Google just announced an AI bot that could change teaching & learning…. consequences are both exciting & terrifying…

Bot reversal

Revealed during a Google conference, Google Duplex stole the show. They stunned the audience with two telephone conversations, to real businesses, initiated and competed by a bot. If anything, the real people in the businesses sounded more confused than the bot. The bots were from Google Assistant and delivered by Google Duplex. Note that this reverses the usual person speaks to bot. In fact, it’s hard to tell which one is real. Here, the bot is speaking to real people. We are about to see a whole range of things done by humans replaced by bots in customer service.

Lessons in learning

This reversal is interesting in education and training, as it supports the idea of a bot as a tutor, teacher, trainer or mentor. I've already written about how bots can be used in learning. The learners remain real but the teaching could be, to a degree, automated. Most of the time we talk to each other through dialogue. This is how things get done in the real world, it is also how many of us learn. Good teachers engage learners in dialogue. But suppose that bots become so good that they can perform one half of this dialogue?

This is a tough call for software. There’s the speech recognition itself. It also has to sound natural, but natural is a bit messy. I can say ‘A meal for four, at four’ – that’s tricky. On top of this, we go fast, pause, change direction, interrupt but also expect fast responses. This is what Google have tackled head-on with neural networks and trained bots.

Domain specific

Google Duplex does not pretend to understands general conversations. It is domain-specific – which is why its first deployment will be customer service over the phone. You need to train it in a specific domain, like hairdressing or doctor appointments, then encapsulate lots of tricks to make it work. But in domain specific areas, we can see how subject-specific teaching bots could do well here. Bots, on say maths or biology or language learning, are sure to benefit from this tech. There is no way the tech is anywhere near ‘replacing teachers but they can certainly augment, enhance, whatever you want to call it, the teacher’s role.

Conclusion

We’re not far off from bots like these being as common as automated check-outs and ATMs. I’ve been working on bots like these for some time and we were quick to realise that this ‘reversal’ is exactly what ‘teaching’ bots needed. There are some real issues around their use, such as our right to know that it is a bot on the other end of the line. And their use in spam calls. But if it makes our lives easier and takes the pain away from dealing with Doctor’s receptionists and call centres – that’s a win for me. If you’re interested in doing something ‘real’ with bots in corporate learning, contact me here….

Flipped reading – 7 reasons why reading just got super-fast

Education often slows down learning. One reason I’m not for the current orthodoxy in social constructivism is the fact that it slows down many types of learning for many people. My efficiencies in learning over the years have come from the fact that my learning is digital by default, asynchronous by default, available to anyone, anywhere at anytime. So imagine being able to read five or more times faster. Typical experienced reading rates are between 200-400 words per minute. Can this be increased to 1000 words per minute, adding not subtracting attention and comprehension? Try it.

1. Reading shaped by old inefficient tech

We may not realise it but papyrus, parchment and paper are technologies, wasteful technologies at that, especially paper with its polluting, deforestation and landfill problems. Remember that a book is not the physical object but the text. Fact is, most of us do most of our reading online these days. That’s solved these problems but it may also solve another – speed. Reading has been shaped by papyrus, parchment and paper. They remain fixed, while your eyes have to do all the work. Now, along comes a technology that literally flips that model. The words move, not your eyes.

2. Much faster reading

Speed reading software from Spritz works because they’ve looked carefully at what actually happens when we read. We all have an optimal attention point when reading words, which is just left of centre of each word. This is the point (Optimal Recognition Point) at which the brain centres then registers the meaning of the word. The software knows this recognition point for words and presents that letter in red at exactly the same point on the screen. Your eyes don’t have to move so time and effort is saved. Try it – it’s remarkably effective.

3. Text-based learning

One basic skill is still primary in learning – reading. Let’s face it, much of our learning, even communication and collaboration is still through text. Google, Wikipedia, e-books, texting, Facebook, Twitter, email are all still fundamentally text media. Increasing this mode of learning is therefore a significant productivity win.

4. Quicker & better comprehension

They even claim quicker and increased comprehension and I can see why. The effortless focus means you can attend to meaning rather than the effort of physical reading from a page.

