing iteration is part of the game. You’ll take more risks and try more things when you know at the beginning that you’ll get a chance to refine.

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Weekend Reading: American-Dream-as-a-Service, Content Marketing, the Fifth Column Reading List, and More

March 20, 2021 • #

👨‍🎓 The American-Dream-as-a-Service

Antonio Garcia-Martinez interviews Austen Allred, founder of Lambda School. Lambda charges no tuition and builds its program on the ISA (income sharing agreement), in which you only pay when you get a salaried position in your field of study.

The cool thing about the incentive alignment is that we’re not going to train you to be a sociologist, because it just doesn’t work. A common critique of the ISA model is: oh, now people aren’t going to study poetry anymore. And my response to that is: yeah, we’re not a university, we’re a trade school. The university has 18 million things that it does for you, and we cut cut off a tiny sliver of that, which is: we’re going to help you get a better job, we’re going to help you improve your state in life. That’s all we do.

There are actually more high-paying jobs available than there are people to fill those roles. And that’s true all over the place. I think about it as an optimization problem. You’ve got all this latent human potential, and it’s just kind of bouncing around. Sometimes it goes to school, and it picks stuff at random to study, and you know what you know because of who you’re surrounded by.

📝 Content-Driven Growth

Lenny Rachitsky gets into different types of content marketing by startup, plotted on two dimensions: user-generated to editorial, and vitality-driven to SEO-driven. Useful structure here for thinking about where you want to be and what types of content and tactics fit.

🌍 Earth at a Cute Angle

Some great examples of oblique satellite imagery. Love the shots of the Tour’s mountain passes — Col du Galibier and Tourmalet.

📖 Fifth Column Podcast Reading List

Someone in the Fifth Column podcast community put together an archive of all the books mentioned on the show over the years. This’ll greatly extend the reading list, nice mix of classics and modern stuff.

💻 Microsoft Power Fx

Microsoft has open-sourced its simplistic formula language based on Excel.

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What Universities Do

August 27, 2020 • #

Last week I linked to Mike Munger’s interview on EconTalk where he and Russ Roberts discussed the roles universities play (above and beyond the educational) and the likelihood that these components could be unbundled or disrupted in the post-COVID landscape.

This piece from earlier in the year goes deeper into Munger’s lexicon for separating these roles (using some clever metonyms):

The Clock Tower — Even with online courses making asynchronous learning possible, students still crave certain synchronous, shared activities outside of the classroom. There’s still value in shared experiences.
The Stadium — College administrators probably on average biased toward thinking that students select them mostly based on educational merits. But the craving of tribal associations with things like sports teams and mascots is omnipresent for a huge chunk of the student body. As Munger says: “many students were recruited 10 years earlier, on Saturday afternoons in the fall, watching football with their parents.”
The Student Union — Clubs and student organizations provide essential social alignment and sorting tools for people to find friends, build relationships, find job opportunities, and more.
The Admissions Office — With any college, especially elite ones, merely getting accepted for enrollment is a huge signal boost to your value as a future co-worker or employee. Universities can still provide an amount of cachet through applying this institutional badge of honor using the social capital they’ve accrued over the decades.

This is an interesting lens through which to look at the university’s value. Most of the conversation about the state of higher education post-COVID focuses in too tightly on the classroom instruction side of the problem. While that’s certainly the most easily disrupted with e-learning, it’s far from the only benefit being delivered to a college student.

I’m reminded of the same situation that exists in elementary school education — that most of our collective attention has been paid on how to conduct “Zoom School” and make sure kids aren’t falling behind educationally. Less well appreciated is the degree to which elementary school is also providing essentially a day care service as part of the education “bundle.” It seems like many in our school systems want to consider themselves educators (which they of course are), and think that the moniker of “day care supervisor” is denigrating in some way. I say we need to celebrate, not denigrate, that essential quality more than we do, just as we should recognize and support the unique aspects of the university if we want them to live on.

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Weekend Reading: A New Web, Future of Higher Ed, and a Ford Concept Car

August 22, 2020 • #

🔗 A Clean Start for the Web

Tom MacWright with some ideas for cleaning up ever-creeping morass of web technology:

I think this combination would bring speed back, in a huge way. You could get a page on the screen in a fraction of the time of the web. The memory consumption could be tiny. It would be incredibly accessible, by default. You could make great-looking default stylesheets and share alternative user stylesheets. With dramatically limited scope, you could port it to all kinds of devices.

And, maybe most importantly, what would website editing tools look like? They could be way simpler.

🎓 Michael Munger on the Future of Higher Education

Great discussion on this episode of EconTalk with Michael Munger about the possibilities post-COVID of “unbundling” the university a decentralized set of separate services that could combine to give serve the same needs that traditional universities do.

🚗 Ford 021C Concept Car

I saw this through a tweet somewhere, but what a great work of design. Very George Jetson.

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Effortless Output in Roam →

August 17, 2020 • #

Today Nat Eliason launched version 2 of his Effortless Output course for learning Roam.

This time around he’s doing an interesting thing with live courses and students selecting a capstone project. Adding something that goes beyond the typical online video self-paced learning style of most tutorials is fascinating.

This is a course about creating something new, not just how to use Roam. Together we’ll pick an area you’re interested in to explore as you develop your skills with Roam, and a final product you want to create with your newfound abilities.

