Leaning tower of PISA – 10 serious skews and flaws

Like the real Leaning Tower of PISA, the OECD PISA results are built on flimsy foundations and are seriously skewed. Nevertheless, they have become a major international attraction for educators, and have sparked off an annual educational ‘international arms’ race’

In the UK, education policy is rooted in, and firmly targeted at, the PISA results. The English Baccalaureate has PISA written all over it. PISA is also used as a political football by D-list celebrities and wannabes, like Toby Young and Katherine Birbalsingh to beat the state system over the head. They stare at the learning tower and swear blind that it’s straight.

Both left and right now use the ‘sputnik’ myth, translated into the ‘Chinese competitiveness’ myth, to chase their own agendas – more state funding or more privatisation. This is a shame, as the last thing we need is yet another dysfunctional, deficit debate in education. Nations have different approaches to education, different demographic and social mixes and different agendas.

The problems in the data are extreme as PISA compares apples and oranges. In fact it compares huge watermelons with tiny seeds. PISA is seriously flawed because of the huge differences in demographics, socio-economic ranges and linguistic diversity within the tested nations. Here’s seven skews as a starter:

1. Size skew

Shanghai topped the table this year but why was one city from an entire nation singled out? Could it be that Shanghai is China’s flagship city? To compare a set of students from the richest city in China (on average 3 times the national income), that has attracted a high proportion of high-achievers, with a similar sample from across the whole of the US is odd. It smacks of political manipulation by the Chinese. There was also evidence, presented in the New York Times, of student priming. Imagine if the cohort was drawn from rural China? This comparative method will fail as there will be lots of outliers in the data. It is not surprising that small homogeneous cities and states pop up at both the top and bottom of the table. The incentive to 'cheat' is huge.

2. Tuition skew

One huge variable that is NOT accounted for is external tuition. This is rife in some of the high perfroming countries, especially China, Singapore and Hong Kong. Many would argue that this one variable alone kills of the statistical significance. We have a choice, ht house or bring up blanced, rounded kids. I know what side I'm on.

3. Immigrant skew

Different tested cohorts have different immigrant ratios. The difficulties that immigrants have with language, social adjustment, school and poverty, is a serious pollutant to the data. As one would expect, Finland and Shanghai have very small numbers of immigrants in their tested cohorts. It is bonkers to compare cohorts with radically different numbers of immigrant children.

4. Selective immigration skew

There is another odd skew associated with immigration, namely that for some countries, immigration is controlled, so that only wealthy or smart kids get through. So, for example, there’s only one country in the PISA results where the immigrant students outscore the natives and that’s Australia, where immigration is highly selective. There’s a huge difference between refugee immigration and cherry-picked immigration.

5. English skew

Associated with immigration, is a curious linguistic skew – the tendency for smart immigrants to migrate towards English speaking nations. This could mean that English speaking nations benefit in the long term from such immigration but show poor short-term results due to high first generation immigration with associated language problems at school.

6. Linguistic skews

On reading, languages with regular structures are likely to do better than languages which are more irregular. The tests may favour languages with simplified spelling structures such as Finnish. Reading data may also be skewed by reading habits as PISA doesn’t recognise reading on screens. It’s big on books.

7. Subjects skew

PISA measures academic subjects only, namely maths, reading and science. To be fair PISA have recognised this flaw and are now embarking on a correction process. But is it right to judge education in these subjects only? One need only focus the curriculum heavily on these subjects to do well, which is exactly what many counties do. Dump sport, music, the arts and humanities and you can produce stellar results.

8. Subject focus skew

Simple differences in taught curricula can also affect the results. In maths, for example, if you have taught ‘series’ theory you will do well in the 2009 results, as a major set of questions focused on extrapolating series in the test. If this is not part of your curriculum, you will score badly.

9. Data fatally flawed?

Sven de Kreiner Danish statistician says PISA is not reliable at all. In the reading tests 28 questions were supposed to be equally difficult in every country. PISA has failed here as differential item functioning - items with different degrees of difficulty in different countries - are common. In fact he couldn't find any that worked without bias. Items are more difficult in some countries. He used his analysis to show that the UK moves up to 8 or down to 36. PISA assumes that DIF has been eliminated but not one single item is the same across the 56 countries.

10. Differences not that great

OFQUAL published a Progress Report (International Comparisons in Senior Secondary Assessment ) in February 2011 making similar points.

They listed several major criticisms:

1. differences between countries’ performance are not that large…usually statistically insignificant
2. whether or not a country has moved up or down the league tables is not that meaningful partly because the absolute differences in scores between countries are not that great
3. the constituent group of comparators changes from study to study and from year to year

They point to three major but dangerous assumptions that:

1. items tested for are somehow an objective measure of what is best
2. learners undertaking the study are a balanced representation of all learners at that stage of education
3. learners sampled in each country are equally motivated to perform well in the tests

Additionally, these snapshot studies do not isolate variables and may well be skewed by “factors in the past that no longer apply”, such as “learner performance in an examination may be the result of curriculum developments undertaken” or “investment in education infrastructure some time in the past”. In other words, using the data to praise or blame the current system is unwise.

Gove’s skew

The great danger is that the world skews its curriculum to fit the PISA expectations, just as PISA draw away from their own curriculum tested areas. This has already happened in the UK with Gove’s Ebac. Gove has specified A*-C passes in five subject areas: English; maths; two sciences; ancient or modern history or geography; and a modern or ancient language. It has all the hallmarks of a PISA-led curriculum. First it’s far too academic and restrictive. Second, it excludes too many sensible options. But his greatest crime is to have moved the goalposts after goals have been scored. If you change the goalposts so dramatically and quickly, you simply condemn 85% of students as failures (only 15% currently meet the Ebac standard). What’s worse, Gove is applying the measure retrospectively. This is like moving the goalposts at the end of the game and disallowing goals scored. It’s madness. You can have schools with high achievement in Maths and English plummet down the new league tables from near the top to near the bottom, as they haven’t focused on humanities or languages. The consequences of this error could be disastrous as the staff pressures will also be enormous, with thousands of teachers in vocational subjects being rendered useless in favour of history, geography and language teachers. One weird consequence is that a student who does Latin and Ancient History will be judged above those who do Business Studies, Engineering, psychology, a third science and lots of other subjects. It’s worse than bad , it’s perverse. I’m glad my kids are leaving secondary education, as it descends into this backward looking nonsense.

Devil’s in the detail

Politicians and activists distort PISA to meet their own ends. They cherry pick results and recommendations, ignoring the detail. Finland is famously quoted by the right as a high performing PISA country. Yet, it is a small, homogeneous country with no streaming, high levels of vocational education, no substantial class divisions and no private schools. Facts curiously ignored by PISA supporters.

Conclusion

One could quibble with the details of my analysis, but I’m convinced the PISA comparisons are riddled with skews and errors, many more than indicated above. The great danger, and it is already happening, is that people read causality into the data. It’s crap schools, crap teachers, money spent doesn’t matter etc. The scope for false causality is enormous and exploited by politicians for their own ends.

PS

"In the last 10 years we've plummeted in the PISA rankings" heard this before from Michael Gove - he lied. UK results were excluded in 2000 (low response rate) and 2003 as data was dodgy. Only gathered in 2006 and 2009. PISA tests not that important but National tests have gone up - what's happening? OECD does not compare over the 10 years. Performance has not fallen, if anything it's flat.