5. More psychological attention

The fact that you are having to do less physical work means that psychological attention is focussed. Attention is a necessary condition for learning. It wanes in lectures and wanes when reading. This massively extends your ability to sustain that attention.
6. Language learning
I could see this work well with language learning in terms of quickening up vocabulary and sentence acquisition. It should also work with Arabic if the same rules about Optimal Recognition Point apply (interesting question). It could even be used to increase early reading skills by accelerating reading and vocabulary acquisition.

7. Power up with wearables

The fact that it can be delivered on small mobile screens, Google Glass and watches. You have no scrolling, paging, contracting and expanding. In fact, it has been announced as a feature of the Galaxy S5 and Galaxy Gear 2. Now imagine it being delivered on an Oculus Rift for total psychological attention and no distractions.

Conclusion

Breakthroughs often come by flipping or reversing models. These ‘Copernican’ revolutions have changed the world forever. Thomas Khun saw this as the key driver in scientific progress but it has also been noted that it works on a smaller scale with technology. One could argue that it works particularly well in learning. The flipped classroom is just one example, flipped reading may be another.

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.

Virtual Reality 'Game of Thrones' on Vive's stunning rival to Oculus

VR is a amazing medium not a mere gadget. I’ve been playing around with the Oculus Rift Development Kit 1 then Development Kit 2 for over a year, helped get some learning applications funded and see it playing a real role in ‘learning by doing’. Having demoed it to hundreds of people across Europe and in Africa, all I can say is that the most common reaction is ‘Awesome!”. What we’re all waiting on is the consumer launch.

Learning potential

In learning we all yearn for something that can really hold sustained attention, induce intense emotion, allow learning by doing, provide relevant context, enable transfer, increase retention, provide cognitive swap and above all, allow you to do things that are impossible in the real world. These are just seven principles in learning that suggest it has huge potential. Here's a brief selection.

Consumer tech

But what makes technology based learning fly is its cultural acceptance. The technology is always ahead of the more sluggish sociology. We’re all now comfortable with search on the internet, Wikipedia, hyperlinked content, learning from YouTube, TED and Khan videos, contributing within a network of professionals on social media. Whenever a sustained, irreversible, global, consumer base develops, learning applications follow.

This is why the Facebook purchase of Oculus Rift was sosignificant. They were first to get on their racing bike but there’s a peloton forming and the race constantly changes as new challengers emerge from the pack. Since that $2.3 billion dollar announcement, the other industry giants have gone goggle-eyed and pushed their R&D teams to get something to market soon. Samsung, Microsoft and others know that this shift from 2D to 3D may be a huge opportunity, as a new medium emerges. That doesn’t happen very often – paper print, radio, film, TV, 2d web…… what’s next?

Valve’s top ten features

Now another big consortium has emerged as pacemaker – Valve & HTC. This is big news for the following 10 reasons:

1. HTC are making the screen

2. Two 1200x1080 displays

3. Refresh rate of 90 frames a second

4. Great field of view

5. Stem VR base station for avatar control (within 15x15 ft room)

6. Wireless HTC controllers for each hand (gloves?)

7. Controller’s positions tracked

8. Headset is very light

9. Google, HBO on  board

10. Release promised in 2015

This is a big step up from the Oculus Rift DK2 with a significant technology difference. The Valve headset contains cameras that track your movement, rather than the Oculus’s cameras tracking the headset. It’s the Oculus tracking in reverse, although it still has the accelerometer and gyroscope.

There’s a pre-release video, that’s not so great, but the launch is this week (2-5 March) at the Game Developer’s Conference. Their promise – developer’s kit this Spring, then release ‘holiday 2015’, by which I take to be Christmas.

Entertainment

One thing most vendors realise is that this is just about gaming. The games market is huge and can drive this forward but the entertainment, education and health markets are bigger. This is not a gadget – it’s a new medium, applicable in almost every domain you can imagine. HBO are in on the Valve act, NBA in on Oculus - so expect some Game of Thrones VR and court-side viewing on launch. TV and film may never be the same again.

Conclusion

This is great news, but let’s not get too carried away. This is a long race, not a velodrome sprint. Competition has driven this forward. Consumer VR will be here, as I thought, this year. It all comes down to marketing, price and quality of the product. As HTC CEO Peter Chou announced when showing the Vive for the first time on stage “We believe virtual reality will totally transform the way we interact with the world. It will become a mainstream experience for general consumers. The possibilities are limitless.”