For advanced learning of any sort of craft (and I’d call quality note-taking a craft, for sure), hands-on learning is the only way to go. It’s too easy to watch clips of someone else working, then get stuck with a “blank canvas” problem when you try to get started yourself.

Very interested to see how this works out! It could show some interesting results to help improve other online learning resources.

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Weekend Reading: Timeful Texts, Sumo Startups, and Canva Backlinks

August 1, 2020 • #

🕰 Timeful Texts

A new piece from Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen (beautifully illustrated by Maggie Appleton). Can we make reading a more engaging and interactive learning experience? This builds on previous ideas from the authors on spaced repetition.

🤼‍♂️ Software, Full-Stack, and Sumo Startups

Interesting take from one of Byrne Hobart’s recent newsletters. Contrasting a typical “full-stack” model of company-building and VC funding to a “sumo” model:

The amount of VC funding has been rising steadily, and returns are skewed by a few positive outliers, so any fund that doesn’t have a specific size mandate is actively looking for companies that can absorb a lot of capital as they grow. The best way to get more capital is to move from a capital-efficient business to a capital-inefficient one, so there’s a strong incentive to pivot in this direction.

The incentive is sometimes too strong. Some companies go beyond the “full-stack” model to what I think of as the “sumo” model: raising an intimidating amount of money just to scare off everyone else. The sumo model does prevent one failure mode for startups: the situation where every time Company A raises a round, it validates the model and lets Company B raise more, which forces Company A to burn through their marketing budget faster and raise an even bigger round, and so on until the entire space is over-capitalized and everyone’s assumptions about long-term unit economics are implausibly optimistic. It’s an easier strategy to try when capital is abundant, but it’s a harder strategy to pull off; the bar for “an absurd amount to invest in a company that just does X” keeps going up.

🔗 The Canva Backlink Empire

In the arena of geeky digital marketing, this is a great deconstruction of organic optimization tactics in play at Canva, one of the best out there at enabling discovery through search and backlink traffic. I love how thoughtful and intentional their page architecture is; it enables so much adaptive targeting to sweep up long-tail keyword spaces.

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Progress Studies for Young Scholars →

May 21, 2020 • #

Jason Crawford on Roots of Progress’s new program for high school students:

Progress Studies for Young Scholars launches in June as a summer program, with daily online learning activities for 6 weeks. We’ll be covering the history of technology and invention: the challenges of life and work and how we solved them, leading to the amazing increase in living standards over the last few centuries. Topics will include the advances in materials; automation of manufacturing and agriculture; the progression of energy from steam to oil to electricity; how railroads, cars and airplanes shrank the world; the conquest of infectious disease through sanitation, vaccines, and antibiotics; and the rise of computers and the Internet. The course will also prompt students to consider the future of progress, and what part they want to play in it.

It’s great to see the progress studies movement bearing fruit in education. The high school age is a perfect place to begin with teaching the history of science, innovation, and technology.

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Weekend Reading: Optionality, Pangaea, and Regulatory Disappointment

May 16, 2020 • #

⚖️ The Trouble with Optionality

A 2017 commencement address from Mihir Desai, critiquing the phenomenon of infinite optionality and lack of commitment pushed by modern universities:

I’ve lost count of the number of students who, when describing their career goals, talk about their desire to “maximize optionality.” They’re referring to financial instruments known as options that confer the right to do something rather than an obligation to do something. For this reason, options have a “Heads I win, tails I don’t lose” character—what those in finance lovingly describe as a “nonlinear payoff structure.” When you hold an option and the world moves with you, you enjoy the benefits; when the world moves against you, you are shielded from the bad outcome since you are not obligated to do anything. Optionality is the state of enjoying possibilities without being on the hook to do anything.

🗺 Pangaea with Modern Day Borders

Nice paleocartography here. India abuts Antarctica, South Africa up against Argentina, and Iran was a peninsula.

🏭 World’s Largest Producer of Rubbing Alcohol Can’t Manufacturer Hand Sanitizer

This is the only image that comes to mind.

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Things That Will Change

March 25, 2020 • #

This is a weird time.

The COVID-19 pandemic is the biggest global event that’s happened in my lifetime. It hasn’t impacted me personally that much (yet), but the financial and public health implications are clearly already disastrous, and bound to get worse.

Most concerning, though, is how little we know today about what’s in store for the rest of 2020 and beyond.

I don’t use this outlet to make predictions, and I’m generally not a fan of trying to call shots on uncertainties. But as an experiment, let’s set down some open-ended questions to revisit in 6 months to see what’s different.

What will be different by mid-September?

Restaurants and bars

Will the restaurant market return to how it was before? If it rebounds, how does the renewed landscape look different?
Does the expansion of the food delivery market change the kinds of restaurants that open? Not all food types are equally compelling when jammed in a box. Does that influence what’s available?
We were already Shipt customers before all of this for grocery delivery. Is COVID-19 the stressor that shifts more grocery business from brick-and-mortar to delivery?

Hotels

Airbnb already impacted the hotel business over the last 10 years. But as we return to normal, what changes? Do people start putting extra priority on personal space?
Airbnb has been, generally speaking, cheaper than traditional hotels over the years, but does this balance shift?

Airlines

Seems like a fairly irreplaceable business, but does air travel return to pre-COVID level? Do people reduce non-essential travel?

