calculadora de alicia

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The Future of Educational Technology and Education
Thinking of what education might look like in the
next decade, one quickly realizes that the trends
in technology are leaving a large number of our
students behind. We no longer live in an age of
visible movement when it comes to progress and
innovation. Today is an age of exponential
change. New and ever-improving technologies are
popping up every day and in every corner of
society. Educating the best and the brightest in
this brave new world will take a new and improved
educational paradigm. Allowing our educational
tools to age in the corner of the classroom will
be the mistake that may cost us our future.
Throwing away masses of children to inequitable
access will ensure that we languish at the bottom
of the global pool of employable workers for
decades to come. The New Toolbox I was at an
auction a few years ago and noticed a few old
woodworking tools that I thought I could use. For
a few bucks, I was able to snag an assortment of
hand tools calculadora alicia that may have been
in someone's toolbox for a generation or more. As
the next decade passed, I used these tools in my
shop for a wide variety of projects until my
projects outgrew these old, dull tools. My
woodworking creations continued to improve as did
my skills and artistry. I quickly discovered that
using improved tools would translate into
improved craftsmanship. As any woodworker will
tell you, new tools require new
skills. Woodworking is a great metaphor for
shaping and molding students. There is simply no
good substitute for a sharp tool. If you want to
build the best projects possible, you need to use
the best tools possible. Thinking in terms of the
next decade for our country, we will be sorely
disappointed in our projects if we fail to
improve our tools.
Within this article, I will try to paint a
picture of how technology will shape the way we
educate students in the next decade. I will
attempt to show the amazing possibilities that
lay before us if we will simply
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walk through the doorway of opportunity that is
open to us. My focus will be this idea
Transforming the student from being a passenger
to becoming a "user." You may be wondering what I
mean by this. Let me explain. Ask yourself what
it means to be a "user." A user is not simply a
person who uses. For the student, being a user
should involve using the latest technology in a
free and autonomous manner. This new-found
freedom will allow the student to become an
active participant in his/her education instead
of a passive passenger. No other time in history
have we been so able to make this a reality. In
our current technological society, being a user
also means being tracked. Tracking has become a
major part of our daily lives and is precisely
the engine that should drive our educational
process for the foreseeable future. Tracking a
student means having the ability to target
education toward weaknesses and strengths. The
ability to accurately customize curriculum to the
individual has been the holy grail of educational
philosophy for many years. This golden age of
technological development may soon enable this
dream to become a reality. Current educational
curriculum and individual assessment is arbitrary
at best. Being able to accurately asses a student
can only be achieved by using modern tracking and
database technologies. The means by which we can
make this a reality is readily available and only
needs to be taken off the shelf to be used. If
Congress is looking for a shovel-ready project,
this may be the one.
Imagine a world where every child has a tablet
computer with ready access to the App of virtual
photographic memory (internet). Further, imagine
that every student can access all the knowledge
of humankind freely at any moment in time.
Continue to imagine a world where a misspelled
word brings up a spelling challenge application
instead of an auto correction. Try to contemplate
what it would mean for a teacher to have a
database of every misspelled word, every
misunderstood concept or every missed equation
for each of their students. Try to envision a
teacher with the ability to customize the
experience of the individual "user" with minimal
effort. Imagine the curriculum being
automatically targeted to the user through an
intuitive educational platform that knows every
strength and each unique weakness. I could go on,
but I think you get the point.
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The company that makes this standard available to
the educational community will be the company
that shapes the future of humankind. Will it be
Google, Apple, Microsoft, or some other yet
unknown pioneer? Continuing from the thoughts in
my last post, I would like to elaborate on the
idea of the student as a user of a new
standardized educational platform. It is obvious
to me that the future of education will always
mirror our everyday lives in one way or another.
If you examine how technology has influenced your
daily life already, you begin to put together a
snapshot of what it will mean to be educated in
the next decade. In the last few hundred years,
most individuals would consider an education as
something you receive. You often hear the
question asked, "Where did you receive your
education?" As we proceed through the next
decade, education will slowly move away from
reception and toward being custom designed for
the individual user. New technology will not only
allow us to receive an education, but also
develop an education. The question we might ask
in 10 years is, "How did you develop your
education?" The question of where will still be
important, but the how of the matter will be the
focus that defines the individual. To make this a
reality we will need a standardized platform from
which to develop a student's unique education.
