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Archives for January 2013

Proposal for you to write a Soka education paper

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Participate in researching Soka education

If you haven’t already, write a paper for the Soka education conference. Looking into the past few years of conference books, you will see that there are two commonalities: people are understanding the core concepts of Soka education and they have a very unique perspective of applying their field of knowledge.

Many of the papers written on Soka education have a common part explaining Makiguchi’s value system and his past. This is hugely important because in itself, Soka education’s philosophy is not unique. The values it holds are present in countless other institutions around the world. What separates this philosophy from others is its unique roots and the consequential following development of the Soka Gakkai. It is safe to say, if it was not for Josei Toda and Daisaku Ikeda, Makiguchi’s name would not be remembered today.

Your perspective is important

It is also safe to say that as a unique individual who has an important perspective on the world, you would greatly contribute to this field by exploring the relation of your knowledge and those who have come before. In 2013, Soka education is young. There are texts to still be fully translated and widely published. Similarly, there are plenty of ideas which have not yet been explored.

The beauty of Soka is its broad applicability to all subjects. The creation of value is subjective and thus universally applicable. Regardless your interest and the depth of your understanding, the process of exploring Soka education (or any field of niche study for that matter) will benefit you greatly.

Once certain outcome in your exploration of this subject is that you will undoubtedly learn more about your own field. Of course you will learn more about Soka education, Makiguchi, Ikeda, and the Soka school system. More so, you will have to question your own knowledge in reference to that of a new lens. The experiment of viewing your own domain from that of a value creative perspective is difficult. Difficult, but undeniably valuable for your own sake.

If you find yourself growing stagnant in your field, review your field in the light of Soka. You won’t regret it. Oh and unlike me, turn it in on time.

Links

To learn more about what Soka education is, go here.

To get involved in the Soka education student research project, go here.

Relearning education

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Trying to understand what is important in a foreign industry is difficult. The last two weeks, I’ve done my best immersing myself in the educator and web developer communities. My goal: understand how I can contribute to a market I felt was missing its modern touch.

Recent publications, such as EdSurge, and a increased organization effort in the edutech market – aka conferences and hackathons – caught my attention. Backed with a self taught background in web development and a semi-guided exposure to educational institutions and learning, I decided I would commit myself to this industry.

Motivation

Web development is a craft and an obsession. Its takes effort to stay un-to-date with the current of technologies. It takes time to wrap your head around the tools available and the languages used. For some, their networks of colleagues and friends make this process easy, but I have found myself grabbing and absorbing everything available.

What started as an effort to make a few dollars without working on an hourly wage led to a full fledged effort to making a career of web development. After proceeding from a few Craigslist posts, to Odesk jobs, an in-person freelance clients, and finally a legitimate corporate hired position I realized this stuff clicks.

Spending time working in a corporation gave me two realizations. One, I could do this for a long time and save a lot of money. The money was good, the time felt meaningful, and the problems to solve were literally endless. Secondly, being given a specific responsibility and task meant that I would become an expert in my field, but my field only.

These two points left me torn. Was I meant to become an expert in UX development and pull in paycheck after paycheck – stressing over the minute details – or find something that I didn’t completely understand but could justify being passionate about. I am choosing the latter.

Getting up to speed

I studied at Soka University of America as a liberal arts student concentrating in the Humanities. Exactly what this means I was supposed to learn, Im not sure.

I came away feeling passionate about communication technologies and their social consequences. As McLuhan says, “The medium is the message.” Neuro-imaging experts studying the brain on the internet will tell you the same.

Within the educational sector, I was drawn in by the aligning of my experience in college and the tone of the media I have been consuming. Frequently I am introduced to new conflicting arguments about technologies ‘disrupting’ modern educational institutions.

What started as my introduction to complaints about the soon-to-collapse derivative market around student loans developed into a focus on technical training for the work place. In my shift from a television watcher to a RSS feed reader, I saw for-profit technical training institutions shift from certificate programs to course-by-course online sessions.

Fast-forwarding to 2013, massively open online courses introduce college credits available through online platforms. While this is technically the same as distance learning programs that colleges already offered, the quality is increasing. My serious interest began here.

Following, I sought opportunities to meet people who were in the industry I understood to be socially meaningful. Conferences, meet-ups, occasional stranger emails, and rapid academic journal consumption provided a scaffold of knowledge to get me up to speed.

