Navigating Technology and Art at a School of Contradictions

In the 19th Century, the London Bridge was a marvel of technology and an example of artistic creativity, and nearly a century later, one innovative American town dismantled the original masonry of the London Bridge and rebuilt it to handle modern traffic.

Today, four miles from where the bridge now sits in Lake Havasu, Az., Nautilus Elementary is using a 21st Century technology and art to help improve teaching and student learning. For all its success, the U.S. Department of Education named Nautilus Elementary School a 2011 Blue Ribbon school.

At the school, technology is helping teachers use performance data to improve education for their students. “Nautilus stands out because from the very beginning, we took standards-based education very seriously,” said Margee Chieffo, a kindergarten teacher. “We taught…to the standards, measured student achievement…then went back and re-taught things that were not comprehensively learned by students.”

To do this, students use “electronic clickers”—small remotes, with which they can answer questions in class—and other tools that give immediate feedback on whether or not individual students and the class as a whole understand an idea or process. With this information, a teacher can focus on particular areas that students are having a hard time grasping. ?The school also uses an online program to track student performance and keep teachers and parents up to date.? This management software allows teachers to post and parents to see their child’s grades online at any time.? Through this system, parents can also view video tutorials, and teachers and administrators have access to educational tools.

Teachers, school staff, parents and community leaders join Nautilus Elementary students at the National Blue Ribbon School Award ceremony

While performance measurement and its data is key to designing lessons, the faculty sees teaching as an art to reach each child as an individual person. “My philosophy is this: I don’t teach subjects. I teach children,” said Chieffo.

Carolyn Myers, a 4th grade teacher, expands on teaching as an art: “We know which teachers are better at technology, which are strong in reading strategies, phonics, math. We say, ‘Can you help me with this? I’m just not reaching this child.’ ”

Nautilus Elementary’s students are enthusiastic when giving their perspectives. Andrew, a 6th grader, said, “We have…great teachers. They encourage us to do our best.” Gabby, also a 6th grader, gave her view on why the school succeeds. “Everyone’s like a family…we’re all really close.” Laurel, a 3rd grader, agreed with her 6th grade friends and gave the bottom line on going to school at Nautilus. “We get smarter by the minute.”

Christie Olsen, who teaches a 5th and 6th grade-blended class, recognizes that a school needs the community. ?A desert town with the London Bridge and a school named after a sea creature would be expected to have a school that is innovative. That’s the case with Nautilus Elementary—bringing technology and art together to win the Blue Ribbon Award.

Joe Barison

Joe Barison works in ED’s San Francisco regional office.

View the original article here

Navigating Technology and Art at a School of Contradictions

In the 19th Century, the London Bridge was a marvel of technology and an example of artistic creativity, and nearly a century later, one innovative American town dismantled the original masonry of the London Bridge and rebuilt it to handle modern traffic.

Today, four miles from where the bridge now sits in Lake Havasu, Az., Nautilus Elementary is using a 21st Century technology and art to help improve teaching and student learning. For all its success, the U.S. Department of Education named Nautilus Elementary School a 2011 Blue Ribbon school.

At the school, technology is helping teachers use performance data to improve education for their students. “Nautilus stands out because from the very beginning, we took standards-based education very seriously,” said Margee Chieffo, a kindergarten teacher. “We taught…to the standards, measured student achievement…then went back and re-taught things that were not comprehensively learned by students.”

To do this, students use “electronic clickers”—small remotes, with which they can answer questions in class—and other tools that give immediate feedback on whether or not individual students and the class as a whole understand an idea or process. With this information, a teacher can focus on particular areas that students are having a hard time grasping. ?The school also uses an online program to track student performance and keep teachers and parents up to date.? This management software allows teachers to post and parents to see their child’s grades online at any time.? Through this system, parents can also view video tutorials, and teachers and administrators have access to educational tools.

Teachers, school staff, parents and community leaders join Nautilus Elementary students at the National Blue Ribbon School Award ceremony

While performance measurement and its data is key to designing lessons, the faculty sees teaching as an art to reach each child as an individual person. “My philosophy is this: I don’t teach subjects. I teach children,” said Chieffo.