Cruises

Already an expendable industry, but not a small one ($45bn annually). After COVID, how does it ever return to normal
Where would this spending go if it doesn’t? What form of recreation, travel, entertainment picks up that spending?

Businesses

Businesses have gone dormant, people laid off, reduced hours, high unemployment. When things start to rebuild, what returns?
For those of us that have gone to remote work with minimal disruption, how many companies return to an office full time?
If even 20% of these remote-capable companies decide either “we don’t need an office” or “we could downsize to a smaller one,” what impact does it have on commercial real estate?

Schools

Schools around the world closed pretty quickly, most moving to remote learning. Universities mostly have some infrastructure in place now for online coursework, even though most traditional ones are still in-person heavy. Given that there was already a trend (albeit small) toward distance learning in higher-ed, and assuming at least moderate success in moving to remote over the next several months, are colleges ever the same again?
At elementary and high school levels, the move to remote Zoom-based classes seems shakier. Our daughter is still in pre-school, so we aren’t that impacted (plus the first week of this quarantine spanned spring break, with no school anyway). But I’ve heard from others mixed experiences with their kids trying to “homeschool” while they work from home. When do the kids return to a normal school life? Will it be back to normal by the fall and start of the 2020 school year?

Entertainment

The feature film industry could be done-for. With theaters all closed for a while, what happens to them after? Will they re-open? And if so, how long does it take to reconstitute a business in which many will likely have permanently closed and laid off their staff?
Film studios are now forced to release new movies online, jumping the theatrical release completely and dropping movies directly on iTunes for $20. What will these new “virtual box office” results look like compared to their predicted receipts if they’d been released traditionally? If the earnings are still attractively high, will this new release model be permanent?
What happens to film and television production over the next 6 months? Do we end up with a lull in new content similar to the writers strike from 2007?

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Weekend Reading: Brain MRI, Flash Cards, and Movie Maps

July 27, 2019 • #

🧠 7 Tesla MRI of a Human Brain

This is one of the highest resolution scans ever performed on a human brain, at 100 micrometer resolution. Scroll down to see some awesome images.

👨🏻‍🏫 Anki

Anki is an open source framework for creating your own flash cards. A neat system for helping your kids with classwork, or even just testing yourself on topics.

Anyone who needs to remember things in their daily life can benefit from Anki. Since it is content-agnostic and supports images, audio, videos and scientific markup (via LaTeX), the possibilities are endless.

📽 Cinemaps

I got lost in these works by Andrew DeGraff. They’re super-detailed visualations of character movements and plot developments oriented spatially as the films move from beginning to end. My favorite is the multiple timeline architecture of Back to the Future.

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Weekend Reading: Summer Solstice, Zoom Learnings, and TeachOSM

July 6, 2019 • #

📺 5 Learnings from Zoom

Zoom is one of those admirable SaaS companies built on solid product and amazing execution. I love this — not relying on anything sexy or super inventive, just solving a known problem better than everyone else. My favorite bit is their retention; it proves what can be done even in SMB with lock-tight product market fit:

Zoom has 140% net revenue retention. This is similar to RingCentral from our last analysis and other leaders. Zoom also shows that yes, this can be done with smaller customers too, not just enterprises.

☀️ Visualizing the Summer Solstice

This is a great quick animation showing the sun’s path across the globe during the summer solstice. It shows very clearly why, as you move toward northern latitudes in the summer you get such long days, with perpetual sunlight above the Arctic Circle.

🧭 Training the Next Generation of Mappers

The TeachOSM crew has been doing grest work training teachers how to use OpenStreetMap in their classrooms. Geographic education is critical, especially in primary education, to form a baseline understanding of the world. I got to help out at one of these workshops last year and the outcomes were truly impressive.

Since 2016, TeachOSM has trained ~350 teachers and vocational educators in open mapping techniques. So giving open mapping workshops for teachers has become a staple of our programming over the last few years. In this post, I briefly outline what we do in our workshops, why it is vital work, and how you can help us to make OSM available in geography classes everywhere.

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Weekend Reading: Human Leverage, Alan Kay, and Mapping the NBA

May 4, 2019 • #

🏋🏽‍♀️ Finding the Point of Human Leverage

Automation is penetrating every industry, but still heavily reliant on human behavior and feedback to make it effective. In this piece, Benedict Evans talks about identifying the point in a workflow where the optimum point of leverage sits for human interaction:

This means that a lot of the system design is around finding the right points of leverage to apply people to an automated system. Do you capture activity that’s already happening? Google began by using the links that already existed. Do you have to stimulate activity in order to capture the value within it? Facebook had to create behaviors before it could use them. Can you apply your own people to some point of extreme leverage? This is Apple Music’s approach, with manually curated playlists matched automatically to tens of millions of users. Or do you have to pay people to do ‘all’ of it?

🎓 Lunch with Alan Kay: How to Become Educated Enough to Invent the Future

This is a great account of an extended conversation with computer scientist Alan Kay. It’s amazing how certain brains can be on such a higher level than the rest of us.

