You have to see this

This will make you cry:

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Professional evolution

Attended a very interesting and engaging event over the weekend: 

ETIS, the symposium of the educational technology industry, here in San Francisco. It is one of my favorite events, because it provides amble opportunity to mix and connect with the greatest minds in educational technology.

Carrying home a stack of cards from new won friends and enjoyed reconnect with old ones. Also carrying home: Two thought reverberating in my mind.

For one, it was exciting to see the call for personalization gain momentum. This is something that's at the very core of LearnThat.org, and it feels great to meet allies and people who share our passion for anytime/anywhere learning. 

The voices are getting louder, the crisis more dire. 

When will the avalanche take off?

Secondly, I engaged in many conversations around professional development and user adoption, partially triggered by being nominated as an innovator company for our Pay-Per-Result personalized payment concept we introduced on our site. We developed this concept in response to administrators asking for guarantees that our technology works, so we designed a concept that provides 100% guaranteed return on investment, supported by 24/7 customer service/chat. You literally only pay for gained, measured learning results, so in essence: We assume responsibility for it working. We don't tell people to trust us based on our marketing... we know that it works, so we give people the option to only pay for measured results.

Some impressions of the problem:

***Programs that were sold to millions of users, yet their analytics show less than 100,000 unique monthly visitors. This seems common in many products. Looks good---strong sales to administrators---low adoption by teachers---does not trickle down to the student.

***Many programs that are lauded as successes, gaining lots of investor support, but that don't have user traction. Are programs not evaluated with basic analytics, like the Alexa toolbar or Google analytics?

***Colleagues stating that 20% first year adoption of their amazing and userfriendly solutions is common in public schools (Quote: "It's different in private schools, because there is more control. In private settings, teachers have to implement what the administrators decide.")

***Our own experience with public school adoptions, taking unreasonable support effort and long start up cycles to implement -- and we tested our software with focus groups of elementary students, so it's not our user interface.

We have still thousands of licenses in our system, paid for years ago, and never claimed because the teachers never came on board.

Everyone is citing "professional development" as the problem (in any other industry, you would call this training, but it has been pointed out to me that teachers take affront with that term).

"We need professional development and more mentoring" is the common chorus.

Honestly, I don't think teachers need any more "professional development" or "training." 

How many hours/weeks/months of professional development should it take to teach the teachers?

The majority of teachers I met so far are capable, smart professionals, passionate about education. They could figure this out in 5 minutes and implement new technology like they do their online banking, facebook social lives and other areas of technology.

What teachers need is an open, honest discussion, respect, and participation in designing 21st century education. They don't need "training" and "mentoring". They need to take ownership of this movement, because they will benefit the most.

If chronic problems don't go away, it's nearly always because too much attention is given to the symptoms, not the underlying causes.

Teachers need assurance that the changes that happen so rapidly (and commonly top-down) are designed to improve their job, not eliminate it. 

Currently, public school teachers are disrespected and underpaid, left insecure and vulnerable, criticized by society for evils they did not create. Understandable that under these conditions their tolerance for change is low. They have no reason to hope that new technology will be anything but another painful yank on their chains. 

The school of the future has to ensure -- and teachers need to know and be able to trust -- that when all is said and done, they will still be the center piece of education, and society has to make a clear decision and commitment to our teachers.

Personalized education has the power to transform the teaching profession and teachers will be 1,000 times happier and more effective because of it.

Professional development should not focus on the use of products and procedures. 

There are many educational products on the market and in any area there are stunning examples of wonderful, user-friendly implementations. Every elementary student could explain these programs to the teacher, if training was really the problem. The problem is that teacher find the very essence of why they chose this career in the first place eroding and threatened. "Professional development" time and resources should be spent to envision the future of personalized learning and to involve teachers in the transition from the traditional classroom to being a mentor of a student on a personalized learning path. 

Personalized learning and the promises technology hold are a dream come true for the teaching profession. Once teachers understand how wonderful teaching in such an environment is, and that they're safe to venture into this new territory, we will have teachers spearheading the movement. 

Teachers who are just doing "a job" might find the transition too troublesome. Resisting change is not tolerated in other areas of society; it should not be permitted in schools. If you're tired of it all (it's understandable) and can't find the energy to engage yourself, find another job or retire. Excuse me, but this is about our children and the future of our society.