PS

Some videos showing VR in education:

VR and 'presence'

Teach history with VR

Teach physics with VR

Teach biology with VR

Amazing reaction on Oculus

WISE 2013 – Reinventing education

The World Summit on Education in Doha, Qatar brings together educators from around the globe. They literally fly you in, put you up in a fine hotel, feed you and let you rip. Networking here, and that is its strength, is as global as you can get, as you’re guaranteed to speak to people from every continent. It is arguably, as George Siemens says, “world’s most important education conference”.
‘Reinventing education’ was this year’s theme, an admirable goal and badly needed as we know that the Millennium goals will be missed, that the existing model is flawed, costs too high and that demand is exceeds supply. So what happened?
As I said when I blogged the last WISE conference I attended (this is my 3^rd), “Education’s a slow learner - it may be more accurate to say that education has learning difficulties. The system is fixed, fossilised and, above all, institutionalised, so the rate of change is glacial. People are, by and large, trapped in the mindset of their institution and sector. In truth, small pools of innovative practice are patchy and stand little chance of wide scale adoption. Many of the speakers repeated platitudes about education being the answer to all of the world’s problems. What they were short on were solutions. Education is always seen as the solution to all problems. The problem with all this utopian talk is that it dispenses with realism.”

4 pillars of education

The plenaries were, well, institutionalised, UNESCO, in my opinion, have become part of the problem and low on solutions. They dominated many of the sessions and regurgitated old reports, clichés and truisms, none worse that their 4 Pillars of Education ‘to be, to know, to do, to live together’. This is fine, but fails on a number of counts. ‘To be’ is a banal abstraction that has no real purchase in education. ‘To know’ is an obvious truism – of course education is about knowing – but knowing what? ‘To live together’ is better but not best taught in school and classrooms. The last, ‘To do’ is good but largely ignored as education gets ever more abstract and academic, treating vocational learning as an afterthought. What we needed was the Samson of innovation to push over the UNESCO pillars and enter the temple of institutional thought to upturn a few tables that have been selling the same tired, old stuff for decades. Sorry - I’ve mixed up two parables in one sentence!

Morin – disappointing ‘discourse’

Morin opened the conference with an abstract, rambling précis of his old UNESCO paper. He’s 92 and struggled to handle his notes and microphone. It was stratospheric, a piece of French philosophy, totally detached from the real world. It’s a type of ‘discourse’ (as French philosophers like to call it) that remains rooted in dualist abstractions and dialectic, with the occasional apercu. But this approach fails to deliver concrete ideas that one could take away and apply in the real world. When asked for some real suggestions and detail, he couldn’t and fumbled through with some more discourse on ‘strategy’. Worse, it set the wrong tone for the summit. One of abstractions and a failure to address real problems.

Literacy & numeracy

But things got much better with a hard hitting session which delivered some surprises for me. First some brilliant insights from Helen Abadzi, that around 18 our minds become less plastic and open to learning literacies. You can learn the letters but it is difficult to see them come together as words. You can experience this for yourself when you learn a new language as an adult. As you rarely reach a reasonable reading speed, of around 60-80 words a minute, you forget the start of sentences before you’ve reached the end. The implications of this research are huge, that we may be wasting too much time and money trying to solve an insoluble problem. The second was that the whole literacy push in Africa and the developed world is being thwarted by poor textbooks and teaching. I have seen this for myself in Cambodia, where a literally unusable textbook was being used in a country classroom. There was a call for the abandonment of traditional ‘English’ and ‘Middle-class’ teaching methods and texts for a literal ‘letter by letter’ approach in the local language, which is rarely as irregular a English. When done well it takes around 100 days. The other issue is teacher feedback, which is often poor and misdirected in schools, focussing on the best not the worst performers in the class. As for numeracy, it’s a different class of problem, as we are all born numerate. New born babies are numerate but not literate. In truth this side of the debate wasn’t covered at all.