For the few computer idealists among us, we are so lucky to have the legacy left to us by Vannevar Bush, J.C.R. Licklider, Douglas Engelbart, Alan Perlis, John McCarthy, Edsger Dijkstra, John Backus, Ivan Sutherland, and Alan Kay. And those are just some of the names I personally know – I am now ashamed I don’t know more of our history. It’s hard to imagine now because they were so effective, but so much of our world’s computing prosperity today is due to these people. They imagined the computer as a personal device, a communications device, a device to lift off the burden of tedious mental tabulations. Douglas Engelbart imagined a tool that would aid humanity in dealing with the increasingly-complex problems it faces around the world. We’ve only seem a glimpse of that vision, but we need it now more than ever.

So practically, what does this mean for me? Alan also said at lunch that one problem young people make is “having goals.” It’s too early to have goals that “consume one’s horizons,” because young people don’t even know what they don’t know. I think this kind of epistemic modesty is a great idea. I can probably benefit from shifting the focus from my overly-specific goals to “more meta” goals, such as becoming “educated” in a broader sense than I previously thought was possible. The more perspectives I can acquire, the better I’ll be at not fooling myself, and the more I’ll be able to appreciate the richness of the world.

🏀 Kirk Goldsberry and His NBA Maps

Kirk Goldsberry’s new book Sprawlball looks fascinating, covering his work on basketball analytics and his famous hexbinned shot charts showing how the game has changed in recent years. But most folks that have followed his ESPN career probably don’t know about his background in geography and mapmaking:

At its heart, “SprawlBall” is a book of maps. It’s a geography book.

During his junior year at Penn State, Goldsberry took an introduction to cartography class on little more than a whim. “I remember the census data and this software [Graphic Information Systems] that basically links databases to maps,” he said. It was this perfect balance of art and science, and I devoted the next 15 years of my life to it.”

He switched his major, got a cartography degree and then moved to Washington to make flood maps for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. After a stint working for a software mapping company in Maine, Goldsberry got his master’s and PhD at UC Santa Barbara, focused on the intersection of computer graphics data visualization and cartography.

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Rethinking the American High School →

April 30, 2019 • #

It’s not a shocker that American schools don’t produce the level of output we expect. I’ve written here before about this topic, and one of the largest failings I see (even dating back to when I myself was in high school, though not to the same extreme) is the rigorous constraint and hyper-measurement culture that’s pervaded education. It seems intuitive that measuring an outcome would help you to identify shortcomings to fix¹, but measuring without a deep understanding of the means and ends can lead to blindness to what’s really happening, not to mention bad incentives to “increase the number” regardless of cost.

Because educating a diverse group of students is extremely non-trivial, expecting some consistent output with basic non-creative input is madness. This article discusses research by a group out of Harvard that analyzes the most effective high schools in the country to try and figure out what makes them tick. Teachers? Students? Parents? Process? It turns out that reducing constraints and enabling creativity from teachers can have a profound impact:

This is at least part of the reason so little creative experimentation occurs in U.S. high schools, the researchers believe. Teachers feel hamstrung by an “ecosystem of constraint”: externally imposed curricular requirements, standardized testing benchmarks, and metrics that colleges use in admissions processes. These external forces are extremely normative, explains Fine; teaching well within that context, as within any context, requires skill, mentorship, and practice.

“Every teacher we talked to, to a person,” she says, “expressed a desire to have their classroom be a place where powerful learning was happening, regardless of what kind of kids they were teaching. They all wanted it.” The challenge, she says, is that often “the system responds to perceived threats by asserting more control, rather than allowing for a natural release that empowers kids to make more choices and to take ownership of their education.”

Much of this stems from the assumption that a classroom or school is like an engine we can “fix.” Even if that were true, it’s a long game. Student engagement and learning aren’t going to skyrocket with a new policy or standardized test implementation. It’s by no means an easy task to marshal support in a diverse, politically motivated community of administrators, parents, and teachers, but hopefully research like this can shine the spotlight on what’s working.

The authors of the study, Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine, are also publishing a book on their research: In Search of Deeper Learning: The Quest to Remake the American High School. Another one for the reading list, for sure.

We’ve all heard the Drucker aphorism “you can’t fix what you can’t measure.” ↩

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Flexible Education

February 13, 2019 • #

This is part 2 of a series on learning, education, and what we might do to improve. Read part 1.

In my introduction to this series a couple weeks ago, I posited a few ways we could rethink education. The first idea was about increasing the flexibility of the system to create one more prepared to adapt to changing demand:

Create a system flexible enough to keep up with what markets demand (and I use “market” to mean “any post-education environment”) — our system is too rigid to bend and adapt to that demand

“Rigid” is a good way to describe most western education systems, and it’s my belief that this lack of flexibility is poorly suited to being adaptable to what markets demand. When you look back on the history of what we’d call “structured” education, it’s very young in the big picture. Modern American public education models can be traced back to the Prussian military academies of the late 19th century. Age-based grouping, structured progression through a hierarchy, measurement and ranking at each stage — these all suited the need of a military organization, the goals of which were much different than what we’re after today.