Carolyn Myers, a 4th grade teacher, expands on teaching as an art: “We know which teachers are better at technology, which are strong in reading strategies, phonics, math. We say, ‘Can you help me with this? I’m just not reaching this child.’ ”

Nautilus Elementary’s students are enthusiastic when giving their perspectives. Andrew, a 6th grader, said, “We have…great teachers. They encourage us to do our best.” Gabby, also a 6th grader, gave her view on why the school succeeds. “Everyone’s like a family…we’re all really close.” Laurel, a 3rd grader, agreed with her 6th grade friends and gave the bottom line on going to school at Nautilus. “We get smarter by the minute.”

Christie Olsen, who teaches a 5th and 6th grade-blended class, recognizes that a school needs the community. ?A desert town with the London Bridge and a school named after a sea creature would be expected to have a school that is innovative. That’s the case with Nautilus Elementary—bringing technology and art together to win the Blue Ribbon Award.

Joe Barison

Joe Barison works in ED’s San Francisco regional office.

View the original article here

Limits of Technology and the Limits of Science

In 1997, I managed to get a copy of the book "Limits to Growth", which was published in 1972. I knew the basic ideas contained in this book, by reading about it in previous years, but there was a very important idea, which I did not expect to find it there, the idea did not receive the attention it deserves. It a warning from the authors (mostly technical scientists), from putting hope that the technological advances that can come in the future, may resolve the serious problems threatening the world.

Perhaps the reasons behind the neglect of this very important idea,were two reasons. First, it is a terrifying idea, all the hopes of saving civilization, centered on the ability of new technology to do the job, and the second reason is that the Club of Rome (the group who issued a book),did not give strong evidence to confirming it.

This idea is one of the most difficult philosophical questions,and it is central to the issue of the collapse of modern civilization probably the Club of Rome based their expectations on some simple assumptions, such as, the probability of failure to achieve the saving technological developments, in time, given the expected imminence of the collapse, but if we wanted this idea to be established on strong theoretical bases, it is inevitable to go into the depths of philosophy.

I do not want to go, in this book, in the depth of this difficult subject, but I will try to simplify the idea, so that the interested reader, would find the basis for researches.

Technology is the application of the laws of the theory in science, and therefore, if we want to answer the question: "What are the limits of technology?" We must first answer the question: "What are the limits of science?"

Scientists in the field of theoretical physicists were trying,for many decades, to reach a theory they call, "theory of all forces" or "theory of everything", one of the famous scientists known for their dedication to this attempt, was Albert Einstein, these attempts means implicitly assume that there are limits to the theoretical knowledge, but theoretical physicists,did not often depend on philosophical basis to support this trend,and most of these attempts were established only on the personal perceptions of the possibility of achieving this ambitious goal. These attempts remain incomplete and the history of science gives us examples of the stages of previous science, where scientists thought they had already reached these final limits of science, maybe the most famous of these historical stages was the stage in the end of the nineteenth century. After the theory of Max well about the electromagnetic waves and before the explosion of the ideas of quantum and relativity, at the beginning of the twentieth century.

But philosophical thinking takes another course, the Dialectical materialism of the Marxism confirms that there are no limits to science, and in this trend it is followed by most modern philosophies.

It is very important to note that the introduction of the idea of infinite knowledge, in fact, does not solve the problem of an imminent collapse of civilization, but only puts it in a different form. The saving technological achievements, which are still needed very soon, if brought in tremendous intensity, the result will be that the question will change from "the collapse of civilization" to "the collapse of the image that we know, or that we can imagine for civilization", and this result does not differ. In fact, from the previous one, as it, in both cases, all things related to our current life, will end, the validity of this result,was approved by the American thinker Francis Fukuyama, in 1993, the credit for the courage,where the idea was incompatible with his famous idea of the "end of history", which was in the height of popularity at that time.

On the other hand, the adoption of the idea of limited knowledge, certainly, settle the issue in favor of the idea of the collapse of civilization.