Middle East: revolutions without revolutionaries

For those tiresome oldsters who see social media as nothing more than the decadence of youth or a meaningless pastime, recent events in the Middle East should have been a slap round the head. A rack of nations, led by a new post-TV generation who partake in genuine dialogue with each other, really have changed the world, irrevocably.

But what do we mean by a media revolution? It was not, I believe, a revolution caused by social media but a revolution that took place in the age of social media. To put it another way, social media was a necessary condition for the revolution but not sufficient. This is, therefore, not a new media revolution, but it is a revolution without revolutionaries, just the sheer force of mass participation, first in new media, then on the streets. It is, of course, more complex than this, so how did the different social media build into a tsunami of discontent and action?

Stage 1: Blogs (despots despised)

Social media gave young people in the Middle East access to the downside of dictatorships– the nepotism, cronyism and corruption of specific ruling families. These revolutions were first fuelled by bloggers who exposed the excesses of the autocrats, along with their wives, sons and relatives. In Tunisia, Ben Ali’s wife and even her nephews were targeted by bloggers and became figures of hate. The Mubarak’s, Gadaffis, Khalifas, House of Saud and others have been exposed in a similar manner. Even the King of Jordan’s wife Rania is under pressure due to her political interference. It is the dynastic nature of these families that are so resented, with father setting up son for power and significant portions of their nations’ wealth being given to friends and relatives. There is nowhere to hide as wikileaks, foreign publications and outside revolutions leak into their countries.

I also don’t believe that this was a Facebook or Twitter revolution. Social media in this type of politics has a certain causality. First the bloggers, who are real activists, with real voices, reporting excesses and explaining in some depth over a long period, the underbelly of the society in which they work and live. They are often the first to be harassed, detained even imprisoned. They act as the unofficial press as the official press are under state control or operate under fear. At this stage Facebook links back to blogs, spreading the word about who’s hot, what’s hot and channels traffic back to bloggers and blog posts.

Stage 2: Facebook (groups emerge)

It’s only much later, when enough heat has been generated, that Facebook is used as an organisational device. It’s a medium in which protest Facebook ‘groups’ grow around causes, martyrs and events. The role of a martyr kicks in, where the images and reports of a suicide (Mohammed Bouazizi) become triggers for groups. At this point the date of a demonstration, for example, is amplified by Facebook, but another medium takes over.

Stage 3 Twitter (street mob)

Dates for demonstrations become twitter triggers, as in the#Jan25 hashtag for the Egyptian demos. Then, as real events on the street unfold, Twitter kicks in with its real-time feed of events; the violence, deaths, more dates for demonstrations. This is when others outside of the country watch, learn and contribute through internationally known hashtags.

So it’s a cascade effect; blogs are individuals, Facebook groups and Twitter the mob.

Stage 4: Denial and shurtdown (Old minds & media)

The ‘media-gap’ between the rulers and the young they rule is immense. The telephone was a novelty when these despots were young and you can’t imagine that they’ve ever used email, never mind social media. In media terms they are archers in the age of gunpowder. Before television Radio in the Middle East was widely used both to unite and disparage others across the Arab world. But it was within an older oral tradition. Halim Barakat describes this expressive style as rhetorical, aggressive and mocking. We saw this on the TV speeches delivered by Mubarak, Suleiman and Ghadaffi . They were patronising and part of an old media model of broadcasting in an ‘adult to child’ fashion. But the world has moved on and this language seemed patronising and out of touch. Young people saw right through it all, as they have grown up with a different, straight speaking model, that is more dialogue than monologue.

The pro-Mubaraks used state television, physically guarding it night and day to put their case. When they saw that they were failing they moved from defence to attack, arresting journalists and closing down Al Jazeera and Nilesat for a full 11 days. (There is no love lost between Mubarak and Qatar.) This attack closed down the internet and mobile networks but the web is like water, it just flows round these obstacles, with alternative routes from tech savvy youngsters defying the ban. Twitter activists even invented speech to text technology for Tweets to get round the Twitter ban. In the end Al Jazeera had to use the web to stream live images. This was as much a media battle as a street revolution.

Stage 4: Action (Youtube)

This is when media start to take a back seat and real people take real action to effect change. It has a different dynamic in different countries. Tunisia and Egypt fell quickly with relatively little bloodshed. Libya is already a civil war and a bloodbath. Bahrain is taking longer. Iran literally living on the edge of revolt. Saudi oppressing everyone as usual, but being forced to make reforms, for the moment in terms of bribes. Jordan has already made changes. They are ALL under pressure to change.

At this point YouTube and the distribution of video, and photographs through the whole media landscape come into their own. Even TV depends, at this stage, on activist journalism, to show what’s happening on the ground, as the state can simply control TV channels. However, at this stage, new media is no longer the prime mover, it is in reporting mode.

Libya - Wikipedia revolution

It’s been fashionable for some, like Malcolm Gladwell, Chomsky, and George Siemens to dismiss the role of social media in the Arab Spring. Well, I place the testimony of those young Arabs over these scoffing, North American writers and academics, who are somewhat distanced from these events. I’ve written about the role of social media in the Arab Spring before but only recently spoken to Libyans who explained how it was somewhat different there.

Blogs

Al Jazeera had already played a significant role in Tunisia and Egypt, and it was the Al Jazeera Live blog that fuelled initial interest in the early events in Libya. Although this was often 8-10 hours out of date, it was something. The whole revolution had kicked of quite suddenly, so everyone, the media included were taken by surprise. Eventually other sites became the main source of live news, in particular people turned to the Libyan Youth Movement and Libya Feb 17^th sites for blogs that were both credible and up to date. These sites aggregated news from lots of different media and social media sites.

Twitter bypasses Facebook

In this case, unlike Tunisia and Egypt, Facebook was bypassed by Twitter. There were immediate uprisings in a number of locations as it turned into an armed conflict, so less need for specific groups around a cause or demonstration. What the country needed was lots of immediate and specific information from the front line. Before long they were literally asking people of they knew how to drive captured tanks. Twitter links to video were a detailed source of events as they unfolded on several fronts. Eventually, as Gaddaffi troops were captured or killed, they found that their phones showed atrocities, which in turn were shown through Twitter links and Youtube. Interestingly Gaddafi’s name proved useless as a tag as it has so many different spellings. Twitter was even used as a source of information and co-ordinates for NATO, direct from the frontline, leading to more accurate bombing.

Wikipedia – what a surprise

Now here was the real surprise, good old Wikipedia became a focal point as a map showing towns and villages updated from green (Gaddaffi) to grey (contact), blue (fighting), zigzag (urban fighting) brown (taken). In addition, the countries that supported the new regime were coloured in on a world map, as they came on board. Who would have thought – Wikipedia contributing to a revolution.

TV

Sky and Al Jazeera were the real heroes as they got to the frontline and stayed there with some hardcore reporting, even shoving microphones into Gaddaffi’s face. The BBC started well as they moved along the north coast from Benghazi, but they soon faded making the wrong calls on location (going south) and getting holed up in Tripoli. CNN was just hopeless.

Media and mediums are the message

Lastly, there’s no social media without a ‘medium’ and in all this talk about Facebook and Twitter, the simple fact that the internet, computers, laptops and especially mobiles, are the real lifeblood of the revolution. The growth of mobiles on the back of cheap tariffs has been phenomenal in these markets. The mobile phone is powerful, portable and personal. It records images and video and can be used to report from the scene itself. Remember that twitter during the Egyptian uprising could only operate once voice to text was available.

