Wireless = Paperless = Personalized
Personalization can offer huge performance increase for education and also help to save in costs and the environment. A paperless school can teach students to use today’s technology naturally and effectively as a part of their own knowledge. The learning process as a whole needs to change to accommodate this availability of information by teaching the “on-demand deepening of knowledge” methodology to train people who are able and willing to use the technical advances as a direct part of their own knowledge.
Introduction
Remember the change from landline telephones to cellular phones? The time after we could answer everywhere, anytime and any place? This next phase of mobile communications of wireless availability and easily retrievable information will change and has changed everything.
Who needs libraries when you have a laptop in your bag full of information worth a hundred libraries? If you want to be really old school, you can pick up a DVD-version of the Encyclopedia Britannica or whip up your wireless net and log in to Wikipedia. Now you’re probably asking how this will change anything?
The penetration of information availability
Well, more and more schools are having increasing numbers of laptops in their classrooms. Rooms with wireless Internet, with people who know how to search information from the net basically in real-time with the topics of the professor. When will this change turn from the teacher using this resource in teaching instead of students finding all the answers before the teacher finishes the question?
Students in Ulan Bator, Mongolia using the OLPC laptop
I’m checking my professors’ facts all the time regarding case studies and similar, so much actually that some professors are pretty annoyed about me knowing too much – since working with case studies sometimes requires people NOT to know too much in order to keep the discussion unbiased. But on the other side this enables me to benefit from my wide knowledge working together with my strong data retrieval skills – a method which I call “on-demand deepening of knowledge”. I can participate even deeper in to conversations; I can check facts and give valid information and thus enrich the conversation and the learning experience.
Teaching methods in general also need to be changed, since there is no need to make people transfer information to their heads but to make people understand and learn how to use that information for the required purpose. Since there is no need to remember every little detail from each fact, but the general layout of things and how they relate to each other. This means that also changes are required from the faculty’s side in terms of how subjects are taught and that data retrieval skills are more important than a good memory of details.
How could the system benefit from this?
This change will, of course, change the current system in total. Imagine a standardized environment – paperless school, where all students have a personal laptop with an open-source learning platform both in their personal units and the school in general.
There is no need for books, paper exams, or specific classrooms – all the books are in digital format available on the school platform in easily searchable databases with related topic linking and user contributed notes (which have been a great add-on to information if you look at technical manuals such as the one PHP offers, example), exams are held in a secure online environment with improved security, always the right amount of exams, automatic answer checking and just so many things that help the teacher concentrating in the main job of showing the students their mistakes, not just going through exams mechanically – leaving space for human errors.
Since there’s no need for specific classrooms, the classes can be held anywhere in the range of the internet connection – outside if it’s a nice day, home if one is sick but wants to study at home. No more forgotten study books, bent backs and spinal problems due to having to carry a 60 lbs backpack five days a week for 12 years, no more computer phobia since starting young would give a good learning curve and when the user interface would be designed logically the usability would be increasing productivity even further.
Personalized studying bring effective results
One of the largest problems with schools is the huge difference between students. I’ve had to suffer personally from this standardization of students where everybody is progressing at pace with the dumbest and slowest kid in the classroom – ironically this kid is probably seen slow and dumb just because the teaching methods used are wrong for the kid, therefore making all progress minimal.
The online learning platform would offer truly personalized, progressive teaching methods which not only adapts to the way the students learns but also would learn from the student how to portray information. Imagine a French class where the grammar tests would progress according to one’s skills, the more advanced students would have more advanced assignments and games like crosswords or charade style games to keep them occupied while the slower students would follow along.
Same goes with pronunciation: The students would have personal headphones with a microphone speaking directly to the platform that would have speech recognition and voice pattern matching to teach correct pronunciation and could give personalized topics for children to stay interested in. Just changing the subject from cars to ponies might make girls concentrate more to the text, even though the learning experience would be the same.
The students would have the chance to take all their notes to their own personal unit and they would have the chance to revisit old classes and their material directly in a logically usable search to find the important things. The search results would show all relating documents, such as the assignments regarding the day and mouse-hover translation of words.
The matter of personalization would also be another thing deepening the learning experience; every student would have the chance to personalize their own system with their own graphics, color and fonts most suitable for their eyes and just to make it more fun.
Too expensive or are the benefits larger than the initial investment?
The cost of having a personalized unit for every student with a life cycle of about four years would cost about the same as buying the books for each student and investing money to the school library. Economies of scale would join the game when the quantities would grow. Having a few extra laptops in case of something breaks down, with docks in classrooms where the computers would charge and automatically backup themselves to the storage servers inside the school network would ensure the integrity of data.
The amount of information gathered from the student’s progress would help the school to have concrete statistics in real time of different learning methods, failures and successes. The statistical data would also show the students teacher directly on the personal needs of the specific student and where they would need more exercise. In an example having Matt, who is a natural talent in mathematics do his math assignments quickly and then concentrate in his problems with English language while the others are focusing on the math problems.
Commercial education is already offering personalized learning plans and logically we can deduct that personalization will create better results: Studying is basically selling the information to the student so that our marketing effort stays in the students’ mind, we can see that having something to relate to eases the process of understanding. Online stores, such as Amazon are notorious with their personalized content but as we can see from their long history and good results, that they are doing something correctly.
So, before I will have time to do more accurate research, discussion and comments would be welcome to have other points of views on the topic and information on similar research would be appreciated.
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