Education Sciences Institute Vision

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Education Sciences Institute Vision ISI Offsite
Meeting
04 Jan 08Dan M. Davis
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An Educational Sciences Institute is Required Now

• 1 - The Nation has a vital need for improved
  education, but it is not being delivered!
• 2 - Pedagogical advances, innovative programs and
  "hero teachers" are available!
• 3 - Distribution and Implementation by
  traditional methods can and must be augmented by
  information technology!

A center/institute/?, modeled after ISI, costing
O(10M/yr), is one one-hundred thousandth of the
nations educational budget, but holds the
promise of implementing the advances of which we
are already capable.
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Current Education Problems

• Too manifold to list exhaustively
• Experience
• Societal pressure
• Assessing the current levels
• Once more, Hero Teachers into the breach
• Examples
• Paucity of domestic PhD technology students
• Done with math book early
• Test scores still unknown data
• Lessons in The World is Flat

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Pedagogy and Performance

• There is a very large body of well designed and
  verifiable research on education
• The academic and military communities have both
  proven to be capable, in different ways, in their
  education efforts
• Cross-pollination across environments would
  stimulate more effective growth
• One common impediment to education at all levels
  is perceived risk of the learner fear of
  derision or condemnation for inappropriate or
  failed initiatives
• This hampers learning

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Technological Enhancements

• There are some issues where technology may not be
  the panacea, but there are benefits that can be
  implemented
• Education has been trying technology at many
  levels, despite drawbacks, failures and
  over-promising
• Analogies exist between the civilian and DoD
  educational environments
• Learners have varying skills, abilities and
  graces
• Dearth of hero teachers and role models
• Limited resources with which to address issues
• Interactive instruction can be augmented with HPC
• Not a new concept has been shown to work

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Vision of a Technology Enhanced Future

• A classroom where a teacher always has a virtual
  interactive hero teacher to help with
• Difficult or unfamiliar subject matter
• Challenged learners in any field
• Gifted students looking for new challenges
• Students in an individual teachable moment
• A computer aided education platform that does not
  burden the teacher in any way with technology to
  master and new gear to monitor
• A system that automatically and effectively
  monitors and differentiates students to identify
  optimal learning strategies

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Technology can Help to Produce that Vision

• Hundreds of small research projects show what
  should be done
• Thousands of hero teachers show what can be
  done
• Decades of slow progress show what is not being
  done because it is so hard
• The Internet Revolution shows what can be
  accomplish if society is enabled by user-friendly
  technology

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Hrothgar Project

• HPC was used to teach HPC
• Taught thinking like physicist
• Validated by student reaction
• Program showed students how to parallelize a code
• Was batch, not interactive
• Gave demonstration of HPC in educational setting
  as
• Accessible
• Stable
• Robust
• Reliable
• Inexpensive

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Major Efforts to Date

• Three papers on technology and education
• Vetted Idea with subject area leaders
• Identified people through whom to work
• Surveyed issues and identified problems
• Isolated the major hurdles
• Compared advances in similar fields
• Conceived the path to inject the best tools
• Conceptualized the organization to lead

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Support and Leadership

• RADM Fred Lewis Head of IITSEC
• Prof Stephen Thernstrom - Harvard U.
• Prof. Harry ONeil USC Rossier School
• Gene Bal Exec Dir, MHPCC, U of H
• Prof William McComas U of Ark
• Mike Rota U of Hawaii

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Vision

• Center, not small research project
• 10-15M/yr for five years, renewable
• Develop enabling technology not generate content
  
• Model on early Government/Internet Developers
  relationship

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Benefits

• New funding sources
• Alternative staffing opportunities (i.e. few if
  any ITAR/U.S. Citizenship requirements)
• Funding buffer for ebbing and flowing of
  DoD-initiatives
• Opportunities to develop new leadership position
  for ISI and USC
• Leverage existing ISI skills/reputation
• Largest governmental budget in U.S. is not the
  DoD, but education.

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Hurdles

• Must be responsive to qualms of
• Teacher organizations
• Parents
• School administrations and government entities
• Previous technology efforts over-promised and
  under-delivered
• Many have sense they are doing this already
• Students now have a high expectation for
  technical sophistication

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State Rankings by 8th Grade Science Scores

• Massachusetts
• Minnesota
• North Dakota
• Vermont
• Kansas
• New Jersey
• South Dakota
• Virginia
• New Hampshire
• Montana
• Wyoming
• Maine
• Colorado
• Pennsylvania
• Texas
• Maryland
• Wisconsin
• Iowa

• New York
• Kentucky
• Florida
• Michigan
• Arizona
• Rhode Island
• Georgia
• Oklahoma
• Tennessee
• Arkansas
• Louisiana
• Nevada
• California
• West Virginia
• Hawaii
• New Mexico
• Alabama
• Mississippi
• District of Columbia

• DoDEA
• Indiana
• Washington
• Ohio
• North Carolina
• Oregon
• Nebraska
• Idaho
• Delaware
• Alaska
• Connecticut
• South Carolina
• Utah
• Missouri
• Illinois
• - National Average

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An ESI-Enabled Educational Vision for the Nation

• Leverage the best and brightest educators
• When we establish one who has the vision, extend
  it to all
• Use new technology to capture the passion and the
  concepts
• Provide managed-risk environment
• Use goals set by visionaries and validated by
  veterans
• Employ proven pedagogical techniques to optimize
  learning and inculcate desired attitudes
• Create an Augmented Intelligence (A/I) program
  to
• match education to learner
• adjust to changing world
• Implement ISI-proven techniques to achieve all of
  the above.

pace individual learners validate progress
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What ISI et alii bring to the Mix

• Manifest reputation for delivery
• Well suited skill set
• Organizational stability for 30 years
• Professional network and valuable colleagues
• Major Research University
• Reputation
• Personnel and Facilities
• Contacts

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Mission Statement and Goals
Education Sciences Institute
Mission Statement The ESI will inseminate,
incubate and insinuate enabling technologies for
K-12 education in order to assist every classroom
teacher to nurture challenging students, to
convey difficult material and to optimize
classroom time this will deliver a new
capability to effectively and easily incorporate
the latest pedagogical advances, the most
student-centered instruction, and the optimal
instructional pacing, all through
teacher-friendly, education goal-oriented, and
innovative systems, adapting lessons learned from
the Internet revolution and the open-source
software movement.

• Goals
• Virtual hero teacher(s) available to assist in
  every classroom
• Relief for, not burden upon, classroom teachers
• No child held back or abandoned by the classroom
  progress rate
• Uniform excellence in education, especially math
  and science

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ESI Activity Flow Chart
Guidance Advisory Committee PM
Products Technology requirements and potentials
analysis New technology enablers for
Education Content capture tools Lesson plan
framework Assessment monitor Interactive
virtual tutor Proof of concept
implementations Outreach to educators identify
and facilitate technology insertion Tiger team
to attack hard EdTech problems Community
leadership to identify, foster and promulgate
standards
Inputs Technology from DoD Needs mandates from
DoEd, State Dep of Ed. Prioritized and urgent
assistance needs from classroom
Teachers Technology-insertion lessons from
Internet Development-sharing lessons from open
source community
Assessment Independent Evaluators
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Org Chart 50 (65) Personnel, 10(15)M/Yr
ISI Leadership
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Future Direction

• What are the goals?
• Who is the team?
• What is optimal configuration
• Entire center elsewhere?
• Involving several Universities?
• Funding considerations to be met?
• What is THE next step?