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Cheaters Find an Adversary in Technology

With more than 100,000 students tested, proctors could not watch everyone — not when some teenagers can text with their phones in their pockets.

So the state called in a company that turns technology against the cheats: it analyzes answer sheets by computer and flags those with so many of the same questions wrong or right that the chances of random agreement are astronomically small. Copying is the almost certain explanation.

Since the company, Caveon Test Security, began working for Mississippi in 2006, cheating has declined about 70 percent, said James Mason, director of the State Department of Education’s Office of Student Assessment. “People know that if you cheat there is an extremely high chance you’re going to get caught,” Mr. Mason said.

As tests are increasingly important in education — used to determine graduation, graduate school admission and, the latest, merit pay and tenure for teachers — business has been good for Caveon, a company that uses “data forensics” to catch cheats, billing itself as the only independent test security outfit in the country.

Its clients have included the College Board, the Law School Admission Council and more than a dozen states and big city school districts, among them Florida, Texas, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta — usually when they have been embarrassed by a scandal.

“Every single year I’ve been in testing there has been more cheating than the year before,” said John Fremer, 71, a Caveon co-founder who was once the chief test developer for the SAT.

Exposing cheats using statistical anomalies is more than a century old. James Michael Curley, the so-called rascal king of Massachusetts politics, and an associate were shown to have copied each other’s civil service exams in 1902 because they had 12 identical wrong answers.

Probability science has come a long way since then, and Caveon says its analysis of answer sheets is the most sophisticated to date. In addition to looking for copying, its computers, which occupy an office in American Fork, Utah, and can crunch up to one million records, hunt for illogical patterns, like test-takers who did better on harder questions than easy ones. That can be a sign of advance knowledge of part of a test.

The computers also look for unusually large score gains from a previous test by a student or class. They also count the number of erasures on answer sheets, which in some cases can be evidence that teachers or administrators tampered with a test.

When the anomalies are highly unlikely — their random occurrence, for example, is less than one in one million — Caveon flags the tests for further investigation by school administrators.

Although its data forensics are esoteric and the company operates in the often-secretive world of testing, Caveon’s methods are not without critics. Walter M. Haney, a professor of education research and measurement at Boston College, said that because the company’s methods for analyzing data had not been published in scholarly literature, they were suspect.

“You just don’t know the accuracy of the methods and the extent they may yield false positives or false negatives,” said Dr. Haney, who in the 1990s pushed the Educational Testing Service, the developer of the SAT, to submit its own formulas for identifying cheats to an external review board.

David Foster, the chief executive of Caveon, said the company had not published its methods because it was too busy serving clients. But the company’s chief statistician is available to explain Caveon’s algorithms to any client who is curious.

Other means that the company uses to stop cheating are not based on statistics.

For the Law School Admission Council, which administers the LSAT four times a year to a total of more than 140,000 people, Caveon patrols the Internet looking for leaked questions on sites it calls “brain dumps,” where students who have just taken an exam discuss it openly.

“There’s all kinds of stuff on the blogs after the test trying to guess which stuff will show up in the future; there’s a whole cottage industry,” said Wendy Margolis, a spokeswoman for the council.

Caveon, which declined to reveal what it charges clients, sends letters to the people who operate those Web sites requiring them to take down the material under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Standardized testing is controversial with some parents and educators, but not to Dr. Fremer, Caveon’s longtime president, who recently gave up managerial duties. He credits testing with helping him escape from a working-class background. The son of a New York City firefighter, he earned a Ph.D. from Columbia in educational psychology and measurement, and then went to work for the Educational Testing Service. He first worked in the verbal aptitude department and later spent seven years leading a major overhaul of the SAT in 1994.

Dr. Fremer has little patience with critics who say standardized tests do not accurately measure academic prowess.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 31, 2010

An article on Monday about Caveon Test Security, a company that analyzes answer sheets from standardized tests to identify cheating, misstated an example of a statistical threshold the company would use to identify suspicious tests. Tests with anomalous answers would be flagged as suspicious if the chance of the anomalies occurring randomly is less than one in one million, not greater than one in one million.

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