Personalized education allows teachers to really spend time and get to know each student, accelerate their progress appropriately, nurture their talents, and provide learning platforms to bring students together in ways that are creative, relaxed, effective, and rewarding for both teachers and students. 

My daughter was fortunate to enjoy such an environment: it's very powerful, and it works.

I hope that more and more teachers and students will start to invest their time, power, and voice to facilitate this change and claim and define their role in this process.

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More interesting research on memory

I have been sharing my beloved delanceyplace.com emails before, and here's the latest super brilliant excerpt and "thought bite" - another piece on memory and our misconceptions of it.

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Autism visible as different brain growth at 2 years old

Interesting article - http://news.discovery.com/human/autism-puts-brain-growth-in-overdrive-110505.html#mkcpgn=rssnws1

Not really surprising from a parenting perspective. Two years of age is the time when the child discovers a sense of self, and starts to challenge and explore its options in the social network surrounding them ("the terrible two").
Autistic kids have a different sense of self, and low ability to interact socially, so while the "normal" kids get busy figuring out how the people around them respond to a "no" presented in varying levels of intensity, autistic brains just punch out of this social learning process.

Consequently, their brain is growing faster in the cognitive area during this time.

Wondering if MRI can also detect where non-autistic kids grow during this time... where does social learning take place? Does that show up on these scans?

Twice the charm!

Invited for the second time to attend the conference of the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) at the end of May in San Francisco with innovator credentials. Excited!

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If life gives you melons...

... you might be dyslexic. 

[from a t-shirt I saw today]

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You could fry an omelette...

...not on our brains (human dignity prevents this), but on the CPU of our developers' computers, as they work on the foundation for our new vocabulary module.

Our brains are running red hot as well, and I don't think I've slept without dreaming of words and numbers for weeks.

The shape this project takes is amazing, and there's that great "rocket blast-off" tingling in the tip of my nose; something great is about to happen.

Over the next few blog entries, I'll share with you as I find a bit of time what we're up to. Feedback is very welcome!

Normally, when I explain to my friends what we're up to, their eyes glaze over, because honestly, what our bright LTW engineers are cooking right now is very powerful stuff, and a fairly complex undertaking.

To start with something less abstract than "language," let me give you a brief "stellar" explanation of why I'm so excited about the new LearnThatWord module.

Once upon a time, people would look up at the sky and see a random sprinkling of stars. And air was just invisible nothingness. 

Over many thousand years, and through careful observation and analysis, humankind slowly determined that there was an order to the stars, a "cosmos," a system and harmony.

Certain stars could be seen moving in groups, others had a certain quality that distinguished them.

Later on, we started to understand that we are looking at different systems and spheres, five in total, troposphere being the one closest to us, stacked into each other like a Russian doll.

I love this picture, and although I don't know the context it was created for, I see a learner and seeker who managed to break through the core sphere, and who is about to move on to the next. It's one of the most amazing illustrations of the process of "learning" in my mind.

However, once we go above the spheres, we're actually looking at an infinite collection of large units called solar systems. Most of us learned that unless you like to flirt with madness, it is quite enough to concern yourself with our local, hometown universe, since the size and complexity of this one alone will make you nauseated if you try to completely comprehend it.

Over time, humankind learned that what we call "the universe," is simply a word we use to represent something that nobody is actually able to visualize or comprehend. We soothe ourselves by using a term that makes our limitation less obvious, by using a singular term for the infinite vastness. Language is similar in that it gives the impression we're looking at one "thing," where in reality there's only infinite, morphing and evolving grandness.

So, this is how the old astronomers would sketch their astrologic knowledge. Keep this in mind as I make a leap from the stars to the English language, because you will better understand what the new quiz will bring if you visualize it with this structure.

Ok... how this relates to our new module:

Words are not created equal. It's fairly old knowledge that we use some words a lot, and others much less frequently, hence it is more important to know the very common words than the more exotic and obscure ones.

Already in the early part of the last century, people sat down and -- at the time, manually -- looked through large amounts of texts, counting words one by one.

These old frequency lists are still quite relevant today, because they only included a few hundred of the top words. There is not much evolution in high frequency words. They're words like "the" (the number 1), "be" (including it's relatives: am, is, are, was, been, etc.), "I," "you," etc.