In Sal Khan’s The One World Schoolhouse, he goes back to the start to try and understand how we got to where we are in education. The approach he lays out essentially disputes or reframes each of the implicit goals of the current public education system:

Instead of fixed age-based groupings, go back to the days of the town schoolhouse, where kids of various ages sat in the same room together
Rather than a forced progression, let students learn some of their preferred subjects, proceeding to the next when they feel comfortable doing so
And instead of being forced to “pass / fail” after a set period of time, use mastery-based learning to ensure there’s true understanding before building the next layer of concepts on a shaky foundation

Naturally such a wild restructuring of the system would be costly, time-consuming, and painful to peel away from the rigid institutions in place today. With his own Khan Academy, Khan is putting his own skin in this game to incrementally build toward a more sustainable future for education. The Khan Academy leverages modern tools and technology to first augment what’s already being done in public schools with teaching based on the principles outlined above.

Flexibility is not something the current model accommodates well at all. So much about each individual student varies wildly: home life, interests, physical vs. mental ability, and experience to name a few. Expecting to see complete alignment within an individual 12-month cohort sounds completely absurd when thought of in those terms. Then, when equity or uniformity is not achieved by year-end, we want to blame or “fix” everything else — be it teachers, course content, or parenting. I’d argue that the model for delivery of the education itself is what’s broken. Perfection is a noble objective, but it should be evident to anyone that it’s also a pipe dream (which also is not something to be upset about). Today’s system of rigorous measurement, grading, and scoring seems to be unfortunately focused on everything but the students.

I sometimes try to imagine the difference in outcome if the systems in place were organized around exposing ideas, identifying interests, harnessing said interests, and enabling students to have success in their areas of choice, even from an early age.

The argument is not to roll a kindergarten classroom back to anarchy and then “wait and see.” Obviously a medium is the goal. It is worthwhile to retain some amount of baseline exposure to various topics — math, reading, writing, science, humanities. But rather than zeroing in so closely on each and forcing every student to achieve total comprehension on everything, why not lower the baseline and raise targets on areas where students show strong aptitude in grade school?

We should establish the lowest possible baselines for foundational principles, then let students grow from there more organically than we do today. Improve the strengths rather than dragging forward the weaknesses.

Another huge benefit of something like the Khan Academy has nothing to do with western, rich public education systems at all — it can bring an education to an entire third of the world’s population that has little to no access to any at all. There’s an economy of scale here enabled by the internet that should be harnessed and invested in.

Children should navigate the world through senses and logic, their brains and bodies tuned in and fully on, learning from first principles rather than memorized rules. Teach & celebrate these things, and children will learn not only past solutions, but how to solve new problems.
— Heather E Heying (@HeatherEHeying) January 20, 2019

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A Series on Learning

January 20, 2019 • #

This is part 1 of a series on learning, education, and what we can do to improve our systems. Read part 2 here.

The most effective learning relies on curiosity, a required characteristic to grow emotionally and intellectually over time. Teaching, on the other hand, is the act of steering this process. The best teaching provides fundamental “first principle” building blocks, lays down a breadcrumb trail, and lets the student discover their own path through trial and error. But we don’t teach children the value of curiosity; we often feel compelled to jump straight to direct information transfer. “We already know these facts, here they are, remember them.”

There’s little opportunity for discovery when you deny the satisfaction of dot-connecting as a child understands something new. The ability to synthesize answers for yourself from discrete parts leads to true understanding. Memorizing division tables or the sonnets of Shakespeare doesn’t create that sense of wonder that comes with deep comprehension.

With my daughter now 3 years old, I think and observe a lot about how kids learn, and how we teach. It’s amazing to watch her discover something new on her own. One day we watched her figure out that magnets stick to the refrigerator. We’d then watch her try to stick all sorts of things to the fridge after that — her own gradual trial-and-error process. It was great to see the sense of gratification in her eyes when she discovered that the whiteboard in her room was also magnetic, seeing her move things between her room and the kitchen. Humans are amazing in what can be discovered, absorbed, and extended with little to no guidance, resilient and “anti-fragile” by nature. A sort of discovery-based learning is the most meaningful and long-lasting, and we should be striving to set up conducive environments in schools.

A contentious topic around learning concerns what is being taught. There’s value in being selective about what we teach to children, to be sure — there are only so many hours in the day after all. I’m of the opinion that the “how” of teaching is far more important. Attempts at bringing up collective grades in US primary schools mostly center around tactical changes to the process — common core, standardized testing, FCAT — a long list of mechanical box-checking that leads us to believe a student has learned all they need to know. If we spent half as much energy on creating better spaces for discovery as we do on measuring performance, we’d have incredibly smarter children. I think some strategic questioning on the paradigms of the system itself is in order.

Of course, a key factor creating the system we have now is the desire for total equality in results. Structures are focused heavily around fairness, so it requires us to have rigid measurement regimes to constantly gut-check the system. There’s little room for individualism, for children to have the room to gravitate toward things they show proclivities for. We expend so much energy on trying to pull everyone up to a minimum standard in a comprehensive set of “subjects” we’ve collectively deemed worthy of all our childrens’ attention: math, science, reading, art, et al. Granted, these things all have inherent value, but it’s a stretch to say that the world and their future require them to know about Robert Frost poems or that reptiles are cold-blooded. They’re required to reach a baseline in a spread of subjects because we’ve built a construct that tests them against this, preventing upward motion until they reach the “quota.” A self-fulfilling prophecy.

The relentless assumption that we can produce high school graduates with an equal knowledge level is absurd, and even with the systems we have in place, we think they’re reaching high school with equal measures of comprehension, and it’s patently not true in reality, even if it is on paper.

