education

Announcing Grockit’s Summer 2010 Graduate Research Internship

ari bader-natal February 3, 2010

I’m happy to announce that Grockit will be offering its paid summer research internship program for the summer of 2010. This is the second year that we’re doing this (thanks again, Angela!), and I think it’s a great opportunity for doctoral students to apply their own research experience to a system that a large (and growing) community of learners uses everyday. It’s worth mentioning that Grockit has a large and interesting set of educational data, a variety of research interests, a very talented team, and a fantastic work environment. I just posted details about this program (with an application form) on the 2010 Summer Research Internship, and I encourage you to check it out.

I wanted to share a few thoughts on why we’re offering this, what we have in mind for the program, and why you (or perhaps someone you know) should consider applying.

Grockit, as you may know, is a San Francisco-based web startup building a platform for — and a community around — synchronous collaborative learning games. We strive to provide our growing global network of learners with a smart platform informed by peer assistance and adaptive support. Towards this end, we’re constantly exploring new ways to support collaborative learning online, and we’re frequently examining and applying techniques for analyzing the learning data that we’ve been collecting. One reason that we’re offering this program is to expand on the ways in which we pursue these goals.

Two of the challenges in studying computational systems for peer learning — both of which I faced in completing my own graduate work — is that these systems can take quite some time to build, and it can often take even longer to cultivate a sufficiently large community of participating learners. As a result, the time required to get from hypothesis to data analysis can be (or at least can feel) quite long. At Grockit, we’ve been making good progress with regards to both challenges, and hope that this internship will provide an enterprising graduate student with the opportunity to speed up this process for their own research questions.

In addition to the research opportunity, we’re offering a program stipend, an accommodation stipend, and a travel stipend. You’ll also get a healthy breakfast and lunch cooked in the office every weekday and the chance to spend your summer in vibrant San Francisco. So if you are a doctoral student studying in a university in the United States and interested in applying for a summer research position with us, I’d encourage you to submit an application.

The deadline is March 1, 2010, and you can apply today.

5 Reasons Why The Apple iPad Will Revolutionize Education

farbood nivi January 27, 2010

It’s all about the UI. The product is the UI. All these mantras boil it down to one thing. The book is still better than the screen because it has a better UI. Until today. The UI of the iPad gets us over that tipping point. The UI of the iPad will allow a student to be in collaborating with a peer in Grockit one second, in their full color, full page text book, the next second, and on the internet surfing for a information to go with the textbook info they are about to share with their classmate in Grockit. All on the iPad because it will be easy and fruitful to spend your time and interaction-actions with that sort of UI.

1. Price – It’s $599 retail which means Apple can probably already sell it into schools for $299-$399 and in a couple years there should be a $199 version. This is significant. We are talking about 65M K-12 students at $199 so about $12B. They don’t need the 60GB version and they don’t need 3G. Sound crazy to spend $12B outfitting each kid in the country with a device with a UI like the iPad? Not at all. It would single handedly advance education as much as the chalkboard.

2. Touchscreen- Compare the touchscreen of the iPad to a mouse on a regular screen. If you’re learning spatial concepts in Math or any subject, being able to manipulate the object with your hands should make it more intuitive and easier to grasp than manipulating it with a mouse. Imagine highlighting. One of the distinct UI advantages about books is that you can annotate them. Annotating with writing or even highlighting with a mouse is cumbersome. Annotating with an iPad seems like it should be pretty easy and intuitive as well as giving you the additional and awesome bonus of things like searching for just areas you’ve highlighted.

3. Screen Size – There is an old saying that ‘quantity affects quality’. Well that couldn’t be more true here. The iPad is a really big iPhone and that actually fundamentally changes the equation. The interaction I described above about annotating a text book is not possible on an iPhone. Well, technically you CAN highlight with your finger in your iPhone Kindle App but that is specifically not like annotating in your textbook because the Kindle on your iPhone looks nothing like your textbook and the iPad totally does look like your textbook. Screen size also lets you work easily in an app like Grockit which, like a textbook, is fundamentally different with more real estate. And finally, we all know that we loved books with pictures the most when we were in School even the images in textbooks. Making those images come alive and serve as a real learning medium is all about screen size and resolution.