Motivating factors

My current interest initiated from the startup world’s success. In my own eyes, seeing single digit person companies pop-up and sellout in one year product cycle, with a cash out of over 100 million dollars a person is ridiculous. Software development is the investment banking of our time. Twenty-somethings with motivation, technical foresight, and social know-how are building and selling companies in ways that were not possible in the past.

Shifting from probability of economic success to value based analysis, education seemed like the next step. Soka education, a driving principal and reoccurring point of discussion at my undergraduate university was my frame of reference. Tech startups are looking at producing solutions to problems that are otherwise left alone. Soka education provides me a vanishing point toward which I should work toward.

Policy, investment and funding opportunities, technological developments, and most of all a change in values has increased the attention toward educational tech entrepreneurs in the past two years. I am curious what truly caused the attention toward are market that has otherwise been unchanged for a hundred and some years.

The ways of teaching themselves have not changed. The accessibility to technology has not completely shifted. The budgets and product cycles have not completely shifted. Still, the valley and its fellow tech hubs are driving attention to the edutech market.

Public appeal

The mass coverage regarding the spots of success have been unbalanced (as usual). Ventures driven by individual success stories littered the headlines for months. Khan Academy being a key example. Shifting from individual content providers to the mass of videos freely accessible through YouTube, the newly available forms multi-media are shifting the worlds view of learning.

Technical programs targeting aspiring programmers and engineers were highlighted in the emergence of Codecademy. Accessibility to college level courses were made public through the hundred thousand person MOOC courses held by the top university brands from around the world. Quality and scalable education were seen as becoming a paired concept.

Resistance in public form followed. Outrage toward the replacement of teachers appeared in the opinion section of major publications. Parents feared teachers would no longer teach. Teachers felt their jobs were not replaceable. Students were provided access to resources in complete form that were previously kept for individuals proven to be capable of understanding their contents.

Einstein, Feynman, as well as countless other geniuses intellectually advanced beyond their peers because of access to information. Imagine the potential of young aspiring minds exposed to the height of university lectures and resources. Not only do these students have access, but they have the ability to participate in discussions.

Structuring opportunities

The discussion surrounding educational tech companies and the issues in schools do not perfectly match up. Replacing teachers with computers is far from the answer. On the other hand, the utilization of modern tools is invaluable. Teachers who can navigate through modern media have a plethora of tools available to them.

Increased expectation and a unchanged variable of time leaves classrooms budging with ideas but restricted in the ability to execute. This is where tech companies come in. Data driven learning, personalization (not the plopping in front of a computer, but the real kind), active learning, real-time assessment and feedback, increased parent-teacher communication, early intervention, are but some of the potential points of applying technology in classrooms.

These technologies must reduce the effort to operate and remove all possible friction to assist teachers. The designs must be intuitive, the data flexible, and the usage made across platforms. Too easy is it to feel like you are solving a perceived problem without validation of correctly doing so.

This post was inspired by the posts found here

MediaX continued and predictive data analytics

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Continuing MediaX

Everyday there is more things to learn and share, so I need to quickly get through these MediaX notes.

Paulo Blikstein talked about the crisis of students who don’t care about science in math. By first grade 70% of students have no interest in science. By the 7th grade, the sample of students who self report shrinks to less than 10%. This is a leading sign of what our economy will be like in the coming years.

He explains that our schools are not places that support science and math learning. If we want to teach swimming, we build a swimming pool. For science education, we are not creating an environment that fits the learning process. We don’t have the swimming pools for science.

Stanford is creating a program that transforms one room in a school and fits it with the necessary tools to engage students through making. This is the experience they need to feel like they want to learn science. Beyond learning who Leonardo Divinci is, they do what he did using 3d printers and circuits.

The program is called the Fablab and its focus is creating an environment where students can apply what they learn to their own lives. These programs are in countries around the world and not limited to affluent communities. That being said, the percent of students who can benefit from these opportunities are much smaller than the number of students in school.

Shortening the geographical divide

Renate Fruchter talked about improving global teamwork. The question is: How can we capitalize on the core competency in a global corporate structure to communicate beyond space and time. The group PBL Labs is using a mixed media reality platform to have real time 3d collaboration between digital space.

The program recognizes Face-to-face is the best communication, but is not always possible. As individuals, we are wired for feedback, so we need to create systems of communication that allow us to communicate beyond face-to-face.

There were six statements that this model assumes are needed: I know where I am, I know where you are, we know where we are, we know where we want to go, we know where we can go, we move.