The process described above does not apply when social media is shut down, as in Libya. In this case YouTube and mobile recorded video leaked to TV plays a bigger role. We have seen this in Libya and Syria with the astonishing scenes of people being gunned down in Deraa and Sanamayn, where the shooting is seen and heard, then the dead clearly and deliberately shown to mobile cameras. This resulted in even more protests in Homs, Tafa, and astonishingly, as it is near the birthplace of Assad, Latakia. Interestingly, free access to social media has become a negotiating point with Assad in Syria, as it has become one of the key demands of the protesters.

Role of Arabic

Another important feature of the Arab world is it's common language - Arabic. Information needs no translation across the region. News spreads fast, very fast indeed. These countries also have large numbers of nationals from other Arab countries living and working within their borders. In the Gulf states this is acute, with some countries having more foreign nationals than locals. This leads to greater cross-pollination.

Conclusion

I’ve travelled a fair bit in the Middle East over the last ten years, especially in the last year, and what I’ve always loved about the region is the people. Now that those people have been given a voice, through social media, we need to listen, understand and give them all the support they need.

I'm a Celebrity let me fix your education system!

I took part in a debate on ‘What should be taught in our schools?’ in London last night - a strange affair as the audience were a bunch of unashamedly snobbish toffs. You could tell at a glance the Toby Young, Katharine Birbalsingh acolytes. Fair enough, it was her book launch.

I was the final speaker and having heard a stream of unpleasant attacks on working class kids, decided to abandon my planned speech and go on the offensive. I was pretty annoyed by Toby and Katherine’s torrent of elitist anecdotes and the usual right wing obsessions with Latin and Shakespeare. But what annoyed me most of all was the assault, by both, on vocational training and working class kids in particular. People were actually braying ‘Hear hear’ or what sounded like 'Hair hair' in those awful 'aspirational' accents, whenever they launched their petty attacks on BTECs and kids who were learning how to be hairdressers, plumbers or work in hospitality. Toby Young was straightforwardly racist in his caricaturing of these kids, fair enough, he's as bald as a coot, so he has an excuse for not knowing much about the art of dressing hair but these are the people who serve him and his ilk in restaurants and fix up their homes, as men like him are usually as hapless in real world tasks as they are arrogant in dismissing those who know about such things. I was, furious.

My response

In any case, this was my response. First, I ponted out that something odd has happened to the education debate. It’s become cool for Oxbridge types to bellow out their superiority (they always mention within a few minutes that they went to Oxford or Cambridge) and to see the state system as largely dysfunctional. They start with a deficit model that caricatures students as feral, teachers as feckless and head teachers as foolish liberals. They parrot this pathological view of the state system.

Why does this happen? Because the education debate has a habit of descending into late night middle-class, dinner-party talk; all anecdotes and bitching. As if we didn’t have enough on our plate with the direct assault on the state system by Ministers, the debate has been further hijacked by D-list celebrities, wannabes, actresses and a TV chef. 
The D-list celeb Toby Young, wannabe (Katherine Birbalsingh), actress (Joanna Lumley) and TV chef (Jamie Oliver), who in turn has rolled in a bunch of minor TV celebs to show us how it should be done. We have nothing to learn from these people, absolutely nothing. Why? Because they are devoid of ideas. It’s all criticism, platitudes and anecdotes. The plural of anecdote is not data.
Toby Young is obsessed with Latin. Once again, he trotted out a set of ridiculous claims and anecdotes about why Latin should be compulsory in schools. But as I’ve posted enough on this subject, with a full set of evidence against these claims, let’s put that to one side. His only other real claim was that Marc Zuckenburg was a classicist and that, apparently, was why he was one of the richest men in the world. Really! Brin and Page of Google and Besoz of Amazon, all went to Montessori schools, do my three entrepreneurs trump yours Toby? This is just crap causality. I repeat, the plural of anecdote is not data. I think what annoyed him most was me calling him a D-list celeb - but he's worse ahn this, he's a D-level thinker in education and downright nasty and racist towards the poor.

TV Chef thinks education is a risotto

I also had a go at the the Jamie Oliver nonsense, a TV chef, putting a curriculum together as if it were a recipe for a risotto. (I’ve submitted a brilliant idea to Channel 4; Rick Stein, now he can fillet a good fish, why not have him head up surgery for the NHS?) Was there anything more dispiriting than watching the pompous David Starkey start his lesson by saying to his class, “You are all here because you failed.” Then without the lad saying anything, Starkey pointed to Conor and said, “Come on you’re so fat you couldn’t move… With Jamie’s food there’ll be lots of dieting opportunities”. I would have applauded Conor if he had simply marched up and decked him. “You think it’s funny making jokes about me” replied Conor, rightly seething with resentment. As it was, Conor simply gave as good as he got and after the class was lucid and reasonable. “He didn’t even know my name”. Two girls after the class, got it spot on about Starkey, “He’s a bit rude.” He is more than rude, he’s a pompous, old snob who then had the cheek to write a stinging article about these young people and the state system in the Telegraph, showing his true colour. He had no remorse, because he’s a megalomaniac who can’t teach, “I have nothing but contempt for the new-style head teachers…gives you a sense of why things have gone so wrong in state education”. Typical of Starkey, everyone’s to blame but himself.

Simon Callow gets irony bypass

Simon Callow then threw Shakespeare at them, or rather some confusing and ambiguous questions, that got predictably confusing answers. When he asked them who they’d like to be in life, he didn’t like it when they mentioned Bill Gates and Katy Price. Then, suffering from a serious loss of irony, blamed ‘celebrity culture’ for the downfall in education! He can hold the attention of a paying audience, but not a roomful of kids. He was, well, hopeless. I loved the feisty girl’s final comment, “He can’t help the way he talks”. At the debate last night the headmaster from Winchester was similarly obsessed by Shakespeare. Then in rolls Rolf Harris. Good start but was too busy doing his own thing and didn’t spend enough time with the kids. He just looked lost. Robert Winston took a chainsaw to a dead pig (budget no object in this schools), but the kids saw right through his theatrical antics. Ellen McCarthur, had the advantage of a 30 foot yacht. Now how many state schools have or have access to a yacht? And next week we have Mary Beard, teaching, you’ve guessed it – Latin. This whole idea is way out of hand and nothing to do with the real world.

Inner-city London skews

Toby and Katherine are the poster boy and poster girl for these attacks on the state of state education. Note that all of them, bar none, live and work in London. The only common denominator is this ‘inner-London angst’ that every middle-class Londoner has about schools. But there’s a problem here. Inner London is not representative of the state sector as a whole.

First we have the richer kids creamed off into the public schools, second, you have the faith schools, set up to educate the poor, but largely taken over as the sharp elbows of the middle class get to work, even lying about their faith, to get in. So, as the evidence shows, from the LSE and Institute of Education, they achieve what they achieve through selection. Around 65% of Westminster’s secondary schools are faith based but the national average is only 17% and it’s less than 5% in many other areas of England. The net result is extreme social sorting. These are inner London skews.

On top of this we have an editorial class who also live in inner London and have exactly the same concerns. Toby and Katherine have no trouble in getting on radio and TV or into print, because the TV folk and journalists all live in London, and have the same worries about their kids, You can read it between the lines, the barely disguised fear of young black kids and a barely disguised fear of working class culture. In an interesting faux pas, Mary Beard revealed that neither she nor Jamie Oliver had suggested Latin, it was a member of the production team who was an Oxbridge classicist.