This is an excerpt from Wikipedia:

So, owning the core words brings an instant advantaged, a quantum leap towards unlocking a language. Unfortunately, it seems as though progress is made rather slowly after the first 1,000 words.

However, to be fluent in a language, you need above  95% of word proficiency. If you are presented with a text of 100 words, not knowing 5 in them is still a high number, and you will need a lot of energy and concentration to make it through a text or conversation at this level. It's kind of like riding a bicycle with a flat tire. You can do it, but it's bumpy and a pain and you won't find it very fun.

Here's another word estimate:

To reach mastery, you actually need about 15,000-20,000 words, and by words most researchers mean the "word family". So dance, dances, dancing, danced would count as one word. If words were counted more strictly, without combining them into a "root word" or "word family" or "lemma," the number of words you'd need to know would be much, much larger.

There are countless ways to learn the 1,000 core words, because that's what many, many publishers focus on. It's a waste of energy, because these "core words" are words you'll learn nearly automatically anyway, and quite effortlessly. You'll encounter them everywhere, so your brain can easily build automaticity around them.

Going beyond these core words, effective support quickly dissipates and it becomes exponentially more difficult to learn.

To provide tutoring along the full frequency strand is possible only for LTW, being the only program designed around a comprehensive vocabulary data set of now 180,000 words (and continuously growing).

The meaning of 80/20 to language

What various language programs suggest is that if you learn the top 1,000 or 2,000 words you're close to mastery. Doesn't that sound great? Learn the 1,000 words that make up 80% of texts and your almost done!

Once you look closer, though, you'll find that these 1,000 core words are words that you will naturally pick up rather quickly; they are really very basic. However, to master living language, you need to be able to fill in the more advanced words in synergy with these core words to actually get something out of them. Meaning is most commonly communicated through the more advanced vocabulary, the more specific words.

Here are some randomly picked lines. Blanked out are the words with frequency rank larger than 1,000:

The world is very xxxxxxx.

Do you like your xxxxxx?

What do you think about xxxxxx?

I can't believe it's xxxxxx!

What all of these sentences have in common is that they use core words for 80% of the text volume. Despite this big text volume that's covered by the high frequency words, not knowing 20% makes communication useless!

Try it for yourself:

Take an average, casual text and blank out all the slightly more specific or advanced words. You'll see the 80/20 proportion (or something very similar). You'll also see that the text has become very hard to understand. If the text is slightly more specific, your primary core vocabulary, while essential, takes you nowhere at all.

It's the 80/20 thing all over again. If you've got the 1,000 core words down, you cover 80% of the text, but only 20% of the meaning. On easy-to-read texts, 20% of words, roughly, will be made up of non-core or advanced words. Unfortunately for the learner, often these 20% carry the bulk of the meaning in a text.

Good news is that researchers (including our own team at LTW) have been setting the big data monsters on the trail of the English language all over the world, investigating its structure from all different angles, and a "language cosmos" is starting to reveal itself.

The data monster has been digesting incredible amounts of words and has produced a lot of very valuable data sets, so that we now not only know the top 20,000 word families, but far beyond.

An exciting time to be in linguistics! Or language tutoring... ;-)

Vocabulary spheres

Using this data and a few important aspects I'll explain in future entries, it is possible to divide the language cosmos into spheres (remember the image above?). It allows us to give a scientifically and statistically sound approach to learning English. Once you reach general proficiency, you may choose to expand further into more specialized vocabulary areas (it's like launching into a new solar system).

Our new vocabulary assessment tool will allow users to tell us what their unique focus is:
Maybe you want to
-   focus on spoken language only,
-   prepare for medical school,
-   ... or business communications,
-   ... or explore humanities or social sciences,
-   ... or be on equal verbal turf with lawyers?

Tell our program what you're looking to accomplish and we will prep you accordingly. We have an incredible general frequency list. But, in addition to that, we have twelve (12) more specific frequency strings, each for a different learning focus and each extensive and comprehensive.

So with this frequency data, it is possible to break up the language learning progress into a cosmos of different spheres, and determine incredible accuracy how much space you already cover, in terms of vocabulary. Knowing what you know allows you to optimize which words you might want to learn next, so they're not too easy or too advanced.