Brain patterns and the mind

This talk is a bit scary. Brain scans can be used to identify if you recognize something or whether it is the first time for you to be exposed to stimulation. Technology use on neuro-cognitive function can scan the brain to see what parts of your cortex fire. Using brain imaging technology and machine learning algorithms, the brain can be analyzed for real world interaction.

The ability to monitor memory does not require human beings to know exactly what touch points in the brain are being active. Instead, machine learning patterns can be used to look for similarities in the processes associated with learning. When a process of learning occurs, it is different than a process of status. This means changes in the brains ability to see something new and recognize something old can be identified.

The decoding can be used to see whether a person recognizes a face. These reports can be near perfect. You can apply this for forensic implications, use it for commercial purposes, and understand the state of being a person believes they are in.

The brain can also be understood to see if people think they are in a certain place. Using video games, people are stimulated to perceive themselves in a game. This means, they are mentally projecting themselves in a different ‘place’. The fact that the information about a person’s believed ‘location’ can be tracked has huge implications.

Emotional wellbeing, psychological status, false systems of logic, and insanity are literally measurable. If a person feels alone or constructs a reality in which they are in a ‘different’ place, neuro imaging can visualize this.

The patterns still have improvement opportunities, but this raises many questions of ethics and privacy. When you can show up in court to have a brain scan which reports whether or not you recognize a witness, we will be in a very different state of authority and operation.

Schools are poor

Roy Pea talked about the educational system. Schools are poor. Graduation rates are horrible. The Bill and Melinda gates foundation has a 17 year goal of having a 70% high school graduation rate in the United States. This is optimistic. Right now, 7/10 people do not graduate from college. Thats a 30% rate of elementary school students who will actually make it into college. Thats 30% of people who have an opportunity to develop a language to understand and express the world in a shared academic construct.

Roy talks about the points we can design differently. To start, students in the K-12 school system spent 1 million minutes in school. These classes with long seating time and lecture based teaching with paper textbooks are not effective. We get very little data from students apart from midterms and final grades. People in every class are creating data, but the amount of feedback that a teacher gets to direct a students learning is minimal. This needs to change.

The department of education published a report in 2012 declaring a technology plan for education. The vision is very different from what we have now. The plan states learning can take advantage of an always on world. The always on can mean always creating (data) and always learning (consuming). Using mobile powered technology, theres opportunities for a single teacher to transmit to all students.

Student centered methods of learning need to be taught. Not just to students, but to teachers, administrators, parents, and communities. We can have student centered learning through the tools we have available to us today. We need to develop systems that support these tools and have individuals who are trained in mentoring and coaching people toward authoritative goals. The goal is life long learning and we can have this through the available learning tools.

We can have learning related to school in and out of the classroom. As American’s, our school system has one of the smallest times in the classroom. We can extend the learning time, even with this. The national plan can have changes applied to the school structure. It can give teachers better tools to apply visual learning opportunities.

Right now, math and science levels drop over the summer for low income students. New services can increase student learning time out of the class through games. The plan to connect America through broadband internet can be a national plan to improve the opportunities to access learning materials. This would transform American education through learning powered technology.

Shortlist of points: education analytics will be important, US department of education declared adoption of technology, personalized adaptive learning pathways using data trails, utilization of mobile devices, out of the classroom learning opportunities, personalized learning goals…personalization is the key.

Grand challenge #1: Design and validate an integrate system that provides realtime access to learning experiences tuned to the levels of difficulty and assistance that optimize learning for all learners, and that incorporates self-improving features that enable it to become increasingly effective through interaction learning.

Talks about Education

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I attended, MediaX

Held at Stanford university to share emerging academic research. The notes from the MediaX talks can be found here. I suggest copying the content and moving them to your favorite editor.

The openning was given by Claude Steele, a scholar of Stereotype Threat. Claude’s openning emphasized the changes in the research that come about from looking at connections between concentrations of study. He gave an example of psychology since the implementation of the MRI brain scan. Prior to image scanning, psycology was a measurement of behavior (subjective and inconsistent). MRI imaging transformed the industry by creating new opportunities to measure (quantitatively and objectively) and establishing a new language for explaining a powerful science.

Interpersonal interaction coding.

The first talk by Mark Schar analyzed productivity, creativity, and group dynamics between “divergers” and “convergers”. Divergers were described as people would questioned one another to find new answers. Convergers were oppositely seen as people who agreed with the rest of a group.