4. Apps – Because the App Store already has hundreds, if not thousands, of apps that are either directly about learning or a useful reference when learning or studying, the iPad is essentially a product that is launching, from day one, with hundreds if not thousands of useful apps for learning. Again, the ones that have text, images or video become even that much more useful because of the screen-size.

5. iBook – Books are still a primary mode of learning in many many learning environments and being able to interact with them in similar and even some better ways than you can with a real book is either here with the iPad or so close that I’m finally convinced it’s happening.

Anyways, I’m pretty pumped to get one and we’re pretty pumped to build Grockit as an app in the iPad to do our part to help with the revolutionizing of education part.

ibooks_20100127-1 It’s all about the User Interface (UI). The product is the UI. These mantras boil it down to one thing. The book is still better than the screen because it has a better UI…until today. The UI of the iPad gets us over that tipping point. The UI of the iPad will allow a student to be collaborating in Grockit in one second, in a full color page textbook the next second, and then on the internet surfing for info they are about to share with their classmate in Grockit. All this on the iPad because it will be easy and fruitful to spend your time with that sort of UI. Here are five reasons why the iPad will revolutionize education:

1. Price – It’s $499 retail which means Apple can probably already sell it into schools for $299-$399 and in a couple years there should be a $199 version. This is significant. We are talking about 65M K-12 students at $199 so about $12B. They don’t need the 60GB version and they don’t need 3G. Sound crazy to spend $12B outfitting each kid in the country with a device with a UI like the iPad? Not at all. It would single handedly advance education as much as the chalkboard.

3. Screen Size – There is an old saying that ‘quantity affects quality’. Well that couldn’t be more true here. The iPad is a really big iPhone and that actually fundamentally changes the equation. The interaction I described above about annotating a text book is not possible on an iPhone. Well, technically you CAN highlight with your finger in your iPhone Kindle App but that is specifically not like annotating in your textbook because the Kindle on your iPhone looks nothing like your textbook and the iPad totally does look like your textbook. Screen size also lets you work easily in an app like Grockit which, like a textbook, is fundamentally different with more real estate. And finally, we all know that we loved books with pictures the most when we were in school, even the images in textbooks. Making those images come alive and serve as a real learning medium is all about screen size and resolution.

5. iBook – Books are still a primary mode of learning in many learning environments and being able to interact with them in similar and even some better ways than you can with a real book is either here with the iPad or so close that I’m finally convinced it’s happening.

Anyway, I’m pretty pumped to get one and we’re very pumped to build Grockit as an app in the iPad to do our part to help with the revolutionizing of education.

Grockit K-12…Get Ready to Claim Your Network

farbood nivi January 27, 2010

k12

Every standard, every state, every student. How does that sound? Grockit will soon be rolling out K-12 curriculum aligned to the state standards for every state and grade in the U.S. Even better, we have created private networks for each district and school in the United States. So get ready to claim your school district’s Grockit network. Benefits include:

A collaborative network where students help each other learn
Adaptive content that matches to each student’s ability
Teacher tools including custom online classes and detailed student reports
Grockit’s complete IRT based assessment technology that can help prove your curriculum is working
Math, Science, English, and Social Science content aligned to your state’s standards
Training and support from Grockit

To learn more about Grockit K-12 and how to improve student engagement and raise your standards, claim your network by contacting us here. We will contact you shortly with more details and you will be one of the first with access to Grockit K-12. For those attending the National Conference on Education in February please be sure to stop by our exhibit and meet us in person.

Cheers,
The Grockit Team

Grockit Questions Are Tailored for You!

jake becker January 7, 2010

Here at Grockit, our philosophy is that students learn best when challenged with problems of appropriate difficulty. Each student has a unique toolkit of complex reasoning, quantitative and English language skills, and Grockit’s analytical software provides that student with feedback on their performance, their progress, and their strengths and weaknesses. This feedback enables Grockit students to tailor their practice and allocate their study time more efficiently.