We're excited to build an easy and effective vocabulary assessment tool right after launching our new vocabulary module. It will be online, interactive and allow users to determine their location in the English Word-iverse in a few minutes.

If you share our passion for learning and would love to wear sponsor laurels, please get in touch.

Frequency data is one of the core pillars of this project, but only one of them. I will post some more of the logic of the new algorithm as we go along, so please consider subscribing to this blog or joining us on Facebook... 

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LearnThatWord finalist for two CODiE awards

LearnThatWord was nominated today as a finalist for two CODiE awards:

Best K-12 Instructional Solution

Best Reading/English Instructional Solution

The CODiE awards are given annually by the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) based on selections made by a jury of judges from the industry and voting among industry peers. We're delighted!

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Donations!

Received our first donation to preserve and expand Vocabulary Junction into the next year... thank you! 

Would like to take part? There's a donation button and thermometer on the about us page.

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Bonus words, wait list and more upgrades

We're constantly working behind the scenes to improve LTW. Many of these things you'll notice as improved speed or better data for the words, but here a few noteworthy recent upgrades:

When you study via Vocabulary Tutor, you have the option to find a word based on definition/image/sample sentence before clicking the audio button. If you succeed, you are issued a bonus point, which is worth a nugget and also counts towards your diploma. With the latest upgrade, the word is no longer added to the practice list if you enter it incorrectly, since many times there are multiple right answers for a certain definition. Failed bonus word attempts are simply added to your preferred word list to be re-tested again in one of the future sessions.

If you are spending coins on your reward page, it will now prompt you to confirm that you want a particular item, since in the past sometimes members clicked at multiple items not aware that it would deduct coins for each activity. If you choose to get learning credits as your reward, you can see how many learning credits you have in your student portal now, even if you're a member.

And because members tend to take quizzes more frequently now that they are rewarded for it, we implemented a 6-hour wait list feature that prevents that words are moving through the practice cycle too quickly. LTW is based on the principle of spaced repetition, so we provide a few quick exposures in the first quiz, and future reviews should happen stretched over a time period that ensures the word is pulled from long-term memory, not short-term.

New feature: If quizzes are restarted in short sequence, practice words that have been presented before will not be shown again until six hours have passed since the last review. Words affected are listed in a 6-hour wait list table in your practice word page.

Our goal for LTW is perfection and our to-do list long... if you have feedback or ideas about what we could be doing better, please let us know!

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Find us @ Google Apps Marketplace

A big step towards making LearnThatWord an easy, one-click choice for schools:

We are now available in the Google Apps Marketplace.

Schools using the free Google Apps for Education program can now make

LearnThatWord available for teachers and students with a click.

Google Apps provides sophisticated email features with calendar, tasks, and

document tools that can be used privately or shared by your constituents in a free

and ad-free environment.

Since our program is offered through the no-worry, affordable and 100% measured

Pay-Per-Result concept--without any per-person licensing fees--it’s easy to get

everybody started through the Google Apps Marketplace. You don’t even have to

decide who to include or exclude, since you can do that later on by granting or

removing sponsorship as needed.

Students receive 5 free learning credits each, schools 100 additional credits. This

allows for a few weeks of trial time, on average.

In addition, all third graders study free with our Vocabulary Junction campaign.

Your annual expense is capped to protect your budget, making it the easiest,

most accountable and most affordable tutoring solution available to remediate

vocabulary and spelling.

Click here to add it to your Google Apps for Education account now:

Click here if you don’t yet have a free Google Apps for Education account and would

like to get started.

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Making practice less onerous

I live in a great place. Little Sebastopol in Sonoma County, home to a lot of conscientious and smart people, and among them the good folks at O'Reillys.

Today, I came a across a discussion on the value of practice, which culminated in the following lines that I would like to share:

My point this morning was in large part that repetition and drill matter, and that once you've figured out that they're actually helping you, they 'suck' a lot less.

It's not just a matter of Calvinist ethics (sorry, Kurt) - it's an opportunity for learners to move forward by doing things a lot, shifting ahead a bit at a time. The great leaps are fun as well, but build on smaller steps.

My concern with this is that while letting kids figure out what works for them is a good idea and that different kids will figure out different things, actually becoming good at things is about a lot more than discovering them or creating them.