We’ve even had Joanna Lumley, only two days ago on the BBC, telling us how to run our schools, her only educational credentials; the Lucie Clayton Charm Academy, a finishing school and ’modelling’ agency for girls. At least it was vocational. This isn’t some ab fab, celebrity author, TV chef debate. It’s a serious business with serious outcomes and needs. And don’t think it’s not having an effect.

Bad news

We end up robbing the Building Schools for the Future budget, launched in 2004, to pay for Toby’s schools of the past. A decision now judged to have been an ‘abuse of power’. We end up recommending Latin as a compulsory subject in our schools despite the fact that the evidence points to it NOT doing what many claim it does. It doesn’t help you learn other languages, it’s a hindrance. We end up with a class-based attack on vocational learning, long the great apartheid fracture in the English system, Rather than listen to Tomlinson we relegated vocational subjects to Diplomas and the whole thing collapsed – again. Toby and Katherine regret the fact that we teach vocational subjects in schools. In one disgusting incident Toby had a go at BTECs in hospitality and hairdressing, and oh how the coiffured, restaurant-fed ,well-to-do ladies in the front row laughed and shouted, ‘hear, hear’. It was unabashed snobbery at its worst.

Education policy should NOT be skewed by a self-selecting group of inner London types who have their own idiosyncratic concerns, backed up by an editorial class that has the same concerns. In my lifetime, we’ve seen the creation of the abolition of the 11+, that most brutal of segregation policies, the raising of the school leaving age to 16 (remember this only happened in 1972), the rise in University participation from 12% when I went to University to 45% in just this year, higher staying on rates in schools. We’ve had the Open University, Learndirect’s 2.8 million learners, both offering ‘second chances’. This is real progress. It’s not perfect but it’s progress.

PS To Miss with Love

This was Katherine’s book launch and at the end she read out a strange passage from the book that was a long rambling exchange between her and a pupil, who for some weird reason called ‘Munchkin’. Katherine has a habit of demonising the children she has taught by giving them names like ‘Gruesome’. Those at the LWF conference heard her rant against this particular student for a full half hour. As Stephen Heppell said when he took the stage “I was beginning to feel quite sorry for poor Gruesome”. And that’s her problem. For all her claims to love teaching and the state system, she is, at heart, someone who does a lot of talking and not much listening.

The whole book is written in a faux-novella style, a confusion of fact and fiction (She even makes up a husband in the book, who doesn’t exist in real life.). And maybe this is the problem. Like David Starkey, she blames everyone (Fiona Miller got a booting in her speech) and everything but herself for the problems. The main problem is her outrageous claims that the state system has collapsed. This is so extreme, as to be laughable. But it was a view held by many of the people in the room last night.  She has this bi-polar tendency to proclaim love in one sentence then follow it up with downright bile and hatred in the next.

Best physics lecturer ever dismissed physics lectures

My son, who’s at a sixth form college, attended a lecture today, on chemistry, at his local university and the lecturer's first words were, "This is going to be a bit boring but there we are...." As Callum said, "It was about entropy and it just sort of fell apart". Glad youngsters have a sense of humour! But there’s a serious problem here. These sixth form students were visiting to be enthused about chemistry, not subjected to a third rate lecture.

Richard Feynman

It reminded me of the reflections of that great scientist Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, regarded as a great science teacher. His lectures in physics are still best-sellers. When I gave my ‘Don’t lecture me!’ lecture to ALT last year, several people tweeted claiming that Feynman was the counter-example to my thesis, that straight lectures are largely a waste of time, claiming that Feynman was the ‘man’. Now I actually showed a picture, during my talk, of Feynman and the cover of his book ‘Lectures in Physics’. I did this because he was deeply critical of the ‘lecture’ as a teaching method. It only goes to prove that even academics don’t seem to realise that memory during a one hour lecture starts to fail.

Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman!

In his autobiography ‘Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman!’ he writes cogently about his experience in teaching Physics to students in Brazil, where he stood up in front of the students and faculty (at their request) and said, ”The main purpose of my talk is to demonstrate to you that no science is being taught in Brazil”. His point was that the students were being taught to memorise techniques and formulae for passing exams, not understanding physics, “it’s not science, but memorising, in every circumstance”.

Lectures on Physics

But it is in the 'Preface' to his lectures, written long after they were delivered, that his reflections on his own work matured. When he arrived at Caltech he was dismayed to find that the students who arrived full of enthusiasm for physics were being bored into submission by ‘stultifying’ lectures. He tried his best, including '3 problem solving lectures in the first year, mixing things up, introducing advanced but interesting content earlier than usual. So what were his thoughts?

First, ”one serious difficulty….there wasn’t any feedback from the students to the lecturer”. This, as a lover of the experimental method, was a “very serious difficulty”. He compares it to an experiment without any measurable output, a complete shot in the dark. And his general conclusions were clear, “My own pint of view is pessimistic. I don’t think I did very well by the students….I think the system was a failure.” He quoted Gibbon, “The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.”. In the end he admits that what is necessary is a more student-centred approach to learning physics through discussion and reflection, “It’s impossible to learn very much by sitting through a lecture”. Incidentally, these lectures are still worth reading, and I say ‘reading’ deliberately because one can stop, reflect, re-read and go at your own pace, a necessary approach to learning physics. The short version 'Six easy Pieces' explains the fundamentals of physics, but the longer lectures are also available.

As Samuel Johnson said, "People have now-a-days got a strange opinion that everything should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do so much as reading the books from which the lectures are taken.”

Latin: makes learning a new language MORE difficult!!

In an odd article, in the Spectator, Toby Young, who seems obsessed with Latin, recommends it as a compulsory subject in state schools, with a string of ridiculous anecdotes. He describes how a friend used Latin on an easyjet flight to communicate with others on the plane. “If I’m on an EasyJet flight with a group of European nationals, none of whom speak English, I find we can communicate if we speak to each other in Latin,” says Grace Moody-Stuart. (I’m checking the passenger list next time I fly easyjet, just in case the awful Grace sits next to me!) Young even claims, with no evidence whatsoever, that Latin would help inner-city kids speak better, as they’d practice unusual word-endings!

He does, however, produce one piece of academic evidence, which he claims gives us “chapter and verse” on the subject, a 40 year old study by from the journal Phi Delta Kappa, where a group taught Latin was compared to another similar group and positive effects found.

Latin is not the cause

Of course, he simply trawled back through the literature to cherry pick a study that fitted his case, ignoring the more recent, superior, work In Search of the Benefits of Latin by Haas and Stern (2003) in the Journal of Educational Psychology.

In a review of the literature, they found that Thorndike “did not find any differences in science and maths in students who learned Latin at school and those who did not”. And in the Haag and Stern (2000) follow up study, to the study quoted by Young, two groups of comparable students, where one studied Latin, the other English, were assessed after two years, “No differences were found in either verbal or non-verbal IQ or grades in German or Maths”. In general, they found an absence of transfer effects of learning Latin in reasoning. This had been predicted by Thorndike decades before, namely that transfer needs common ground in the source and target.

Now for the bad news: Latin makes it worse

The problem with understanding Latin is that you need to pay close attention to word endings; case markers on nouns and time markers on verbs. But in English and Romance languages word order and prepositions are more important. Endings play a minor role.

What Haag and Stern found, predictably, was that students who had learned one Romance language first found it easier to learn another Romance language, than those who had learned Latin. But it gets worse, as Latin caused incorrect transfer, such as the omission of prepositions and auxiliary verbs in Romance languages. In other words, learning Latin was detrimental to the learning of the new language.