Small-minded debate on Big Data

This session bordered on the bizarre. As one of the most important current topics in education it deserved better. What we got were idiosyncratic, personal and to be frank, not very informed, views on the subject. John Fallon, of Pearson, was reasonably articulate and tried to keep to topic, but the other three were amateurish. I saw one ‘analytics’ expert in the room leave after 15 minutes.

For John Fallon we need to collect, analyse and interpret data give opportunities to look at education like never before and transform outcomes. We’re not short of data, it’s just that most of it is inputs such as spend, enrolments, millennium goals, broadband connectivity and so on. As I always say, to measure bums on seats is to measure the wrong end of the learner. Then there’s the outcomes; PISA PIAC, high stakes tests, artificial once year events. What we don’t use it for, said John, is to enhance learning. How do I know what’s going on in students’ minds. Big Data needs to scale. Thousands of individual interactions each and every day, across informal and formal learning. He was the only one on the panel who had any real grasp on the detail.

Divina Frau-Meigs, a sociologist, and self-styled activist for media literacies (stretching the meaning of the word activist), gave an idiosyncratic presentation based on her own flimsy research. At one point she included drawing mindmaps on paper as Big Data. It’s called BIG data for a reason. Her statement that it’s mostly dashboards and data mining missed the point. Emilio Porta an economist from Nicuaragua was obsessed with global data – UN, UNESCO, PISA and so on. He couldn’t see the flaws in having created a sort of arms race as the leaning Tower of PISA data is hopelessly skewed. htp://buff.ly/1aCLCSb Politicians distort and exaggerate these stats for their own ends. This was a very low level chit chat about a complex and serious subject. I’m not sure that any of the panel had the expertise to do it the justice it deserved.

Mindgraphs - Hans Rosling

Hans Rosling has a great TED talk on the animation of statistics. But what matters is what those statistics tell us. Rosling stunned us with his assertion that our common perceptions about population, poverty and education are worse than that of chimps! He did this with enthusiasm and humour.

What is the global literacy rate?

80%

60%

40%

20%

(answer at bottom)

Again and again he showed us that our common perceptions are misconceptions. Population is not increasing exponentially as birth rates have and are falling and the number of children in the world has stopped growing.

On education he also scotched a few myths around figures quoted by notables on the panels. What is worse, he asked POVERTY or GENDER in education? Poverty is the clear answer. Above all, we no longer have developed v developing nations but a range. Rosling should have been the opening keynote, he set the tone for a proper debate, based on real figures.

What if Finnish teachers taught in your schools?

Pasi Strahlberg posed a few questions to show that you must tackle improving your educational system holistically. It is not JUST about quality teachers, the mantra we so often hear. It’s a wide range of social issues around scrapping the private sector, not rushing things and avoiding early years ‘schooling’. Let them play until they’re 7 or 8. Don’t get obsessive about testing. This flies in the face of almost everything we do in education in the UK. We have become trapped in an arms race, where the solution to everything is more ‘competition’, more ‘schooling’, more ‘league tables’ and more ‘testing’. I also noticed that this was in direct contradiction to Julia Gillard’s prescriptive ‘testing’ approach.

Monsters and misconceptions

This was a revelation, quick fire talks on all sorts of topics and solutions, some good, some great, some awful. Let’s get the awful stuff out of the way. The talk by the Observer journalist was an anecdotal rant about how women rule the world and hapless men need to listen to them, as ‘men can’t collaborate, women do’. This was a statement so general and awful that it deserves a response. I played football nearly every night as a child, I’ve managed companies, worked in teams and have little to learn from a hackneyed journo, who has spent most of her life in solitary confinement typing out articles on subjects to a deadline. She obscured an interesting point about the feminisation of education in early years and primary by caricaturing men. OK, got that out of my system.

To counter this, we had superb presentations on hard hitting topics, like child marriages, self-sustaining schools in Uganda, MOOCs in China, Amazigh education in Morocco and the Khan Academy. This quick-fire stuff needs to be promoted and given more status, maybe themed. I particularly enjoyed the iThra talk, about an after school science programme. He had a stunning quote, “The education system is a monster, by fighting it we would have become monsters ourselves”.