The study looked at how people collaborated, by calculating the pace at which questions were asked and new ideas were presented. The study clearly showed a distinction between two seperate groups (composed on only one type). The pace of ideas were expressed by diveregers at a rapid pace in the beginning and a bit slower in the middle. *The convergers had a slow start *to discuss ideas, then near the middle exchanged ideas and slowed down again at the end. The important point is to have both groups together when constructing teams.

The goal of the study was to understand and code interaction-dynamics between individuals working together in groups. The result was understanding that regardless of the type of people, the most important thing was to insure that no “blocks” were created during discussion. As long as no blocks existed, the group continued to look for alternaltives in approaching the situation.

Greg Kress studied how to predict long term team performance based on personalities. Study showed that all 17 factors studyed are important, but one specific point was significantly correlated with innovation and creativity. People who were extraverted in expressing their feelings created a better team dynamic and design.

Johnathan Edelman looked at how to influence media and how media influences people. ()Im not exactly sure how this was translated to the evidence below) Edelman studied two groups interaction to see how their behavior would be in a radical design process. The result showed groups that had extraverted physically expressive emotionally involved individuals were identified as the ones who would contibute more to a group. These individuals were seen to gesture more than others.

Marketing strategies

Ramesh Johari, professor in management science and engineers looked at how markets can be engineered. He looked at the variables important on influencing exchange in a online market place.

When looking at a market we ask ‘who can we trade with’, ‘wou are our competitors’ and ‘how much should we charge’. These questions are difficult to answer because of the limited amount of information provided to us in determining the answer. The rise of online market platforms change our ability to make these decisions.

Two important points of platforms are: Fine-grained matching of market participants and fine-grained collection of information about matches. In otherwords, transparency and centralization.

Market designers, like Uber, centralize the marketplace around their control. You request a ride, but don’t have a choice between who to select. Once you make a request, Uber opaquely decides who will serve you.

Oppositely, Ebay or Odesk are very decentralized and allow the use all the access to make the best decision. Still, because there are so many options, the decision is influenced by factors of search, rating, history and filtering.

Both decentralization and centralization, opacity and transparency have its benefits. Decentralization is powerful when the platform does not know what the best match for the user will be. Centralization is best in the opposite situation when the platform knows what is best for the user.

Opaque markets can also be benefitial in crowded markets. Tradiationally economics states that having more choice allows for the market to make the best decision. Instead, in a “web 3.0” world where there is too much information, it is not always obvious to know what to choose. (i.e. taobao). Having too much information and not enough can both be negative.

The big questions are how do you know how to price these market items and how much information do you need to release. A project describing this issue is looking at the pricing of mobile apps and the variables that influence the purchase of these products. When the question regarding the best marketing strategy, visibility is the most important variable in competitive atmospheres.

Academic publication meta-coding

John Willinsky and Alex Garnet talked technically about providing an effective markup structure to existing PDF journals. The focus was kill the PDA and establish a constant method for automaking the parsing and rendering of scholarly materials. The benefit of a good markup is that your document becomes your metadata. You dont need a well coded abstract, but instead the document itself contains all the content availible for understanding the contents.

Reasons: Markup is expensive when someone needs to manually markup the document. Especially for small publishers, it can be very expensive to manually tag existing documents. As a result, having a system to systematically parsing exissing content is valuable.

PDF doesnt have well-structured text mining and indexing. It also goes against current patterns of data storage, in that it does not have a way to render in different formats on mobile platforms. This prevents dyanmic content from being loaded into the documents. (Imagine having a up to date graph in your content while reading a journal)

Links: Although I dont know how this will help, some of the programs/services used in developing this software was: ParsCit, BitTex, PDFx, OJS Plugins, CrossRef, and mPach.

(to be continued…That was only 1/3rd of the presentations.)

Traveling to meet and learn

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My trip

Enter US

I returned back to the US on December 24th (approximately two weeks ago). I overcame a week of jetlag, where I was waking up at 4 AM every morning and going to bed by 8pm. Not such a bad habit if you ask me. Before returning, I decided I was going to do a bit of traveling in the US, knowing that I was going to bunkerdown in Orange County, while finishing up some remaining school tasks. I planned a trip to New Mexico, Texas, the Bay Area, Detroit, New York, Boston, and Washington DC.

