Alex’s favorite books are Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace and pretty much anything ever written by Michael Lewis. While he says there’s too much good music out there to name his favorite band, the all-powerful iTunes tells him that he’s really digging My Bloody Valentine, Chromatics, and Sonic Youth these days. When coding his tastes skew more toward electronic stuff — Orbital, Booka Shade, and LTJ Bukem are favorites at the moment.

You can find Alex at the (infrequently updated) http://acompa.net or on Twitter @achompas. We’re excited to have him here!

Clayton Christensen

Clayton Christensen’s Disrupting Class was the most recent pick for the Knewton book club. In this groundbreaking book, Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor and expert on innovation, describes a world in which continuous assessment unleashes a range of productive possibilities for education: “When students learn through student-centric online technology, testing doesn’t have to be postponed until the end of an instructional module and then administered in a batch mode. Rather, we can verify mastery continually to create tight, closed feedback loops. Misunderstandings do not have to persist for weeks until the exam has been administered and the instructor has had time to grade every student’s test.”

Having worked to create Knewton Math Readiness, an adaptive course which is built on the Knewton Adaptive Learning platform and which evaluates students continuously in order to deliver personalized learning paths, I have some firsthand experience with the power and potential of continuous assessment.

As computerized systems enable us to deliver continuous assessments to students, I envision a world in which we will be able to provide the following benefits for students:

1. An increased sense of inclusiveness.

Continuous assessment provides students with a constant stream of opportunities to prove their mastery of material and sends the message that everyone can succeed if given enough time and practice. This reduces the anxiety and finality around testing and heightens the emphasis on the learning itself. When mastery instead of competition with other students becomes the point of assessment, the focus shifts from superficial competition to true understanding and personal learning goals.

2. Higher learning standards for all.

In a system of continuous assessment, advanced students can progress through material at their own pace and remain engaged by pursuing more challenging work as they pass out of the basics. In this sense, the standards for such students stretch to help each student maximize potential. Because success is defined on an absolute and individualized basis, students cannot be satisfied with their achievements relative to others; they are encouraged to seek their own course and take responsibility for their learning.

3. Clarified purpose of assessment.

The problem with administering assessments only once in a while is that the primary aim is to compare students while at the same time allowing them to “pass” to the next level. This produces a situation in which the purpose of assessment is muddled: the tendency is to let students level up (because, regardless of standards, everyone is generally expected to pass) although they may not truly grasp the material or have a very weak understanding of it. For this reason, students may start the next level at a weaker state with no opportunity to correct their misunderstandings.

4. Capacity to remediate weaknesses through strengths.

When we, as Christensen suggests, begin measuring the length of time it takes to master a concept or skill and contrast the efficacy of different approaches, we are able to gather data about the learning process and put this knowledge to work for students: “Because learning will no longer be as variable, we can compare students not by what percentage of the material they have mastered, but by comparing how far they have moved through a body of material.”

This sort of data solves another problem: the self-perpetuating cycle through which the curriculum and methods of instruction for various subjects are tailored for those who are gifted in them. Math classes, for instance, are taught by those who are gifted at math and through texts written by those who are gifted in the subject as well; and class itself is shaped by the questions and comments of gifted math students. (This leaves those who are not gifted at math feeling excluded and turns them off from the subject.)

Imagine an alternative: the confidence students develop in the areas in which they excel helps them learn subjects for which they have less proclivity. And better yet, strategies that have been proven effective for students with specific weaknesses can be used to help other students with those weaknesses. Envision a system that places a student on a proven effective learning path once he displays a learning style and proficiency level that is similar to another student in a network.

5. Increased self-awareness for students who, through continuous assessment, come to understand their proficiencies and knowledge gaps.

Time and again, we encounter evidence that self-awareness — understanding of how one feels, thinks, and learns — is one of the most significant factors in professional and personal success. The famous psychologist, Gardner argues that self-knowledge — “intrapersonal skill” — is one of the eight defining types of intelligence (the others being “linguistic,” “logical-mathematical,” “naturalist,” “bodily-kinesthetic,” “spatial,” “musical,” and “interpersonal”). The more continuously we assess students, the more knowledge they can gain about themselves — what it takes for them to master something, how they can approach problems differently, what their blind spots are, and how to eliminate them.