This standardized platform will allow us to
tailor a custom curriculum that will be matched
to talents, interests and life goals. For the
educator, a standardized platform will create a
way to assist the student in discovering a true
purpose in life through a unique educational
experience. The basics of reading, writing and
arithmetic will not be taught as much as they
will be discovered and used. Learning will become
a reciprocal experience between the teacher, the
student and the machine. Under a standardized
platform, each of these three participants will
have a role to play. The teacher will be the
facilitator, assisting the development of the
curriculum and inspiring the direction the
student takes. The student will be the user,
gathering resources, skills and knowledge in an
efficient and measured sequence. The machine will
do the work of data gathering and analysis, which
will assist the teacher and student in refining
the curriculum. This data gathering work of the
machine will also free the teacher from the
burden of record-keeping and tedious tasks that
currently distract from the real job of teaching
and learning. Under a standardized system, grade
level will be far less important. Achievement and
progression will be measured by accomplishment
and intelligence as a benchmark for success. The
question of failure or success will be irrelevant
and replaced with a standard and consistent
measurement of potential and overall
intelligence. Information will no longer be
missed but continually rehearsed and monitored
for retention by the machine. In our current
educational paradigm, the teacher is in charge of
arbitrarily constructing curriculum. This
approach to curriculum development is based on
inexperience in some cases, outdated materials,
inadequate funding and a shortage of time.
Measuring the success of a specific curriculum is
currently impossible. With a standardized system,
comparisons of curricular success can be made
across the entire spectrum of education and then
continually reformulated and enhanced by the
machine.
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Sadly, teachers today are bogged down with an
assortment of mind-numbing tasks that would be
better suited to an off-the-shelf automated
system. Tasks such as data tracking, reporting
and record keeping are currently accomplished
manually. These tasks could easily be delegated
to an intuitive database. Developing a standard
to follow would eliminate these tasks and free
the teacher to do their main job of teaching
students.
Education 3.0 Throughout history, man has sought
to pass on knowledge to the next generation. This
process started with oral tradition, storytelling
and writing. With the advent of the printing
press, knowledge and information slowly became
available to the masses. The amount of
information that could be gained by one human in
a lifetime was severely limited by his access to
printed materials and wealth. The majority of
learning was gained through observation and
imitation. We can call this Education
1.0. Education 2.0 starts around the late
eighteen hundreds with universal literacy
movements throughout newly industrialized regions
of the world. Improvements in education slowly
transitioned from apprenticeship to formal
education and training. Despite our movements
toward universal education, access to knowledge
and opportunity continues to be inequitable
throughout the world. Even with the arrival of
the computer revolution, access to the tools of
learning continues to define the learner. The
next decade may mark the moment in history when
all men are granted equal access to the greatest
treasure a soul can possess. I use the word may
in the last sentence because there is the chance
that we will miss this golden opportunity. Access
to Education 3.0 will only be gained through
investment and universal standardization. If we
continue to divert wealth toward fruitless goals
and corporate greed, this opportunity will be
lost or hopelessly delayed. Education 3.0, when
it arrives, will be the age of universal
enlightenment. Platforms for education and
learning will slowly standardize and become
globally accessible and affordable. The poorest
to the wealthiest will have access to the machine
that runs the platform. The thought on your mind
at this point is most likely wondering what
machine I keep referring to. The machine in
question is the one we have been so busy teaching
and training since roughly 1969. You've
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probably guessed it by now that I am referring to
the internet. The great cloud of knowledge that
we call the internet is precisely the mechanism
that we will use to build the platform of
Education 3.0. When the platform is finally in
place, the decade to follow will see the greatest
amount of wealth, discoveries and use of human
potential that we have witnessed during our time
on this earth. The only question that remains to
be answered is the point at which I will leave
this article. When will we allow the user to use
the machine to its potential? Stephen McClard has
been the Director of Bands at Bolivar High School
since 2002. Mr. McClard graduated from Southeast
Missouri State University in 1990. He started his
teaching career in Southeast Missouri before
moving to Illinois where he taught band for 8
years. Mr. McClard's bands have consistently
received superior ratings at contest as well as
many other awards and accolades. Since 2002, the
band has traveled twice to Chicago, where they
won 1st place class 4A and 1st place overall at
the Midwest Music In the Parks Festival. The band
also traveled to Cincinnati in 2006, receiving
the same honors. In 2006, Mr. McClard was named
by SBO Magazine as one of the 50 Directors Who
Make a Difference. In 2006, 2008 and 2009,
Bolivar RI School district was named one of the
"Best 100 Communities for Music Education" in
America by the American Music Conference. Mr.
