Cognitive Science, Education, Technology, etc.

Update: It looks like the Kutztown 13 case is going to be resolved reasonably. No one's going to jail.

Seems a bunch of bunch of high school kids are up on charges because they “cracked” the administrative password on the laptops they were issued. In this case, the students were greatly assisted by the fact that some of the laptops had the administrative password taped to the back, and some students (the "Apple Corps") were told the passwords and all the laptops used the exact same passwords. Oh, and the password turned out to be the address of the school.

The kids shouldn't have done this, but this comes close to entrapment. Suspend them for a few days, start using a reasonable security policy and get on with your lives.

Who would have thought it was so hard to give away computers?

Hot on the heels of a near-riot when Henrico County decided to sell their used iBooks for only $50, the Pittsburgh Public schools are also running into trouble giving away their PCs.

In both cases, the problem is that the school districts valued the old PCs at much less than the market (Henrico at $50; Pittsburgh said they were "garbage").

Hasn't anyone heard of ebay?

Speaking of new superintendents, The national media has played the story of Mark Roosevelt becoming Pittsburgh's superintendent as a story about the trend towards hiring non-traditional superintendents. But there's non-traditional and then there's non-traditional. Roosevelt isn't a businessman or a general who has shown leadership but whose career has had nothing to do with education. His whole career has been about education, though more from the policy side than the operations side. I'm hoping for the best.

We picked a cover for Bridge to Algebra. For me, the experience was like picking a china pattern when I got married. My initial reaction was that I didn’t care, but as soon as I saw some of the possibilities, there’s a lot of "I can't live with that one."

The cover is a picture of a bridge. Surprised?

Linda Seebach of the Rocky Mountain News garden-pathed me with her advice to Denver's new superintendent. She starts by advising him not to trust so-called experts. Sounds like good advice. Education's full of self-proclaimed experts who promote their pet theories with little concern for evidence.

But check out her solution -- Trust a different set of experts.

This is not a fix for education's problems; it's just a volley in the turf war between education professors and mathematicians. The reason education is awash in fads and unfounded theories is precisely because education tries to solve its problems by abandoning the experts who weren't able to help for another set of experts who promise to do better. The solution is not to turn to a new group of experts. The solution is to try things out, measure the results, keep what works and get rid of the rest. Sound familiar? It's the scientific method.

Cool site of the week: The Visual Information Center at the University of Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh’s a shrinking city and in the process of closing schools. This group produces maps showing all sorts of information about the schools in the district – where the students live, where the free-and-reduced-lunch students live, etc. My daughter's a dot on this map, but I'm not saying which one.

The NY Times (yeah, you gotta register, but its free) reports that the educational software market is in decline. They particularly focus on home software for young kids.

What’s going on? The educational software industry has, once again, promised more than they can deliver. Most of the stuff in this category is lousy. At the recent SIIA EdTech conference, Ed Coughlin told a depressing tale of two software packages, Reader Rabbit and DaisyQuest. You’ve probably heard of Reader Rabbit, but DaisyQuest has disappeared from the market. Guess which one has research demonstrating its effectiveness? And which one is still on the market.

Competitive markets work when the criteria for success in the market values in the short term what works for them in the long term. This hasn’t happened in educational software (or, more broadly, in education). In the short term, consumers are attracted by flash and (assumed) engagement. In the long term, though, they want effectiveness. But effectiveness is unrelated to flash and only related to engagement in ways that aren’t always obvious to consumers. So they buy software once for the flash and then don’t return.