6. Capacity to uncover interdisciplinary relationships between subject domains and concepts.

Continuous assessment allows us to refine our understanding of the content that we are teaching students. We might discover that effective remediation in a subject requires attention to another subject or that the root of common misunderstandings within a subject is something altogether unexpected.

Through the data generated, we might, for instance, uncover a relationship between reading comprehension and math word problems — or between quantitative/logical skill and English composition. We might discover that a specific order of teaching subjects (or even concepts) is remarkably effective — that logic and foreign language or fractions and musical harmony should be taught side by side, for example.

Here’s a picture of David’s presentation, titled “Personalizing Education for the Planet.”

And here’s the awesome whiteboard pictorial transcript captured live during his talk:

The second day of the summit, the Day of Action, brought together startups, administrators, teachers, and students into workshops and breakout sessions in order to brainstorm solutions to issues faced by the Georgetown community, like collaborative space availability and barriers to the adoption of classroom technology.

The Georgetown h.Innovation Summit tackled head-on the challenges of innovating within a large bureaucracy like a traditional university. By inviting some of the country’s most forward-thinking companies to share their ideas and solutions, Georgetown solidified its role as a model for innovation within the higher ed arena. We’re looking forward to participating in the next event in the fall!

After the summit, I had the chance to ask some questions to one of its founders, Michael Wang. Michael is a fellow Georgetown alumnus, former investment banker (also former Director of the beloved student-owned and operated Midnight Mug coffee shop inside Georgetown’s main library) and recently the first Chief Innovation Officer (CINO) of Georgetown University.

Here’s a picture of Michael (@zmwang) emceeing the Day of Ideas ahead of the Knewton session:

How does it feel to the be the CINO of your alma mater?

It’s a humbling experience. I’m grateful for the opportunity to collaborate and learn from such inspiring and brilliant people across the Georgetown community from University leaders to students to professors to alumni. It’s a blast. There are people being innovative all across campus — my job is to listen to their ideas and think of ways to 1) support them, 2) share them with others and 3) champion them.

Why did you decide to create the Innovation Summit? What were your goals?

The world has changed. We are more connected, more engaged, more informed, more empowered, more distracted, and more collaborative than ever before. It’s a super exciting time to be in education + technology. The goal of the inaugural Georgetown Innovation Summit was to reimagine the role of technology in higher education and to inject energy into the community by spotlighting ideas and projects being spearheaded by students, faculty, staff and other leading thinkers in the space. We wanted to set a robust foundation for our University community to grapple with the big question: What’s next in higher education?

We heard you have a new Chief Information Officer! Tell us a little about Ms. Lisa Davis?

Our new Vice President and CIO Lisa Davis is awesome. As the University leader driving strategy in technology, Lisa has brought a new energy to campus and sharpened our focus to serving the needs of our stakeholders — only when you understand what kinds of technology your constituents find valuable and relevant, be it old or new, can you effectively support and empower them. Under Lisa’s leadership in just 10 weeks, we have collaborated with various University stakeholders from the Office of Communications to the Office of Mission and Ministry to The Corp to the School of Continuing Studies and launched GU Mobile with ModoLabs, migrated to Google Apps for Faculty/Staff, increased Wi-Fi on campus lawns and partnered with Destiny Solutions– this is just the beginning.

What was your favorite part of the summit (other than the Knewton presentation, obviously)?

The random collisions. Our staff talked to companies about their products and established next steps and action items. Students got internships and jobs with companies. Professors met students who were interested in their work, classes, and projects. Companies learned about cutting edge projects and research from professors.

What are your future goals for the Innovation Summit?

We are appreciative of the support from our Chief Operating Officer Chris Augostini and our senior leadership in launching the first Summit. We are planning to host another event in Fall 2012. With renewed excitement in the community, we will look to build out the Summit to a larger audience and begin to focus on specific areas and challenges, in an effort to create solutions (Don’t worry, there will be more time for “random collisions” as well!). We planned this first Summit in six weeks. Now, with six months, we have… a bit more time to rock out!