McClard was previously featured on the cover of
the 2003 issue of SBO Magazine for his work with
music technology. In addition to his career in
education, Mr. McClard maintains an online
woodworking business and is a 3rd generation
piano technician. His woodworking creations
include custom bass guitars, which have sold all
over the world and one-of-a-kind computer desks
made from old pianos. His piano desks have been
featured in magazines such as Business 2.0 and
Piano Technicians Journal and in many other
newspapers and television news features. Open
Source Software in Higher Education The higher
education sector is quite unlike other
industries. It has its own processes and a
different set of demands. Most commercial
proprietary application vendors develop their
applications focused on a wider domain spread
across industries. This, academics complain,
creates a distinct disconnect between software
vendors and the end-users in academia. To
overcome these shortcomings, the education
industry started looking to "open source" as an
alternate model. Around a decade back,
institutions started debating total cost of
ownership in adopting an open source based
community approach vis-a-vis proprietary
applications, viability of open source based
business models, sustainability and security
issues. The success of community developed open
source software is quite well established. Linux
and Apache are ample proof of its success. A
similar trend, though not that widespread in its
reach, can be traced to the development of
community projects in education like the Moodle
and Sakai. Through the course of its formative
years, the open source community based approach
in education has developed several alternative
models. Some of these models and schools of
thought have thrived and been implemented
successfully across a significant spectrum of the
industry. Progress and success in open
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source projects like the Sakai, Moodle, Kuali,
uPortal, Shibboleth, and many more are being
closely watched by the industry. Community Source
Model One school of thought believes that open
source sharing is more a philosophical approach
than a viable alternative. The adoption of open
source in higher education seems to suggest
otherwise. FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source
Software) communities are thriving well in
learning environments too. The FLOSS model has
been extensively used in initiatives like the MIT
OpenCourseWare and Open Source Biology. Project
Gutenberg, the Wikipedia, The Open Dictionary
project are prime examples of how open source has
been successfully adapted to education
initiatives. In a community source project,
multiple institutions come together to partner in
the project. All partners contribute financially
as well as in employing human resources for the
effort. In the early stages, the partnering
institutions provide all design and development
efforts and only in subsequent stages is the
project opened to the broader community. This
way, the initial support is secured and the
institutions have a substantial influence in
deciding how the application is modeled and
designed.
The initial focus of community source projects is
on collaboration between institutions. The focus
in the crucial first stages is therefore to form
a common economic outlook and an appropriate
administrative framework rather than forming a
community around a shared code. Most community
based open source projects slowly migrate to open
source in the later stages. The Sakai project,
for example, started as a joint effort between
four institutions (Michigan, Indiana, MIT and
Stanford). The initial agenda was to set up a
framework of common goals that would produce
appropriate software based on an agreed list of
objectives. The scope for participation was later
increased by forming the Sakai Educational
Partners Program (SEPP), whereby other
institutions can join and participate in the
community for a small fee. The Current
Landscape An education enterprise like any
organization has its own needs ranging from
resource planning to budgeting. Additionally,
they have typical requirements like the need to
integrate with financial aid
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programs of the government, multiple payroll
cycles, and student information systems (SIS)
that handle admissions, grades, transcripts,
student records as well as billing. All these
call for robust ERP systems. Until recently,
colleges and universities mostly rely on either
custom-developed systems that are more than 15
years old, or have transitioned to commercial
products from vendors like Oracle, SAP,
PeopleSoft or vendors like SunGard that are
geared towards the higher education market. Kuali
Financials was borne due to the lack of open
source solutions Enterprise applications in the
higher education sector are comprised of a mix of
some proprietary application vendors and some key
open source community initiatives. PeopleSoft,
Oracle, SunGard and Datatel are some key vendors
that offer tightly integrated ERP packages for
the education sector. Recent consolidation in the
industry, like the acquisition of PeopleSoft by
Oracle and of WebCT, Angel, etc by Blackboard,
has caused considerable unease in the education
fraternity. The concern stems from the fear that
the trend of consolidation would lead to the
monopoly of a few key vendors. The plans of these
vendors to offer tightly integrated systems
heightens the fear that this will provide an
unfair leverage to these vendors as it would
extend the community's dependence on them.