Assistant Professor @UCIEducation Interested in [foundations/history/philosophy/equity] of ed tech, ed data science, and learning sciences

Joined August 2019
“They think the way you toughen kids up is to get them to clean a bathroom, and the way you get them to learn is to power through it as quickly as possible,” Professor Willingham said, adding, “These are naïve theories of psychology.”
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I may not see eye-to-eye with @ben_m_somers on this, but here's where I think he's on to something: 1. I agree with @nirmalpatel_, @AmmarMerhbi, and many others that the history of ed tech keeps repeating itself and we are seeing and will see this with AI as well. BUT... 1/
+1 - My *personal* opinion on AI/EdTech/Education: People who think "AI will change learning" don't understand that education is a society building enterprise. It has nothing to do with technology! MOOCs only changed life of people who love to learn, and so did Google, and so does AI. But at large, education remains social work. This is why all waves of edtech feel the same, where tech pushers in control of funding and heavy marketing backing think more about tech and less about the society building role of education. They think about learning as a very targeted achievement rat race thing. It is not inclusive growth, it is me winning while everyone loses. You can see it from their holier than thou attitude. "Technology will solve everything" GTFO, tech salesman In society, technology is not at the center. Neither AI will be at the center. Human well being will be at the center!
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5. I think this aligns with what @ben_m_somers is trying to do, but I also think he's one of the few people really trying to do this (with grounding in Papert), and many other visions of AI in education will fall flat. 6/
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Will this be impactful at a large scale.* Not sure. Could meaningful ed tech come out of it? I think so, in the sense that Logo is meaningful. *Ben's smart enough to step outside the grammar of schooling to try to push the needle on this with @recessgg. :) 7/
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I'm sure @geoffreyhinton knows you don't need AI to "draw all the curves for you" and have students "try changing the coefficients [of polynomials] and see how how the curves changes." @Desmos does that. @ddmeyer, maybe you should offer Hinton a tour?
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By the way, Ben usefully separates the evidence he's gathered from his own personal commentary. Regardless of what you think of his commentary—you don't even have to read it—I think the evidence is worth paying attention to.
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Sure there's some commentary sprinkled alongside the evidence, but I think a lot of critiques about his writing are focused on his personal commentary at the end (and some focused on his data collection methods). But why can't we have a conversation about the data itself?
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Alpha School defenders have stated that good criticisms of Alpha School are welcome, but @benjaminjriley is not serious and shouldn't be trusted. I'm curious what they think of this critique. Should it be taken seriously or is it just Ben continuing to try to stop edu innovation?
I’ve just published another report on Alpha School’s Survival Challenge.
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Can you guess which educational psychologist said this? "Common observation should teach that mental capacities are highly specialized. A man may be a tip-top musician but in other respects an imbecile: he may be a gifted poet, but an ignoramus in music: [cont.]
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he may have a wonderful memory for figures and only a mediocre memory for localities, poetry or human faces: school children may reason admirably in science and be below the average in grammar: those very good in drawing may be very poor in dancing."
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Wow, unexpected career milestone reached! Piotr Wozniak (@SuperMemoWoz) quote tweeted me—to quote Seymour Papert's view on something at that! (I'd actually completely forgotten about this quote. Nice reminder.)
Replying to @THSchoolFactory
just by chance I see Papert agreed with you, however, I think it only applies to directed learning, as kids naturally balance frustration: xitter.cf/EdTechMuser/status/180…
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Since there's a lot of excitement around accelerated learning with ed tech, check out The Program. In a LARGE experiment (900 students, 32 classes, alg 1, 2, and geom, 3 conditions), most students using The Program without teacher help finished the curriculum in half the year!
MathAcademy, Alpha School, Mentava, Recess, and yes I'm throwing PhysicsGraph in there are lighting the world of education on fire and I couldn't be more excited.
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@bferster has a nice writeup on this. There's also an article called The Shame of American Education that talks about it. But I don't see much discussion on social media. (The founders aren't on X.)
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Shayan Doroudi retweeted
I'm excited to announce the most ambitious recreation of Bloom's 2Sigma study of the last 40 years. It's funded by @reedhastings and staffed by a team of 20 of the best educators in this country. Our education team's goal is to show the largest academic gains in one year ever recorded, and we'll publish our results even if we fail. Recently, @jwdanner introduced me to @reedhastings. Most people know Reed co-founded Netflix. Fewer know he has been one of the driving forces behind improving education for the last twenty years. When Reed pitched me on recreating Bloom's famous 2-sigma problem, I felt an overwhelming sense of hope for education. Over the last few months we have moved at breakneck speed to assemble an exceptional team. Someone recently described it to me as the "Avengers of education." We are testing one question with the rigor it deserves: can elite one-on-one tutoring reproduce the largest learning gains ever measured in a controlled study? We will work with researchers from Stanford, Brown, Cornell, and other leading institutions, and we intend to be the most transparent research group in the field. That means publishing our methods, our benchmarks, and our results, whatever they show. We will invest up to $100,000 per year per student to give them the best education on the planet. If it works, the data and methods can help educators and technologists recreate these outcomes for every child. We are actively hiring tutors, engineers, and operations people to help us climb this mountain.
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