What advice do you have for companies, organizations, or schools looking to become more innovative?

1) Understand who you are and what you value. You can’t “innovate” without an understanding of who you are and what you want to become. 2) Champion your innovators. It’s happening in your organization. Let them be the influencers to inspire others. Build ecosystems around them. Empower them.

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Most of our knowledge about how students learn comes from the traditional classroom. Like the adopters of new technologies that have come before, institutions hoping to transition to a computer-based learning model have inherited blueprints that reflect constraints and assumptions that no longer apply.

Here at Knewton, I manage several of our partnerships with K12 and higher education institutions. Our partners know that it would be all too easy to simply port the traditional classroom online or into labs, almost exactly as-is. They’ve recognized that doing so would miss the opportunities for improvement and transformation that adaptive learning provides.

Instead, schools and colleges on the forefront of this shift are taking the best of what the existing model has to offer—great instructors and great content—and amplifying their impact on each student. This mission requires educators, instructional designers, and companies like Knewton to separate elements of the older model that contribute to improving student outcomes from those that are vestigial limitations inherent to brick and mortar.

Skewing Toward Skeuomorphs

Technologists speak of skeuomorphs, features of new technologies that mimic past forms. Pick up any electronic device today and you’ll find plenty of skeuomorphic features: icons of long-disused 3.5-inch floppies to save our files, dog-eared “pages” within our e-readers, simulated shutter sounds from our shutterless digital cameras.

Some skeuomorphs are beneficial reference points, anchors that orient users within an unfamiliar environment. Unfortunately, other skeuomorphs do harm, confining us to a path that prevents us from making the most of our innovations.

Though they’ve become more common in our current era of rapid technological change, skeuomorphs are not new. Archaeologists originally coined the term to describe decorative architectural features meant to imitate previous materials or construction techniques. For example, when ancient Greek temple builders shifted from wood to masonry, they continued to reproduce in stone the peg heads, beam ends, and other features of the earlier wooden temples.

Skeuomorphs can persist long after they outlive their original function, accommodating skills or patterns of interaction that people learned in an earlier era. Christopher Latham Sholes designed the QWERTY typewriter keyboard in the 1870s to prevent typebars from jamming by separating commonly paired letters like “A” and “N,” an innovation that ostensibly slows us down today. But the high switching cost of having everyone re-learn touch-typing prevents us from moving past this skeuomorph’s purposeful inefficiency.

New Perspectives

In “What Technology Wants,” Wired Magazine co-founder Kevin Kelly writes:

[When we think about new technologies, our] immediate tendency is to imagine the new thing doing an old job better… The first movies were simply straightforward documentary films of theatrical plays. It took a while to realize the full dimensions of cinema photography as its own new medium that could achieve new things, reveal new perspectives, do new jobs.

Like those first films, most early efforts to take learning online have focused on simply broadcasting otherwise-unchanged lectures and coursework to remote students. This has greatly increased the geographic reach of traditional instruction (and its socioeconomic reach, thanks to open educational resource projects like MIT’s OpenCourseWare). But these developments don’t really represented a step forward in pedagogy.

One approach that can help provide a more critical view of skeuomorphs is to import recent insights from disciplines outside education. Psychometrics allows us to attain statistically valid levels of confidence about what students know and don’t know, their learning style, and more. Advances in the study of human-computer interaction yield new insights on the features that make user interfaces intuitive. New research from the field of game design, of all places, demonstrate powerful ways to motivate progress through any kind of material for kids and adults alike.  Information design provides new techniques for visualizing progress and proficiency. And adaptive learning challenges the presumption that all students should (or, for practical reasons, must) get the same material at the same time, allowing us to answer each student truthfully when he or she asks: “What should I do next?”