They took two groups of German students, one who studied French, the other Latin as their second language. Both groups were then given a course in Spanish and the results measured. When the results were analysed by a Spanish assessor (who didn’t know who had taken French or Latin), the assessor found no group differences in verbal intelligence.

However, the French students made significantly fewer grammatical errors than the Latin students. As predicted the Latin students wrongly transferred the rules of Latin to Spanish. For example “misconstructions in verbs emerged to be either highly reminiscent of or identical to Latin verbs”. The French group turned out to be much better prepared to cope with Spanish grammar. Psychologically the Latin students had suffered from negative transfer using false friends in their new language. The fact that the grammatical similarities between modern Romance languages are much greater than that between Latin and modern Romance languages, means that the defenders of Latin are flogging a dead horse.

Incidentally, if you’ve heard the argument that Latin helps medical students learn and understand the considerable amount of medical vocabulary that has to be learned in medical schools. This also turns out to be false as shown in Pampush and Petto (2010)

Conclusion

This is not an unimportant or esoteric debate. Our state education system is in danger of being hijacked by minor celebrities, wannabes and TV chefs. Much of the debate is purely anecdotal, and worse, the anecdotal memories of a small clique of inner-London types who want to impose their worries and idiosyncratic ideas on the rest of us. It is important to counter this nonsense with the real evidence. The plural of anecdote is NOT data.

10 reasons to NOT teach Latin (reductio ad absurdum)

There’s often a tension in education between the traditional and the progressive. But when the traditional hauls us back 2000 years, we really do need to worry. So, whenever I hear ‘Latin’ recommended in curricular discussions, I want to reach for my pedagogic gun, as it’s invariably subliminal snobbery. The perfect example is the toady Toby Young, who wants Latin to be a compulsory subject in all secondary schools. Yes, a D-list celebrity, who’s made a living from writing about being feckless and hapless, wants us all to listen to his petty, inner-city, London, middle class concerns about the quality of schools in his area. His solution – learn Latin!

Now you have to have some pretty convincing argument to put Latin into your core curriculum, so here goes? I’ll be a devil and advocate.

1. Helps you learn other languages

Sorry, it doesn’t. The metastudy Research and the teaching of English by Sherwin, found that “the study of Latin does not necessarily increase the ability to learn another language… No consistent experimental evidence in support of this contention was found.” The argument runs along these lines, that the Romance languages have Latin roots, so knowing Latin helps one learn French, Spanish and Italian. Now there may be some marginal advantage to knowing Latin before you learn these languages, but only if your Latin is very extensive, and you do Latin before you try the other languages. Why scratch your ear by going over the top of your head? Learners have limited time and that time is clearly better spent on the target language itself. You don’t have to go out with the grandmother to help you understand your wife. This argument is simply a non-sequitur.

2. Cognitive skills

One could argue that Latin teaches one to think. But what does that mean? If it’s true of Latin it’s true of any language, so why not learn one that is at least useful? What special cognitive skill(s) does dead Latin confer over dozens of other living languages or dozens of other analytic subjects for that matter? Stephen Pinker, Harvard’s world renowned expert in psycholinguistics backs this up in The Language Instinct, “Latin declensional paradigms are not the best way to convey the inherent beauty of grammar”. He recommends computer programming and universal grammar on the grounds that they are “about living minds and not dead tongues”. reductio ad absurdum

3. Latin language mavens

Pinker also has a go at the Latin language mavens who want to pointlessly foist Latinate rules of grammar into English. As Pinker explains, this snobbery took root in 18^th century London, when Latin was used as a mark of social class (still true today) and Latin grammar rules were crudely pasted into books on English grammar, for example, ‘don’t split infinitives’ and ‘don’t end a sentence with a preposition’. Latin simply doesn’t allow you to split an infinitive and to stupidly insist that it’s wrong in English, is as ad hoc as making us wear togas.

4. Latin is misleading

It can be argued that learning Latin grammar is simply misleading as there is no real transfer to the target languages, certainly not English, and similarly in modern Romance languages. Latin has seven (six for some) cases, five declensions in nouns and doesn’t have articles. Far from being useful it’s positively misleading. And in terms of vocabulary, one would be far better spending one’s time studying etymology, rather than only one root language.

5. Waste of time

Of course, the cardinal argument against learning Latin is the fact that there’s only so many hours in a day for learning and there’s dozens of other subjects that should take precedence. We have to make choices in learning and this one is irrational. So as we’ve seen, there’s no real argument for learning a dead language on the basis of utility (unless one wants to become an ancient history scholar) as no one speaks the damn thing. tempus fugit

6. Lingua franca of the world - English

Learning a language, to a reasonable level of competence, is as difficult a learning task as one can imagine. This is made all the more difficult in the UK by the fact that English has become the world’s unofficial, and in some fields official, lingua franca. The vast majority of children who take a second language in the UK fail to achieve any real level of competence because it has to be taught in classrooms with no contextual opportunities for practice. Many therefore argue that the global reach of English has greatly reduced the need to learn another language, let alone a dead one!

7. Romance is dead

And why this obsession with learning romance languages over say, German or Mandarin? You are far more likely to hear Punjabi, Bengali or Urdu (the top three minority languages spoken in the UK). I suspect that there’s more than a whiff of snobbery in our selection of languages at school? “Mum - I’m dropping French and taking Urdu”. “You’re what!”

8. Illusion of utility

A GCSE in Latin barely enables you to decipher a few Roman inscriptions and numbers. It will certainly not allow you to interpret the works of Seneca and Cicero. Even at A-level you’d have to be exceptional to get as much from these texts, as you’d get from a good translation.

9. Why not Greek?

Wouldn’t you prefer the riches of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Plato’s Socratic Dialogues and works of Aristotle; a far richer literary and philosophical tradition that the Roman? If so, learn Greek. Our literary, philosophical and political traditions have far more to do with Greek texts than Latin. Graecum est; non legitur

10. Pomposity

The benefits of a ‘classical education’, they say. But is there anything more annoying than those who drop in Latin phrases and confuse erudition with pomposity? I saw that hideous snob Rees Mogg do precisely this on a documentary on class recently and it made me wretch. Enoch Powell was the last politician who felt the need to pepper his speeches with this nonsense. Latin remains the cold, dead language of exclusivity and exclusion. It’s a peacock’s tail, the luxury of being able to ignore utility for superfluous acquisition of a useless and purely academic exercise. It says, subliminally, to hell with vocational subjects, I’m not ‘trade’. The dirty truth of the matter is that Latin has long been used as a marketing device by largely private schools to advertise their posh pedigree and attract parents of a conservative bent to cough up the fees. quid pro quo

JISC a minute! Why JISC can’t deliver innovation.....

JISCed!

Many moons ago I was contacted by JISC to speak at one of their events, but when I provided the usual biography and picture, they got back to me saying I couldn’t speak as I, “was not affiliated to an educational institution”. I pointed out to the hapless girl on the phone that it was THEY who had asked me to speak. So much for engagement with the outside world. It would seem that not much has changed.

JISC censorship

No surprise this year then, when friend of mine found himself in a similar Kafkaesque position with JISC. They had asked him to speak on mobile learning (he really is an expert here) but when he submitted his abstract they hastily arranged an ‘Elluminate’ meeting, where of a group of 7 JISCers (overstaffed I’d suggest?) began to unashamedly edit the talk. They literally outlined what they wanted him to say. His response: “To which I replied ‘fuck off’” was natural. He explained that he was very busy and wouldn’t become a proxy for their views, and offered to ‘univite’ himself from the conference. They relented and let him speak.