Honestly, I have no idea why I planned the trip. I had some places that I knew I wanted to visit (Im looking at you Detroit), but no concrete reasons or goals. I sort of decided that I needed to look at jobs, I needed to reintroduce myself to cities in the US after being China for a year, and finally I needed to see friends.

Immediately after getting into Aliso Viejo, I thought I had caught a cold. The opposite timezones threw off my internal clock. I decided I needed to get a jumpstart on aclimating to US life and started a process of reaching out to old clients and meeting new web developers.

My first step started in China. I used Reddit’s /r/webdev community to start asking people if they were interested in partnering to work together on projects. I was up at 3am trying to finalize some client work when I decided it would be a good idea to look for co-workers. The result was suprising. I had respondents from Japan, Ireland, and Los Angeles.

Being the internet, I did my best to create a concrete bond beyond a Reddit comment. I got skype/email contact information and started coordinating some direct contact. The Japan and Ireland connections were both quite experienced web developers in their field. On was a designer (Ireland) and the other a security expert (Japan).

The user from Los Angeles was most interesting, because he was the one I was most likely to meet. Los Angeles connection was a PHP developer and offered to meet when I arrived back in the US.

Reddit post /r/webdev

Networking through Reddit

I met Dan Morgan the third day I returned from China. Not being able to drive, my father graciously took time to drive me up to LA. I met with Dan over dinner, where I promised to cover the tab in exchange for his time.

My goal was to get as much exposure to the developer community in Los Angeles. I was looking to justify my interest in being a frontend developer in Los Angeles, as well as look for some validation in my experience in China. Having been out of the country and never apart of the professional web development community in California (or the US), I felt meeting people already in the field was the best step.

My conversation with Dan started out with him trying to guide me in the right direction. I was looking for what organizations I should watch out for, what meet ups I should be looking to join, and where I would be most efficient at meeting people who valued the work I had to offer. Dan answered my questions by guiding me to looking into the design firm Huge. He also alluded to the fact that there was a inflated value toward UX designers in Los Angeles.

Our conversation quickly shifted to how we could be mutually useful to one another. First I understood that he had personal projects of his own (as most developers should/do). I also was able to validate my own experience in China by realizing that not all people had experience with the LEAN startup methodology. More so, I realized that my experience organizing tech meetups and events was a valuable experience that would be useful in the context of networking.

Overall Dan was very enlightening. He made me realize there are different kinds of developers. To be blunt, people like Dan are very talented but not aware of the many opportunities around. Dan is the type of person would look for an easy solution available to making money. He was not interested in working hard for someone elses idea.

This attitiude was not because Dan was lazy, but because he was tired of developing other people’s ideas without being properlly rewarded. I saw this in some sense a result of being jaded by the community. This showed me that if I continue to do work for others, I need to enter contracts/relationships with the understanding that I need to cover my bases from the beginning. Rather than expecting to be rewarded in the future for work in the past, I need to make sure I am rewarded in the present.

Reddit to the rescue

Reddit to the rescue (again)

Next step, I drove to New Mexico with Ryan. We decided to go the scenic route through the native American reservations in Arizona. Our route took us through parts of Arizona where we didnt know anybody. We needed a place to sleep, but were also keeping to a restricted budget.

Our trip began on New Years day and we were going to need to find ap l ace to stay on that evening. We expected to be in Flagstaff or Sedona Arizona (approximately 400 miles from our final destination). Also, little did we know that the nightly temperature was below 0 degrees fahrenheit. This meant no sleeping in the car.

On December 31st, I posted on the /r/Arizona sub-reddit that we were looking for a place to stay on the night of the first. To my pleasant suprise, a redditor took up the call to host myself and my friend. Mind you, complete strangers.

Zach, in all his willingness, was okay with us coming to his house at 11pm (our expected arrival time). He gave us his room (where he had a couch and bed) and told us to make outselves at home. We met for no more than 5 minutes, because he had to be up for work the next morning at 5am. He even left before we woke up in the morning, so by the time we left, we never even got to say bye.

I am extremely grateful for his willingness to host us. Ryan and I left a small gift (a book, photos, and chocolates) to say thanks. Apart from some text message exchanges, we didnt otherwise communicate. Before leaving, Ryan and I cleaned up the room. We tried to leave the place cleaner than when we arrived.

Overall, loving the network opportunities coming from Reddit. Highly recommend it to others looking to connect with new job markets or looking for places to live!