I find it helpful to peel back a process to its core objectives. What is the mission of K-12 education? To produce a bunch of equal adults? Because it doesn’t happen that way even now, and thinking anything else is pretending. I think the goal of education is to teach children how to learn, as a foundation, and give them the tools to be self-sufficient in absorbing, understanding, and harnessing new information.

I’m not a scholar of education or a psychologist, and I don’t even study a huge amount on the topic. I come at it from a pragmatic, observational direction where I see the output of the education system we currently have. Stack up the system’s results with widespread market needs and it’s obvious we aren’t hitting with a high batting average. That doesn’t mean higher education outputs nothing but unemployed 20-somethings. As I said above, humans are resilient and can adapt to environments quickly if necessary.

This is the first post that I’d like to serve as the kickoff to a series on education. Here are some ideas I’d like to cover in deeper detail down the road that I believe are essential in making headway on new paradigms:

Create a system flexible enough to keep up with what markets demand (and I use “market” to mean “any post-education environment”) — our system is too rigid to bend and adapt to demand
Make continued education a cultural norm — why would formal learning halt at age 18 or 22?
Build on-the-job style programs into schools as early as possible — not to employ 8 year olds, but to as early as we can inform young people what life is like beyond their youth, and prepare them for it

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Weekend Reading: Mastery Learning, Burundi’s Capital, and SRTM

December 29, 2018 • #

🎓 Mastery Learning and Creative Tasks

Khan Academy’s Andy Matuschak on tasks that require “depth of knowledge” versus those that have higher “transfer demand.” Both can be considered “difficult” in a sense, but teaching techniques to build knowledge need different approaches:

One big implication of mastery learning is that students should have as much opportunity to practice a skill as they’d like. Unlike a class that moves at a fixed pace, a struggling student should always be able to revisit prerequisites, read an alternative explanation, and try some new challenges. These systems usually consider a student to have finally “mastered” a skill when they can consistently answer related problems over an extended period of time.

🇧🇮 Burundi Moving its Capital

It’s not every day you see the map changing:

Burundi is moving its capital from the shores of Lake Tanganyika and deep into the nation’s central highlands.

Authorities announced they would change the political capital from Bujumbura to Gitega, which is located over 100 kilometers (62 miles) to the east.

🛰 SRTM Tile Grabber

This is an awesome tool from Derek Watkins. It makes downloading SRTM data dead simple.

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Weekend Reading: Ubiquitous Computing, Versioning SQL, and Video Game Maps

December 15, 2018 • #

🎙 Computing is Everywhere

A great interview with Bret Victor on the Track Changes podcast. His work has always been an inspiration for how to think about both creating things and teaching people.

📊 Git Your SQL Together

This post from Caitlin Hudon is a great reminder for anyone that works with data. Combining git versioning with your SQL is super helpful for archiving and searching previous analysis queries.

You will always need that query again

Queries are living artifacts that change over time

If it’s useful to you, it’s useful to others (and vice versa)

🎮 The Brilliance of Video Game Maps

I love the map and exploration of Skyrim. As an artistic achievement, the map there isn’t as eye-catching as Grand Theft Auto, the Ultima games, or even previous Elder Scrolls games. But I love the unlabeled overhead picture of the world that forces you to get out and walk to find your way.

The absolute piece de resistance of a game world map has to be the continent of Tamriel for The Elder Scrolls. People have tried to wrangle Skyrim’s map into submission with mods and interactive versions of it, but it fundamentally is a map that doesn’t explain itself to you or aspire to be particularly helpful. The world is what it is - now you have to go and find your way across it.

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OpenStreetMap and TeachOSM

November 15, 2018 • #

I’ve hosted many OSM mapathons in the past, and today’s event with AGS and the Geo2050 conference was a huge success. It’s hard to create an engaging, productive environment that’s conducive to new mappers learning about OpenStreetMap. Today’s objective was to highlight how teachers can involve students in active work + contribution in a valuable context.

Steve, Richard, and Nuala did all the work, I just showed up to lend advice to folks that had any questions while mapping. The TeachOSM group did an excellent job showing the tasking manager, with a couple of challenge tasks to get folks comfortable with learning the editor and basic mapping.

One of the teachers told me that her students are often asking how they can contribute or give back in response to those in need around the world. They collect donations of money and food, among other things. She was ecstatic to learn that HOTOSM’s tasking manager offers up a plethora of real opportunities to respond to active needs, and learn about new places around the world while also giving back.

This is what has always motivated me most with doing OSM mapping — using it to get people interested in maps and geography. I’ve always maintained that the missing element in growing the OSM community is getting people to care. Most people think it’s neat at first glance, but don’t quite see the benefit in where their contributions will ever get used. Today I think we successfully demonstrated the benefits to over 50 people who are now armed to evangelize OpenStreetMap with their student networks.

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Promoting GIS at Hunter College

November 14, 2018 • #

As premier sponsors of the American Geographical Society, we try to do our part in promoting geographic literacy, education, and the future of geo sciences.

Hunter College

Part of our efforts this week is participating in the GIS Career Fair at Hunter College in Manhattan. Bill and I were there to showcase how geography fits into our business and talking with students about what it means to build a career centered around GIS and mapping. We talked to dozens of people about all aspects of the industry, with a diverse group interested in environmental science, energy, space, and more.