The point of these stories is not to say that JISC is wholly and utterly useless. It’s not. In fact, it has many good people and strengths. It is, however, at times inward looking and sometimes institutionally blinkered, especially on innovation. First, it’s just too big and amorphous. There’s been an army of JISC bods around at conferences over the last few years. Many are pretty good and knowledgeable. Fair enough, as I applaud efforts to get some innovation in FE (which is normally ignored) and HE. Problem is, I don’t see enough innovation in HE and FE. It’s not that JISC isn’t trying to be innovative; it’s just that the model is wrong. They have several things going against them. As one senior FE person said to me last week, “FE and HE don’t innovate because they ’ve never had to”. But it’s really about a fundamentally flawed approach to innovation and cultural change.

JISC and innovation

Look up JISC on Google, and it says JISC - Inspiring Innovation. But does it? The website still has David Lammy as the Minister for Higher education, and there's a feeling that its insularity is a problem. The name's a bit of a giveaway as it has its roots, not in educational innovation but IT; Joint Information Systems Committee.

JISC can’t be the major innovator, as much of the major innovation in FE and HE has come from the outside. The technology is the domain of the private sector, OER is largely driven by Foundations and pedagogy is still, well stuck in the ‘lecture’ driven rut. They mention the word ‘pedagogy’ a lot, then default back to lectures. Try questioning the ‘lecture’ - I did and got crucified at ALT, but when the talk was released on YouTube it attracted lots of positive attention (lesson learnt – get out more).

Large scale institutional change in FE and HE, such as the OU, Learndirect, University of Phoenix, MIT and other innovative organisations, have often come from external sources of inspiration, whether it’s politicians, smart public servants or entrepreneurs. I’m not saying innovation is solely in the domain of the private sector, but it’s certainly not natural territory in the public sector. We need both.

Some JISC innovation projects have to be seen to be believed. Well, maybe not even seen. Take the “Blind interactive simulation cricket user training”. Surely this is proof enough of the second and third rate ‘faux’ research in this area. The project objective is to “create a bespoke digital interactive practice and coaching space for Blind Cricket”. This is ‘donkeypedia’ territory.

People, not processes, innovate

You can look at innovation in technology and education in two ways:

1. Diffusion (nudges, gradualism, lots of small projects, pilots etc.)

2. Disruption (big thinking, strategic change)

I fear that the first has been the model for far too long and has failed in so many ways. Colleges and universities have failed to climb the e-maturity path, share little in terms of best practice and tend to default to traditional, embedded norms.

The second, disruption, is possible, I think, because the political climate wants cost savings. There is the real possibility of reshaping education with increased use of the OU and OER model. This is all about SCALABILITY, whether it’s recorded lectures, online content, alternatives to lectures, a fourth semester, reduced capital expenditure and OER. SCALABILITY is the key term for me, which is why I object so much to the 'it's not about the technology' line. It's the technology that gives us pedagogic scalability. That's what makes Google, Wikipedia, iTUNES U, Youtube, Facebook and OER resources work. We have seen how the OU and Learndirect have positioned themselves as effective and scalable solutions in everything from basic skills to PhDs, yet few in JISC would have the slightest idea of how this is done in a real delivery organisation like Learndirect, as they don’t engage with many outside of FE and HE.

JISC, and others, by definition, can never lead, or even discuss, radical innovation. They are reduced to ‘nudges and pilots’ which fail because there’s no real subsequent sharing and adoption of best practice. There’s no shortage of good of ideas, just a shortage of will and impact. I had a lecture from someone at BIS last week who talked about this very problem. There are lots of ideas but little changes, as dissemination and adoption is weak. He rolled out the usual ‘stimulate, incubate, adopt’ model, forgetting the simple fact that processes don’t innovate, PEOPLE innovate.

What to do?

OK, the times they are a changin’. Has the pressure to innovate arrived? I think so. We have to get the cost side of education down through scalable solutions. That is the realpolitik for the next decade or more. That means radical innovation around scalable solutions, and not some fatuous debate about how many kids on free school meals get into Oxford.

Note, that I’m not saying that JISC should not exist, just that it should be realistic about its role as it is straightjacketed in terms of innovation. There’s a real need for IT support and advice, but not an army of people who inadvertently reinforce the status quo. Grant money can only be claimed by existing FE and HE institutions, and that limits innovation to internal sources. This actually stops innovation. We need to bring together, Foundations, companies, entrepreneurs, politicians, civil servants, FE leaders and HE leaders to tackle the crisis. In many ways I saw an attempt at this at the WISE Summit in Qatar. But trying to do this through JISC is, I fear, ‘doomed to succeed’.

HEFCE review

This review started September last year and is due to deliver Spring 2011. To be honest, the membership of the review group may determine the outcome as it lacks any genione outide voices. Reviews such as this need to have the credibility of objectivity, so I hope they really do show such objectivity, and get over the hurdle of being 'on the inside', the very problem I've highlighted.

OK Jimmy Wales – what's next after Wikipedia?

Wikipedia is a miracle and Jimmy Wales walks on digital water. So it was great to both see him speak, and get to speak to him, at Learning Without Frontiers this week. A truly 21^st century phenomenon (started 2001) and thorn in the side of those who think that knowledge is the domain of libraries and educational institutions, Wikipedia is BIG, with over 3.5 million articles in English, appearing in 262 languages (not all are fully populated).What’s more, it’s a fantastic legacy, as important as the publication of any book in history, as it has an astounding past (crowdsourced) and a fecund future, in terms of content, access, growth and impact. So what answers did Jimmy Wales have to the following questions?

How many?

Last month there were 408 million unique users. Think about that for a minute. Only China and India have more people.

Who’s looking at what?

Turns out different countries look at different things. The Japanese are obsessed with ‘pop’. Germans have ‘geography’ as their top topic (should we be worried?) and Spain ‘science and technology’. On the whole, however, pop, sex, history, geography, science and health are the big topics. Did you know that the LOST scriptwriting team had to use LOSTpedia to check when new references came up as the whole thing became too complicated to track?

Who creates the content?

Wikipedians are 87% male, average age 26, highly educated (almost all graduates) and the majority do not have a partner or children. Jimmy described them as “intelligent, obsessed guys with too much time on their hands”. Now some could see this as a bit of a problem, but hey, is it our fault guys? Get on there girls.

Wikipedia in China

When Jimmy was in China he was in a restaurant and Wikipedia appeared on a menu. This happened several times and people sent him menus from all over China with Wikipedia dishes on the menu. He guessed that people searched on Google for translations for dishes and since Wikipedia comes up often, it was carried over blindly onto the menus.

More seriously, China banned Wikipedia, but freed up the site around Olympics time, and now only block sensitive pages such as Taiwan and Tiananmen Square. It’s still the one country where whole classes of students have never heard the term ‘Wikipedia’. Everywhere else, the majority have not only heard of it but used it regularly.

Who hates Wikipdedia?

So what did Jimmy think about the ‘haters’, mostly academics? As he explained, they mostly don’t understand what Wikipedia is, in terms of construction, editing and discussion. Sure things are wrong, at times, but as he explained, on the whole, it’s pretty good, and as good as other traditional sources of printed knowledge. To those who say it’s too editorialised, his reply was that you can’t accept all contributions for entry and not have an editorial process. It can’t be completely open. On the whole Wikipedia is built by smart people who care.