Rewriting the Blueprint

In educational interfaces, skeuomorphic designs abound:  digitally reproduced blackboards, “spiral-bound” gradebooks, and the like. But skeuomorphic thinking goes beyond just icons, toolbars, and images. The 45-minute lecture in class has become a 45-minute lecture on a web cam. We can do better.

We can start thinking of class time as a venue for reinforcing and expanding what students learn at their own pace at home or in lab time, rather than a locus of primary instruction. We can provide students the freedom to move to the next class as soon as they’re ready, rather than confining them to discrete quarters or semesters. We can build grading policies that value attaining new levels of proficiency over simply showing up and completing assignments. We can even start breaking down some of the walls between disciplines by organizing learning around concepts rather than courses. We can allow the most advanced students to push their knowledge to new heights, and we can devote more instructor time to the students who need help the most.

All these opportunities are open to us, if we allow ourselves to pursue them. The tension between tradition and innovation isn’t a zero-sum game; treading a path between the two will yield the best learning outcomes for our students. We owe it to them to equip them with the best learning tools we can devise.

Irene Bloom (photo from The Chronicle of Higher Education)

Our friends over at Getting Smart just published a great post about one teacher’s experience using Knewton in the classroom.

Irene Bloom, a Senior Lecturer at Arizona State University, was originally a skeptic of online learning. But she says that the classroom dynamic has changed since introducing Knewton into her remedial math classes:

… Knewton has allowed Bloom to introduce collaborative learning, allowing students to move along at their own pace. “I love looking around the classroom and seeing them working in groups, talking to each other and explaining things to each other,” says Bloom. “I only step in when they are stuck.”

“Most of the time, different groups are working on different things, depending on where they are in the course,” adds Bloom. “This is very new for me. Before this, I worked on the assumption that all students were at the same place. Now, because they progress at different rates, I meet them where they are.”

Bloom has also seen tangible improvements in learning outcomes and student engagement since beginning to use Knewton. Read more about her experience on Getting Smart.

When a molecular biologist reasons about genes and heredity, the second law of thermodynamics is not always her second thought. As I sit here composing these sentences, I’m barely cognizant of the fact that I could leave out roughly half of the textual characters I’m typing and still my point would come across, and only mildly adulterated. Because I’m a creature of 2012, I think nothing of the miracle of this language transmitted in full fidelity across the many wires of the web — but what if I were a creature of some time earlier and my medium was the drum?

It’s a rare book that manages fantastic leaps across time and concept, and does so with such complete fidelity to the sciences and biographies of those who developed those concepts. It was a pleasure to be able to share a few hours in the mind share of James Gleick, reading his latest book, “The Information,” which explores information in all its streaming, noisy, lively, expressive, fickle, and multitudinous incarnations. It was particularly rewarding to realize that many of the connections and relationships he shares are particularly foundational to thought processes that run through an information scientist’s mind here at Knewton at any given moment.

The Information dissects the lifecycle of information itself: transmitter goes to encoder- goes to imperfect medium- goes to decoder- goes to receiver. For a data scientist at Knewton, this view of the world — this particular lifecycle of information — can be mapped to the way we model student understanding and behavior. A student’s unknowable state of understanding- goes to imperfect assessment of that understanding–goes to receiver — with the exception that the receiver in our system is really a feedback loop wherein we update both our knowledge of the properties of our assessments and our knowledge of each student that operates through this loop. This is a process-oriented description of what Item Response Theory (one of the fundamental tools we use at Knewton) provides us.

Given a configuration of messages we derive from an assessment medium, the task is to “decode” the inner state of a student’s knowledge. To me, this is just one notion of what a (probabilistic) model is — a layer of abstraction that rides just above the clickstream, the knowable answers to questions on tests viewed through an imperfect lens, that gives us a picture of a student’s state of knowledge, from which we attempt to infer a student’s optimal next course of action.

In “The Information,” Gleick flies through centuries of early history, describing monumental changes in the representation of thought from oral language to pictographs, to ideographs, to written language. He presents the argument that these developments in language represent a much more significant development: changes in the representation and levels of thought. Citing Eric Havelock, Gleick argues that written language enabled conscious thought, converting experiences to a prose of ideas, which triggered a change in the human psyche to embrace abstraction. In contrast, Plato took a completely different view on the impact of the written language on human thought, arguing that the “innovation will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it… [offering them] the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom.”