Mozilla – tinker, share, make

Mark Surman showed us how to present. Face the audience, stand up, look people in the eye, speak knowledgeably but from the heart, don’t use notes and deliver a clear message. Compare this to Morin and others on the many panels that delivered the same old platitudes. Motivate, engage and excite learners. Get them to tinker, share and make things. It’s a learn by doing model that allows young minds to understand the technological world in which they live and use that technology to learn, do things and make things. What gave his message clout was the fact that he was doing this through the Mozilla Foundation, around the world, in Mozfests and Maker events.

Educators are always going on about 21^st C skills. For Surman the 4th literacy is web literacy, as the web is the new classroom, 21st century skills - 5 Cs (Classroom is not one of them)  communicate, create, culture, collaborate, community on the WEB. These skills are not well taught in schools and universities, where learners are herded into classrooms and lecture theatres, online communication tools and devices often banned and creativity rare, often squeezed by the obsession with STEM subjects. Educators are also always trying to force storytelling. Young people tell stories daily - it's called Facebook. Lifelong learning is Google, Wikipedia, Social networking and YouTube - life is not a course it's informal learning.

MOOCs

Excellent input from the knowledgeable George Siemens and the Chief Scientist for EdX. These guys know their stuff but the other two participants clearly knew nothing about MOOCs and astonishingly, had never taken a MOOC. How do I know this? I asked them and the chair. Neither had taken a MOOC. They both spoke like amateurs because they were amateurs, trotting out clichés about human interaction and drop-out without any grasp of the detail. Siemens was clearly frustrated by their uninformed negativity and explained why drop-out is not the problem people imagine it is, that pedagogy is varied and evolving and that the experience is richer than people imagine and, above all, people like them and use them. For the first time in 1000 years education that delivers quality education to massive numbers, at low cost, that people want and enjoy.

MOOCs are a wake-up call for Higher Education. MOOCs flip universities. Siemens is right, MOOCs are a supply response to a demand problem. We’ve seen more action in 1 year than last 1000 years and MOOCs will produce dramatic systemic and substantial change. Certification is NOT the point in MOOCs - only 33% wanted certification in Edinburgh MOOCs and there are plenty of ways they can be monetised.

Human interaction is an issue but in the 6 MOOCs I've taken this has been great - teaching seems intimate, peer-to-peer interaction strong, forums lively and physical meetups possible. Siemens got a little tetchy when drop-out was mentioned – rightly so. The sceptics seemed determined to look at everything within the deficit model. What about the hundreds of thousands of drop-ins? I’m absolutely amazed that so many have taken so many courses from so many places. Online experience need not be inferior. As Siemens said, let's hold classrooms and lectures to same standards as online!

There’s real fears around dominance by the private sector, but if that delivers cheaper, faster, better education, so be it. In my opinion, however, the future of MOOCs is: open platforms, open content, open pedagogies and the opening of minds. African MOOCs may unlock a billion more brains HOOKs VOOKs - High school and Vocational MOOCs are also being delivered as this is not just about HE and degrees. The MOOC session by far best at WISE talking about real reinvention and a real phenomenon.

Conclusion

This is my third WISE summit, and as usual, I met some amazing people. Thanks George Siemens, Mark Surman, Cathy Lewis Long, Derek Robertson, John Davitt, Davod Worley, Jef Staes and all of the new people I met in Doha. The Souk was a hoot (try the Iraqi restaurant there), the gala dinner hilarious (the lack of alcohol made us almost hysterical) and on the rides on the bus to and from the conference I had some of the best impromptu sessions.

Overall however, you can see the problem, a failure to engage with the real problems head-on; costs, relevance, technology, that faculty and existing teaching systems biggest barrier to progress in learning.  86% of the delegates want reinvention of education but time and time again the panels reflected and reinforced old ideas and practices, with the audience clapping every time the word ‘teacher’ was mentioned. Teachers matter, but until we recognise that teaching is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for learning and look for some other additional solutions, WISE will forever be focussing on the wrong thing – teachers, not learners. The fear, that students may ‘manage to learn without me’ and of technology in general, is holding us back. Next year, less administrators, more innovators. The good news is that the Qatar Fundation has been doing brilliant work across the globe and announced a focus on innovation this year, with financial support for such innovation. They may be on to something here.

PS

Session on University Rankings was in Room 101!

 (Answer 80%)