What next?

I asked Jimmy whether he ever thought Wikipedia would create an education version, as teachers are not scalable and a step by step instructional adjunct with self-assessment tools would make it more relevant to education. He misunderstood the question a little and referred me to Wikibooks and explained that there’s too many national accreditation boards to consider. That didn’t stop him forging ahead with Wikipedia. Simply go round them. Ignore them. Let users and creators decide on content.

This is important, as Wikipedia broke the back of the encylopedia market, then broke the illusory monopoly that publishers and academics had on knowledge. But more than this, it showed that human beings are decent, altruistic beings who know a good and worthy thing when they see it, and are willing to help create things in education outside of the institutional structures.

I suspect that the next big educational resource will come from another source. Wikipedia is what it is, we need something similar but different.

Solution 1: Wiki textbooks

You can create textbooks through wikis, and use collaborative web-based creation and distribution for quality educational content. The problem here, seems to be the fondness for the ‘book’ metaphor i.e. Wikibooks etc. We don’t want books, we want web-based content.

CK12 is a possible breakthrough, as Jimmy Wales is on the board, and it’s well funded. You can use, edit and customise their textbooks. It’s pretty neat with good drag and drop creation tools, but again, it’s the ‘textbook’ metaphor that limits its usefulness.

Solution 2: Questions and answers wiki

Quora may be the sort of thing that will work. It’s created, organised and edited through crowdsourcing, but organises knowledge as answers to questions (which may in themselves be edited). This puts a more natural front-end onto a knowledge base, as queries are almost always framed as questions, not keywords. However, one question, one answer fails to create the dialogue and opportunities for structured learning.

Solution 3: Wiki Self-paced content

Take a structured, subject based resource, similar to BBC Bitesize, and allow it to grow and edit through crowdsourcing, with an editorial eye that knows good questions, good answers and there are opportunities to answer questions by the learner. Note that I’m not suggesting an expansion of Bitesize. That’s defaulted into little bits of animation add-ons.

Solution 3: Self assessment tools

This, I believe is the key to unlocking the open source knowledge market. Educational institutions have a stranglehold on education, making it incredibly expensive. That stranglehold is reinforced by the noose of accreditation. If we can free assessment from institutional control, we free up education for all. A populated open source Assessment tool that allows you to create, edit and use assessments would be a boon to learners and organisations.

Solution 4 All of above

Over the next ten years I see these fledgling wiki-led, open source movements produce resources in learning that are as powerful as Wikipedia. It needs a combination of good content and assessments. It also needs a credible open source brand, like Wikipedia. But Jimmy Wales, is not on this tack. To be fair he’s changed the world forever with Wikipedia, it would be a bit much to expect him to do it twice! If anyone is interested, contact me.

Kinect from Mr Kinect himself at Microsoft

Man or mouse?

Are you a man or mouse? You can now be both, as Kinect gives your body control of the computer. Screens are 2D but the world is 3D, that’s why there’s a mismatch. Computers are poor on real world space, and so we have to tell them who we are and what we want them to do through keyboards, mice, joysticks and touchscreens. But with Kinect, the real world, with you in it, is now an operating environment. Kinect-like interfaces allow 3D interaction without all of those helmets, gloves and body sensors. It’s virtual reality without the hassle of gadget armour. It allows the real person to operate within the computer and within environments generated by the computer. Just step up and off you go.

You as interface

How does it do this? Well, I lucked out this week as I had two sessions with the guy who heads up the Kinect technical team. It was like speaking to someone from the far future. A true ‘Me-interface’ has to recognise you as a body, along with your voice and what you say. This ain’t easy. In Kinectables, you can stroke, feed and train animals. You stroke your chosen pet, and see it respond, then give it a name by saying it out loud. You can toss a ball to your cub and he’ll nod it back and use voice commands, such as ‘play dead’ and he’ll drop.

Your body

The first problem with body position is size: we’re fat, thin, tall, short. On top of this we come in lots of different shapes. Then there’s appearance, in terms of hair, clothes, glasses etc.. Now add in the clutter of a background. How do you pick bodies out? Kinect’s cameras peel you away from your background. Note that 2D doesn’t do it for this task, you need 3D as depth images allow you to recognise body parts.

To understand how Kinect works, you need to see it as a database with over 1 million body positions that is rapidly compared with the output of the depth cameras (infrared plus monochrome). The infrared laser projects a grid of 50,000 dots and the RBG camera picks up the depth difference between these dots through parallax differences. The body is then reduced to around 30 body parts based on joint positions i.e. reduced to angles and positions. It is interrogated and position inferred. In that respect it’s more Deep Blue than a pure rules set. But the software also learns and this is the key to its success. It can track six people but only cope with two serious game players at a time. 1.2-3.5 metres and the tilting motor adjusts the sensor by up to 27 degrees. The Kinect software takes up around 190Mb and is a compromise, as the games guys want most of the available space for their games software.

Your voice

This is not as clever as the Peter Molyneux video suggests as it’s limited to commands, and is currently quite poor on natural language recognition. Just imagine the technical problems of isolating the sound from the background noise during a loud game and tracking different voices in a 3D environment. It does, however, have an array microphone, making it directional, so it can distinguish and isolate several different moving sound sources. You can use this for audio and video chat through Xbox Live.

Looking to the future, natural language processing is notoriously difficult but affordable software such as Dragon is around. Once this reaches a consumer price point and efficacy that allows it to be embedded in games consoles and other mobile devices, another step will have been taken in terms of the ‘Me-interface’. Google Translate for Android has just been updated to include a live conversation translator. You click on the microphone, speak, and it reads aloud the translated text.

Kinect 2….

The development kits have not been released, except for current developers and a few universities. Indeed, there’s a debate going on within Microsoft about open v closed development. My money’s on ‘closed’ as it’s in the Microsoft DNA. The hacked MIT open source release is only the for the depth camera, so there’s no body configuration stuff and that’s what really matters. So what’s in the pipeline?

They bought Primesense, bought for their camera technology along with a couple of other advanced camera companies, one is Canesta, and that tells you what’s coming. The next version with increase all dimensions by 4. Remember that increasing a current 50-60,000 number along each axis gives you a quantum leap in fidelity. It will easily resolve fingers and other smaller objects (at the moment it recognises your hands only). Even more astounding is the fact that within two years the ‘parallax’ sensing of the current Kinect will be replaced with ‘speed of light’ Canesta sensing, where differentials in the speed of light determine position. Now that’s not a step change it’s a dimensional leap that gives us accuracy.

Future apps?

Knowing where someone is in terms of body position and gesture has huge possibilities. A hugely accurate and high-fidelity system could replicate you elsewhere either as a hologram or robot, that mimics your every movement. This transportation can replace travel. Here’s a quick Kinect hack with Kinect as a robot (Kinectbot), where it moves around and recognises objects and people, along with gesture control. To give you some idea of the creativity unleashed by Kinect see these 12 favourite Kinect hacks. It can know what you’re doing when driving, so that it could warn you when you’re using a mobile or nodding off. It can take gesture commands, rather than reaching out to buttons on your radio or satnav. Surgeons in operating theatre can use gestures to get up X-rays or MRi scans during operations as they can’t touch possibly infected keyboards or touchscreens.

Incidentally, Steve Ballmer has also announced that there’ll be a PC version.