While they held two opposing arguments, Havelock and Plato shared the belief that there were huge implications from the development of a new technology — writing– on human thought and wisdom. As Gleick goes on to argue, the current technological innovations enable other forms of information, such as bytes, which can be seen as changes in the representations of thought. Applying this to the education space, there are many arguments synonymous to Havelock and Plato’s, on whether or not educational technologies will be effective in furthering students’ thought capabilities, or in Plato’s words, delivering greater “wisdom” to students. Havelock and Plato’s arguments provide important insights to that question, that while “educational technology” has become a term and a sector of its own, it encompasses a large span of technologies — from computers to Knewton’s adaptive learning engine, and possibly even writing itself.

In this context, it seems that the jury’s still out on the broader question of whether educational technologies are increasing our wisdom or knowledge, even for an old technology like writing. Our best bet is to narrow down that question on technology by technology basis. While we may never be truly able to resolve the debate until we delve into epistemological questions of defining wisdom, we can measure possible proxies of  student knowledge, performance, or proficiencies, and the impact of each technology on those proxies.

Here at Knewton, we’re doing our part by measuring our proxies. We are starting to see some really interesting data on the impact that our technology can have on student learning. In the process, we’re making some gains toward the epistemological question too, by continuing to refine our measurements of those proxies. For now, we’re working on them internally, but we’re excited to share these out with everyone very soon.

We arrived mid-afternoon and were immediately overwhelmed by how enormous this place is. For both of us, it’s not only our first time at NAB, but our first time in Vegas at all. Luckily, as New Yorkers, we’re slightly prepared for spectacle and crowding, but I still felt like a lost tourist immediately upon entering the hall. After we got lost trying to find Registration (which ended up being in an entirely different building), we realized the size of the task that was in front of us. The program listing all the exhibitors reads like a phone book, so for our first day, we settled for wandering around and checking out some pretty cool stuff rather than trying to find anything in particular.

Check out a photo diary from our first day below, and stay tuned for our next post — tomorrow we’ll be thinking about how all these technologies can be used in education!

Here’s a fisheye shot of just one of the booths we stopped to check out – the convention center is the size of 14 football fields (!) and we haven’t managed to cover even a fraction of it. Comfortable shoes required, for sure.

They have lots of cameras set up for you to test and try, of course — and it only makes sense that you need someone or something to film. Somehow I never thought about it, though — the result is that there are people whose entire job consists of sitting in a fake set and pretending to do something all day long, so that people checking out the cameras have something to look at. It’s the strangest thing — this man was sitting in a fake kitchen. He was clearly bored…by the time we walked by he had already carved a tiny face into an apple with a paring knife. Can you imagine sitting there all day with this many cameras looking at you?

This was just cool. It’s a hovering, remote-controlled copter that has a camera mounted on it, for aerial shots. Here it is grounded – that camera attached to it is a RED that probably cost around $40,000 — and that’s before you attach it to the copter!

Here’s a picture of it in flight. This must get some amazing shots.

Here’s Ian checking out a sweet camera — as Knewton’s resident video expert, he is predictably in heaven in this convention center.

Hey! That’s my old high-school friend and YouTube viral star, Freddie Wong (@fwong)! He made a name for himself creating viral content online, and is one of the best-known “YouTube celebrities.” I was checking the conference Twitter feed and saw a mention that he was speaking right then at a booth not far from where we were sitting — we ran over and caught the end of his fantastic talk about how to make content that people truly want to share online. After the talk, he was mobbed by fans who wanted a picture with him, but once he saw me we sat down for a few minutes to talk — I haven’t seen him in years! What a great surprise to run into him.

Well, our first day was exhausting and we’ve been up for nearly 24 hours already, so it’s time to head back to the hotel for some sleep so we can attack more of the show tomorrow. From the Las Vegas Strip, signing off for now.