It’s good to see the energy and excitement in the geospatial industry.

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Weekend Reading: Forecasting, Raster CV, Free University Courses

October 27, 2018 • #

🔮 Forecasting at Uber

The scale of the prediction problem Uber has is wild. This is an intro to a series on methods they use for forecasting demand for their marketplace.

🛰 raster-vision

A neat project from the Azavea team for computer vision applications with satellite imagery.

🎓 600 Free Online Courses

A great list from Quartz compiling a bottomless feed of content for self-teachers.

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Teaching OpenStreetMap

October 26, 2018 • #

We’re heading up next month to the American Geographical Society’s Geography2050 again this year, which will be my 4th one, and the 5th annual overall. It’s always a great event — a diverse crowd in attendance and a chance to catch up with a lot of old friends.

The last two years the AGS has hosted and led an OpenStreetMap mapathon in conjunction with the event to promote OSM as a tool in education. It’s organized and led by TeachOSM, and they invite 50+ AP Geography teachers from around the country to learn how to work with OpenStreetMap in their classrooms as a teaching aid. Alongside Steven Johnson and Richard Hinton (who do the real work behind TeachOSM), I’ll be helping out as a volunteer to lend my knowledge of OSM and its editing tools to the group.

I’ve always been a JOSM power user (like CAD for mapping), but I’m sure for this exercise we’ll do things with the built-in editor, iD, and maybe some HOTOSM mapping tasks for aid work. I’ll need to brush up on the latest and greatest with iD. I follow the project on GitHub and have seen tons of activity going on lately.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything in OSM at all, especially in a mapathon group setting. It’ll be a refreshing opportunity to get to do some mapping again and to support such a great cause to promote geography education.

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Building Complex Reasoning Skills Online Through Open-Ended Activities →

October 25, 2018 • #

The Khan Academy’s Long-term Research group studies new strategies for teaching and learning. This paper presents a method for freeform response and feedback on open-ended The dynamism and interactivity of these tools for teaching are fantastic. I haven’t seen some of these modern e-learning platforms in a long time, things like Blackboard or Canvas. I have used Khan Academy extensively and am always impressed. My childhood self would’ve really taken to the engaging presentation style of the content.

Students shouldn’t have to wait until their adulthood to pursue open-ended problems and improve their ideas through discourse with others. Indeed, as we’ve discussed, contemporary learning standards insist that students develop these skills earlier than ever. Skillfully-orchestrated classroom activities can successfully build these practices, but teachers across the country have lamented to us about how challenging and time-consuming these sessions are to facilitate.

What if online learning platforms could deliver rapid, reliable, and relevant feedback to students on complex open-ended activities, the way they already do on simpler multiple-choice exercises? What if these activities could facilitate thoughtful and energetic discourse between students and their differing ideas?

They have an interesting take on harnessing students’ skills to teach one another, through methods like peer review and feedback. Putting teachers in a position of being a “facilitator” much of the time would allow them the space to more effectively focus on students that need more help.

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How the Economic Machine Works

October 6, 2018 • #

Learn the foundations of how an economy works, in only 30 minutes.

This piece from Ray Dalio (hedge fund manager and author of Principles and hedge fund manager) breaks down an entire Econ 101 class in a concise, graphical form. He’s actually an excellent narrator. And knows a thing or two about how markets work.

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Recent Links: Playing with Numbers, Logistics Networks, Vancouver Island

September 13, 2017 • #

🎓 Numbers at Play: Dynamic Toys Make the Invisible Visible

Great tools keep up with their users. They operate at the speed of thought, ever shrinking the feedback loop between conceiving of an idea and exploring its consequences.

Tools for thought must support communication not just from the expert to the novice: they should enhance conversation between collaborative peers. They should enact thought at the speed of speech. With tools this fluid, we can reinforce natural dialogue through novel representations without awkward pauses. We can support students in co-constructing meaning as they discuss and resolve their multiple interpretations.

Fascinating work by the Khan Academy research team. They’re exploring different types of tools for teaching using visible, tangible “toys” to visualize concepts like fractions, subtraction, and more with interactive models.

🚢 How Logistics Networks Respond to Natural Disasters

I just finished up reading The Box, a history of how container shipping came about and evolved the global economy. With the storms of the last few weeks, I always wonder what sorts of second- and third-order impacts there are around the world when supply chains are disrupted by natural events.

🇨🇦 The Wild West Coast of Vancouver Island

I enjoyed this piece in Cruising World about a family’s sailing trip down the west side of Vancouver Island. The wild, wooded, and rocky coast of British Columbia is amazing landscape. They took this trip with their daughters of 2 and 5. What an amazing experience for kids to see wild bears and the village outposts in those harbors.

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A Quick Guide for New Developers

March 18, 2015 • #

This entire post comes with a caveat: I am not a software engineer. I do build a software product, and work with a bunch of people way smarter than me, though. I’m experienced enough to have an opinion on the topic.

I talk to lots of young people looking to get into the software world. Sometimes they want to build mobile apps or create simple tools, and sometimes looking to create entire products. There are a lot of possible places to start. The world is full of blog posts, podcasts, books, and videos that purport to “teach you to code”. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an awesome world we live in where this stuff is accessible, but I think people get priorities twisted during that early impressionable stage by thinking they can make a successful iPhone app from scratch in a few months. Even if it’s possible, is that really a life goal? Or do you want to actually become an engineer?