Kinect for Christmas: future unleashed!

Some pieces of technology just pull the eyeballs out of your sockets. This one had me literally leaping about with delight. I remember seeing Doom, Google Earth, Skype, Wii and iPhone for the first time. You just shake your head at the wonder of what you see, and so it is with Kinect.

It was much quicker to connect and set up than I had anticipated. You just need as a big a space as you can muster, free from things that break, because, believe me, within seconds you’re cutting some weird shapes on the dancefloor, gym mat or game space.

For those of you who don’t yet know, Kinect eliminates the need for a controller (although it can still be used in some games such as Harry Potter). Your bodies are scanned through more than 50.000 dots, so it recognises positions, gestures and on top of this voice, to give you a really new learning and game experience. All the shoot ‘em up fanboys will cry ‘so what’ but my very own Black Ops 3^rd prestige level 46 son, was whooping with joy when he gave it a go.

When you see that sensor eye swivel up automatically to get you in shot, you know you’re about to see something special.

Dive straight in

On Christmas Day I had 4 to 80 year olds playing, and lots of ages in between. The science-fiction nature of the technology gets their attention but, as we all know, familiarity breeds contempt, so what kept them going? ‘Ease of entry’ was the big draw. For those unfamiliar with gaming and/or consoles, you simply step up and the sensor recognises you, telling you to simply step back if you get too close. It’s easier than any other games machine to use as it does all the work. The step by step instructions get you to DO things, without having to resort to buttons, joysticks or mice. You’re in and playing before you realise it.

That’s me that is

As your on-screen avatar reacts in exactly the way you do, it’s quite strange to catch yourself, brushing back your hair, scratching you nose, standing in a certain position or striking a pose. We see ourself as others see us. We don’t often see ourselves, except in front of static mirrors and as Kinect shows you moving, it’s sort of familiar yet unfamiliar, fascinating but weird. Once you start playing the doppelganger effect is natural.

Snappy

You know those photos taken on rollercoasters that you pay $10 for on exit, you get a batch of these for free, taken at just the moment in the game you’re likely to be in an extreme jump or pose. This is a nice piece of after-game feedback, although you need a well lit room for good shots. In some games, such as Your Shape: Fitness Evolved, your body image appears on your avatar, face, clothes and all.

Learning with Kinect

Kinect has to be played to be believed and it turns the Xbox into more than just a games console. You’re witness to the start of something new and big. We’ve had ‘first person shooters’ now we have the possibility of true ‘first person doers’ and ‘first person thinkers’. It really does know what you’re doing, communicating and saying. The sensor’s eye’s the limit.

First person doer

Kinect’s most obvious first batch of applications are around exercise and sports– doing something physical. As it can scan in your body shape it can also have a go at your height, rough weight and BMI. Fitness and exercise games are already available with everything from aerobics, gym exercises, Tai Chi to yoga. Poses in yoga and other light forms of exercise can be tracked, as can balance and actual performance. You can cheat with hand devices by shaking them up and down, you can’t with Kinect’s roving eye. Your Shape: Fitness Evolved, gives you yoga, workouts with weights and gym games. Personal trainers guide you through and give feedback in Tai Chi, Yoga, fitness classes, boxing blocks at they appear, hoops for stomach and hips, stack em up for upper body. Dance is the other obvious first genre and there’s already an eight-ball selection of titles, such as Dance Masters, Zumba and Dance Central.

Then there’s sports and sports simulations. One can easily imagine, superb golf, tennis and otherracquet simulations and coaching programmes that match your performance and shape it towards those of champions. Kinect Sports has football, track & field, boxing and bowling. This really is exhausting stuff.

Alternatively, Kinect Adventures is a good introduction to exercise with fun. River Rush, where you river raft on your feet (on your own or with two on the boat) and is hugely energetic.Rallyball has you returning balls by head, arm, hand, knee or foot; truly knackering. Space pop allows you to defy gravity and fly by raising your arms to pop bubbles. Reflex Ridge has you dodging obstacles in a wipeout game. 20,000 leaks sees you trapped in a glass tank where you reach with hands and feet to plug leaks caused by aggressive fish and sharks.

Moving beyond this to therapeutic physiotherapy, where balance and the regaining of physical skills is necessary, these applications can rehabilitate after a bone break, strain, stroke or amputation, avoiding the lack of compliance and frequent hospital visits.

Then there’s physical tasks at work, such as manual handling, physical maintenance, object manipulation, operating machinery and vehicles. Many jobs have manual components that require learning and actual practice. There could therefore be a role in vocational training for such technology.

This learn by doing can be taken over into kinaesthetic approaches to learning maths, science and other subjects. There’s no reason why objects and symbols can’t be manipulated in calculations and virtual labs. In fact, here’s a hacked example. There is evidence that this ‘apparatus’ approach to these subjects helps with both understanding and retention.

In history, we could wander the streets of Rome (Caspian have already built the 3D model and game for web delivery). Any environment past to present, microscopic to astronomical can be walked through, explored and used in active learning.

First person thinker

Peter Molyneux thinks a slew of new genres will emerge as our imaginations grasp the potential. His Milo demo is already the stuff of legend. In teaching people how to think and behave, we at last have a piece of technology that gets rid of the input barrier; those annoying mice, keyboards, controllers, joysticks and even touchscreens that put so much cognitive lag between what we want to do and what we can or actually do. Input devices are simply the design flaws of immature technology. We don’t carry use them in most real life situations, so when they vanish, everything seems so much more real.

Face to face tasks such as meetings, chairing meetings, interviewing, appraisals, disciplinary meetings, grievance meetings, coaching, counselling and mentoring will become topics in simulators as we learn to do these things in safe environments by simply sitting down on front of the screen. We can make all of the mistakes that others make in real life, to learn from failure rather than inflicting our failures on others.

Customer service skills with a wide range of possible customers, randomly generated, or weighted towards your client base, can be presented and your behaviour and words tracked. Even ancillary tasks such as checking in baggage for airports staff, handing over security badges, searching at security and so on, will be possible.

Sales skills can be sharpened through both visual feedback and voice recognition, so that the right listening skills and reactions can be learnt back at the ranch where they do no harm, and not in front of real customers.

Presentation skills can be taught quickly, with immediate feedback on performance, both physical and vocal. You will be able to see yourself present as well as get an intelligent diagnosis of your faults. Timing, gestures, position, speed of delivery, emphasis should all be trackable.

At a higher level, full organisational and business skills around business planning, sales, marketing and strategic talks can be tackled in realistic simulations.

Me, you, them

Note that in Kinect, or Kinect-like technology there’s:

1. One-to-self learning with you on the screen

2. One-to-one learning with someone on the screen

3. One to one with another real person

4. Or a threesome or more

It’s a self, first, second and many thinker simulation tool. The combinations of all three make this an extremely versatile simulator, come game, learning experience.

Future of Kinect

We are at the start of an era where learning will be freed (where appropriate) from the dry page, freed from the lecture theatre and classroom, and available to all though digital abundance and duplication on affordable technology in every home. This is exciting as much education and training is trapped in the inefficient environments of schools, colleges, universities, classrooms and lecture halls. If we don’t find ways of freeing learning from the huge capital cost of building and running buildings, and paying armies of often stressed teachers, then these possibilities must be entertained. Of course you can always sit back and play non-Kinect games such as the classic Halo, or shove in a DVD.

(Next post on mindblowing Kinect applications already in research and development.)