So there’s this big deal thing called Code Year and I was going to write a whole blog post about that, but Julie Meloni beat me to it and said it better than I would have:
I wish that Code Year was 2013 and 2012 was “some smart people with good ideas and a lot of money built took the time to build great pedagogically-driven tool to really solve an existing problem for folks who want and need training in this area.”
So is it me, or is Code Year just Codecademy on a calendar? Oh, and they started to use Meetup. I don’t really see what their $2.5M round is buying yet, let alone how they’re going to make it back. Maybe I just need to be patient. But Code Year is already launched.
Zooming out, I see Code Year as a small (and perhaps overexposed) part of a larger overall movement that includes MIT’s OpenCourseware, Khan Academy, and the Stanford AI and ML courses. There are serious questions about how well this kind of stuff works. But it looks like the train is leaving the station, so we might as well start figuring out how to point the tracks not off a cliff.
Bloomberg says he’s going to do it:
My New Year's resolution is to learn to code with Codecademy in 2012! Join me. codeyear.com #codeyear—
Mike Bloomberg (@MikeBloomberg) January 05, 2012
And now the White House is partnering with Codecademy to create something called “Code Summer+” which I predict will yet again repackage Codecademy courses without addressing questions of instructional design and pedagogy.
Then there’s this inconvenient little point:
Today the White House officially endorsed the *for-profit* company codecademy. Well at least it's not Halliburton!—
(@zedshaw) January 18, 2012
While the business model hasn’t been revealed yet, Union Square Ventures also hasn’t come out to say that the seed round was actually a charitable donation. It certainly does make things confusing.
But wait — I’m a public high school computer science teacher. Why am I complaining about any of this? I see why Zed Shaw might be bitter pissed, but I’m not trying to sell any books about programming. (Update: Zed Shaw clarifies his position and says Codecademy’s failings actually drive readers to him. Which is fine. My point is just that he makes money in the same business space as Codecademy, where I have zero financial stake in any of this, so why the hell do I care who is getting a boost from Obama?)
My answer echos some of Julie’s comments: I love that there’s an effort to make people more aware of CS and an effort to help more people get into it. I worry that these efforts significantly misrepresent the challenge of learning CS concepts, and put too much faith in people learning on their own. It’s not like the resources and reference materials haven’t been out there on the internet the whole time. Is the problem really that people need game mechanics to help them learn? Or is the problem that this stuff is hard to learn without someone in real life helping you?
Now the idea that folks might just start getting together, outside of traditional institutions, to help struggle through the hard parts is inspiring. We might really be able to move beyond the traditional model of education. But then how do we know the learning is real? As usual, Bruce Sterling called it a couple years out. He wrote a piece for Wired called Favela Chic education back in 2009 whose conclusion was basically, “Who cares about proving it?” So come on, let’s just start learning how to program already! We’re not going to get to the future by sitting around reading and writing blog posts!
OK, but one more wrinkle before we get back on our social networks to check if any of our friends have learned any new skills in the last 5 minutes: Justin Reich just gave a talk entitled “Will Free Benefit the Rich? How Free and Open Education Might Widen Digital Divides”. It’s worth considering the possibility that the efforts being made here, including the projects endorsed by the White House, may have exactly the opposite of the intended effect.
I can’t predict the future. But as a person who spends my days helping kids learn computer science, I can tell you this: People are not going to stop getting stuck on tricky concepts. They’re tricky. People are not going to stop needing expert help and guidance. They don’t know what they don’t know. Unless the online self-learning initiatives and businesses start to take this into account, start to take research seriously, and start to test solutions, a lot of venture capital and venture philanthropy money is going to end up burned. And after all that, we’re still going to need more programmers.
Today’s farcical public education situation: Attempting to shape employee behavior via censorship. As of today, SFUSD blocks an unknown number of web sites, including TeacherPayTeachers — not just for students, but for faculty as well. Here’s what I see:
Obviously, this is a pointlessly stupid thing to do. In the year 2012, people have multiple ways to access the internet. And as boring as it is to quote the contract, it seems clear that the district can’t legally limit teacher use of resources:
6.2 Academic Freedom – The District and the Union agree that academic freedom is essential to the fulfillment of the purposes of the San Francisco Unified School District, and they acknowledge that fundamental need to protect teachers from unreasonable censorship or restraint which might interfere with their obligation to pursue truth in the performance of their job with the District.
6.2.1 A teacher’s academic freedom is his/her right and responsibility to study, investigate, present, interpret, and discuss all the relevant facts and ideas in the field of his/her professional competence. This freedom implies no limitation other than those imposed by generally accepted standards of scholarship. As a professional, the teacher strives to maintain a spirit of free inquiry, open-mindedness, and impartiality in the classroom. As a member of an academic community, however, the teacher is free to present in the field of his or her professional competence his/her opinions or convictions and with them the premises from which they are derived.