Young people interested in learning how to code could learn a lot by starting with the smaller steps. Instead of diving immediately into learning node.js, or beginning with “Build Your Own Rails App in 15 Minutes” blog posts, focus your energy on some foundations that will be 100% useful in building your skills as an engineer.

In no particular order:

Learn how to use the Linux command line

It almost doesn’t even matter what exactly you do with Linux to get started on this. Install some variant of the OS on a computer or virtual machine, and start trying to do stuff. Install packages, set up PHP, get Postgres running. Most importantly: learn the basic command line tools that you’ll use for the rest of your working life — things like grep, sed, cat, ack, curl, find. Think of these as tools of the trade; once you know how to work them, you’ll use them every day. Compare your craft to cooking. It’s possible to create good food without a razor sharp chef’s knife, a large rigid cutting board, and fresh ingredients, but it’s a lot easier when you have them.

Work on tools instead of systems

Starting out by building entire products is a bad idea. The most readily available ideas are ones that require a lot of moving parts, typically. These are the ones that sound fun. Starting to assemble some knowledge by building your own blog engine or social sharing site or photo database system won’t teach you nothing, but it puts the cart before the horse. A few hours into building your photo sharing site (with an objective of making something to share photos) you’ll be working on a login system and a way to reset passwords, instead addressing the problem you identified to solve in the first place. The easier place to start is to identify small pain points in your technology life, and build utilities to fill these voids. A script for uploading files to Google Drive. Wrappers to simplify other utilities. A command line tool to strip whitespace from files. You’ll be biting off something you can actually build as a novice, and you might be able to ship and open source something useful to others (one of the bar-none best resume builders around). Scratching small itches is your friend when you’re learning.

Prime yourself on “devops” knowledge

The “cloud” sounds like a huge loaded buzzword, and it is. But nearly every useful technology stack, even if it’s not a publicly facing consumer product is now built using these core architectures. If your mission is to build iOS games you’ll think this stuff isn’t valuable, but learning how to stand up instances on AWS, install database servers, and understanding the network security stack will guaranteed add indispensable chunks of knowledge that you will need in the near future. This stuff is free now to get a place to hack around, so there are no excuses to not plunging in.

Spend hours on GitHub

Dig for open source projects you find interesting. Pick apart their code. Follow the developers. Read the issue threads. You’ll find something you can contribute back to, without a doubt, even if in tiny ways at first. This is not only hugely satisfying to an engineer’s brain, but you’ll slowly build valuable trust and presence within the community. Don’t be afraid to dig in and have conversations on GitHub projects (trust me, no one else is scared to make comments or offer opinions). Being thoughtful, considerate, positive, and thinking like you’re working as a team are excellent ways to get invited into the fold on open source efforts.

Creating New Contributors to OpenStreetMap

January 15, 2013 • #

I wrote a blog post last week about the first few months of usage of Pushpin, the mobile app we built for editing OpenStreetMap data.

As I mentioned in the post, I’m fascinated and excited by how many brand new OpenStreetMap users we’re creating, and how many who never edited before are taking an interest in making contributions. This has been an historic problem for the OpenStreetMap project for years now: How do you convince a casually-interested person to invest the time to learn how to contribute themselves?

There are two primary hurdles I’ve always seen with why “interested users” don’t make contributions; one technical, and one more philosophical:

Editing map data is somewhat complicated, and the documentation and tools don’t help many users to climb over this hump.
It’s hard to answer the question: “Why should I edit this map? What am I editing, and who benefits from the information?”

To the first point, this is an issue largely of time and effort on the part of the volunteer-led developer community behind OpenStreetMap. GIS data is fundamentally complex, much moreso than Wikipedia’s content, the primary analog to which OpenStreetMap is often compared—“Wikipedia for maps”. It’s an apt comparison only on a conceptual level, but when it comes time to build an editor for the information within each system, the demands of OpenStreetMap data take the complexity to another level. As I said, the community is constantly chewing this issue, and making amazing progress on a new web-based editor. In building Pushpin, we spent a long time making sure that the user didn’t need to know anything about the complex OpenStreetMap tagging system in order to make edits. We picked apart the wiki and taginfo to abstract the common tags into simple picklists, which prevents both the need to type lots of info, and the need to know that amenity=place_of_worship is the proper tag for a church or mosque.

As for answering the “why”, that’s a little more complicated. People contribute to community projects for a host of reasons, so it’s a challenge to nail down how this should be communicated about OSM. There are stray bits around that tell the story pretty succinctly, but the problem lies in centralizing that core message. The LearnOSM site does a good job of explaining to a non-expert what the benefits are of becoming part of the contributor community, but it feels like the story needs to be told somewhere closer to the main homepage. Alex Barth recently proposed an excellent idea to the OpenStreetMap mailing list, a “contributors mark” that can be used within OSM-based services to convey the value of free and open map data. This is an excellent idea that addresses a couple of needs. For one it communicates what the project actually is, rather than just sending the unsuspecting user to a page about ODbL, and it also gives a general sense of how the data is used by real people.

In order for those one million user accounts to turn into one million contributors, we need to do a better job at conveying the meaning of the project and the value it provides to OpenStreetMap’s thousands of data consumers.

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