Reading sheet music is one thing - learning to play an instrument is another. And I figured out what integration and differentiation were about long before I got to calculus, but I probably should have flunked my second semester of calculus because I just couldn't wrap my head around how to actually make it work. (Which shocked me, because math up to then had just flowed naturally for me.)

Ideally I'd love to have discovery and creativity motivate learners' actions - but they still need to motivate learners into a tremendous amount of repetition to get there.

Kurt said 'Computers and the internet can be used to scale the learning by discovery paradigm.' Yes, and they can also be used to manage, moderate, and fine-tune repetition. Hopefully we can combine all of that into something that gives people instruction at a pace they can maintain, thrilled by their progress, but also in a way that sticks with them."

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Learning has it's own rewards, BUT...

... we're excited to announce the launch of our new rewards program!

LearnThatWord users now earn coins for completing quizzes! These coins buy anything from La Linea cartoons to games to free learning credits, etc. After all, the biggest challenge about learning is keeping the momentum going and to stay motivated!

Rewards, whether they're diplomas or prizes, are given for effort and quality, not existing achievement.

Come check it out, and let me know what you think!

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Cognitive Misers

The following excerpt is a text sent to me yesterday by the delanceyplace.com snippet collector, one of the few emails I enjoy reading whenever I find the time to:

"We tend to be cognitive misers. When approaching a problem, we can choose from any of several cognitive mechanisms. Some mechanisms have great computational power, letting us solve many problems with great accuracy, but they are slow, require much concentration and can interfere with other cognitive tasks. Others are comparatively low in computational power, but they are fast, require little concentration and do not interfere with other ongoing cognition. Humans are cognitive misers because our basic tendency is to default to the processing mechanisms that require less computational effort, even if they are less accurate. Are you a cognitive miser? Consider the following problem, taken from the work of Hector Levesque, a computer scientist at the University of Toronto. Try to answer it yourself before reading the solution. 

Problem: Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married, but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person? 

A) Yes
B) No
C) Cannot be determined

"More than 80 percent of people choose C. But the correct answer is A. Here is how to think it through logically: Anne is the only person whose marital status is unknown. You need to consider both possibilities, either married or unmarried, to determine whether you have enough information to draw a conclusion. If Anne is married, the answer is A: she would be the married person who is looking at an unmarried person (George). If Anne is not married, the answer is still A: in this case, Jack is the married person, and he is looking at Anne, the unmarried person. This thought process is called fully disjunctive reasoning - reasoning that considers all possibilities. The fact that the problem does not reveal whether Anne is or is not married suggests to people that they do not have enough information, and they make the easiest inference (C) without thinking through all the possibilities. Most people can carry out fully disjunctive reasoning when they are explicitly told that it is necessary (as when there is no option like 'cannot be determined' available). But most do not automatically do so, and the tendency to do so is only weakly correlated with intelligence.

"Here is another test of cognitive miserliness, as described by Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Shane Frederick. 

"A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

"Many people give the first response that comes to mind - 10 cents. But if they thought a little harder, they would realize that this cannot be right: the bat would then have to cost $1.10, for a total of $1.20. IQ is no guarantee against this error. Kahneman and Frederick found that large numbers of highly select university students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton and Harvard were cognitive misers, just like the rest of us, when given this and similar problems."

Author: Keith E. Stanovich
Title: "Rational and Irrational Thought: The Thinking That IQ Tests Miss" 
Publisher: Scientific American
Date: November/December 2009
Pages: 35-36

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The Myths Behind the Things We Do

Here a few lines by Benedict Carey, "Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits," The New York Times, September 6, 2010... 

 " 'We have known these principles [for improved study] for some time, and it's intriguing that schools don't pick them up, or that people don't learn them by trial and error,' said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. 'Instead, we walk around with all sorts of unexamined beliefs about what works that are mistaken.' (...) 

 

Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are 'visual learners' and others are auditory; some are "left-brain" students, others "right-brain." In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journalPsychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas. (...)

 

Cognitive scientists do not deny that honest-to-goodness cramming can lead to a better grade on a given exam. But hurriedly jam-packing a brain is akin to speed-packing a cheap suitcase, as most students quickly learn - it holds its new load for a while, then most everything falls out. ...  [In contrast] an hour of study tonight, an hour on the weekend, another session a week from now - so-called spacing - improves later recall without requiring students to put in more overall study effort or pay more attention, dozens of studies have found."

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