6.2.2 Within the bounds of Board policies and administrative regulations, as well as adopted state and district curriculums, teachers shall have the opportunity to utilize best practices in employing their teaching methodologies that address students’ different learning styles. Teachers shall also have the discretion to use supplemental materials and develop supplementary lessons aligned with California content standards and district adopted core curriculum.
6.3 Listening, recording, television, or other monitoring devices shall not be used in any part of the building to violate teachers’ rights.
Emphasis mine. I’ll also mention here that I’ve never used TeachersPayTeachers myself. I saw it mentioned in an edtech newsletter, tried to look it up, and found it was blocked. So this isn’t about a pet resource. This is about how and why policy is made. If a teacher finds or purchases materials through this (or any other) web site, and deems them to be relevant in the discretion of their professional competence, then the teacher can use those materials in the classroom. So what possible reason is there for blocking teacher access to this site at SFUSD schools? This looks like a ham-fisted attempt to prevent teachers from sharing or selling curriculum materials. And why would the district want to do that?
SFUSD Board Policy 4540, which at least two of our current school board members claim they don’t know anything about on Facebook (screenshot here), states the following:
1. Patentable or copyrightable materials developed by staff members in the course of carrying out their professional responsibilities on District time shall be the property of the District.
2. Such materials developed partially on District time and partially on the employee’s personal time shall be the property of the District and the employee pursuant to an agreement between the employee and the District.
3. Such materials created by an employee during personal time when not fulfilling contractual duties to the District are the property of the employee.
It doesn’t make sense to me that materials developed by government employees would be anything other than public domain, but this also isn’t about the ill-informed Board Policy 4540. Blocking access to a lesson-sharing or -selling web site on the school network is an overly broad measure that doesn’t do anything to enforce the policy. All it does is limit the ability of teachers to use or even assess the value of a resource at school. All it does is make teachers work at home in order to avoid these kinds of arbitrary and petty censorship attempts. All it does is send the message that although we are trusted to work with your children, we’re not trusted to use the internet. These kinds of actions are indefensible from an institution that claims to value access, equity, student achievement, and accountability.
This is why I’ve been asking for the past week for a reason that TeachersPayTeachers is blocked. Today, SFUSD’s CTO Matthew Kinzie replied to my email, writing:
“I am not aware of any political motivation to block this site. Unfortunately, we lack the documentation behind the original decision to black [sic] the site. John approved ITD unblocking this site a couple of days ago.”
How many other web sites are blocked without any documentation of the original decision? That list of sites, however long it may be, represents SFUSD going above and beyond what their contracted internet filtering vendor, M86, blocks for CIPA compliance. And now we learn that this extra layer of censorship is not connected to anyone who can explain why or how it exists. Why are we running our school district as if it were a repressive political regime?
The person that CTO Kinzie refers to approving the unblocking is Dr. John Rubio, Educational Technology Supervisor. How he ended up with the unenviable responsibility for making the school district’s censorship decisions is a question that only his boss, Executive Director of Academics & Professional Development Bill Sanderson, can answer. Ultimately, Superintendent Carlos Garcia has the power to direct how these censorship policies (or informal policy decisions, since none of them are ever made public) are set and implemented. Meanwhile, SFUSD continues to devote resources to limiting student and faculty access to the internet, while failing to provide even basic email accounts for students. It looks like it’s going to be a long 21st century for those of us working here.
I just got an invitation to read (that is, grade) the AP Computer Science exam in June. After reading about Helen’s experience last year and hearing Dr. Jody Paul, the chief reader, speak at the Grace Hopper conference in November, I’m excited for this! With the exam just under 4 months away, my focus is on preparing my students and I’ve been thinking a lot about how the exam is scored. It will be very interesting to be a part of that process from the other side.
As I delinquently finish grading final essays for my 10th grade class, I’m surprised (and not really surprised) to find how confused some of them are. But I think I’ve found at least one source of their confusion, one more of these technical vocabulary things that unintentionally makes it hard for humans to learn how the web works: The word “link”. What does link actually mean?
Without going buck wild and consulting some kind of dictionary-like resource, I figure it means at least three different things. First, a link is a connection, as when we use the href attribute of the a tag to make clickable text that will take you to another site. Second, the verb form means either creating or following one of these connections. Third, and most confusingly, there’s actually a link tag, which we most commonly use to import CSS rules from an external file.
Think about this for a second: When you specify the href of an a tag, you’re giving the URL for the client to visit and display when the stuff inside that a tag is clicked. We usually call that whole structure a link. But when you specify the href of a link tag with rel="stylesheet", you’re giving the URL of a resource that should be incorporated into the current document. No wonder the kids are confused! Remind me to tell next year’s class this little secret.
A recent homework question: “Describe each of the three ways that you can remove a reference from an object and make it eligible for garbage collection.”
Student answer: “Abandoning the original reference for another (yea like dumping a girlfriend for another one, so the original is up for grabs (or gc)”