Grockit’s ever-growing bank of unique questions has been written and reviewed by expert instructors and seasoned content writers. We design our questions using College Board, ACT, GMAC® and ETS® released questions from previous exams, along with other specially-selected resources. This allows us to best model actual questions that you will see on your test day. Each question is characterized by its difficulty level and the specific skills that it tests, and we use that information to provide you with fine-grained feedback on your performance and learning. When combined with the data that we’ve collected from your recent performance, this meta-data helps us provide Challenges custom-built for you.

50th and 90th Percentile students alike will benefit from Grockit’s algorithms and incremental learning platform. We aim to challenge you with test-true practice questions to help prepare you for your test day. Good luck with your studies!

25 blogs

ari bader-natal December 19, 2009

Many of the approaches that we draw on at Grockit — adaptive web-based learning, study group formation, embedded assessment, computer support for collaborative learning, educational applications of data mining and social network analysis, learning in games, and the benefits of practice, feedback, spacing, teaching, discussing — are no longer exclusively discussed in academic journals and conference proceedings. Several of the researchers and practitioners in these areas have hit the blogosphere, where ideas are informally sketched, quickly shared, and freely accessed. Here are 25 such blogs that are currently in my newsreader:

OLDaily
Learning Games Network
Digital Media and Learning
Epistemic Games
Clark Aldrich On Simulations and Serious Games
Confessions of an Aca-Fan
Raph Koster’s website
Learnlets
Will at Work Learning
Informal Learning Blog
CSCL Community
Connectivism: networked and social learning
P2P Foundation
Iterating Towards Openness
Sharing Nicely
TravelinEdMan
Innovate journal
Learning Sciences and Educational Technology
International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning
Infinite Thinking Machine
Online Sapiens
Elearnspace
Educational Technology News
Fortnightly Mailing
Virtual Canuck

Have some that we’re missing? Leave a link, and we’ll check it out.

Social contexts for learning

ari bader-natal November 24, 2009

As promised in my previous post about the E-Learn conference, I wanted to share a few thoughts sparked by Terry Anderson’s keynote. The slide that caught my eye — and the one that I’ve been thinking about the most since the conference — mapped out three different types of “many” in social learning environments: the group, the network, and the collective. Based on a set of papers and blog posts by Jon Dron and Terry Anderson over the past few years, the model describes the characteristics of each of these social learning contexts. Here’s a composite reproduction of their illustrations, describing some of the key characteristics of each type of social software:

Dron & Anderson: Groups, Networks, and Collectives

While I’m several years late to the discussion, I think that it’s still worth mentioning why I find it so interesting. At Grockit, we’ve also been thinking about contexts for learning, albeit in different terms: we’ve been thinking in terms of supporting learning from experts, learning with peers, and learning alone. I can’t help but see parallels between these three learning contexts and that of Dron and Anderson’s groups, networks, and collectives.

Grockit: Learning from experts, with peers, and alone

Notice the similarities:

Expert-led classes in Grockit resemble traditional classroom groups.
Peer-driven sessions are based on an ever-changing network of participants.
Self-directed solo learners benefit from the collective behavior of all past Grockit interactions.

Each of these contexts has advantages and disadvantages, so we’ve opted to support all three and leave it up to the student to choose the way in which they wish to interact with others. We’ve noticed that for many, this choice changes from day to day, or even over the course of a single sitting. The choice is yours: How do you want to learn from others today?

How to Choose a College, Part One

crystal schmelzer November 20, 2009

Let’s face it, getting into college doesn’t stop at a stellar ACT or SAT score. Not only can choosing which schools to apply to be a daunting task, but also completing applications, personal statements, letters of recommendation, and financial aid paperwork can be less fun than studying for midterms. There are thousands of colleges and universities in the US to choose from and the application process for these schools can be less stressful if you have an organized plan of action. Grockit’s guest blog series at www.eduinreview.com offers insight on how to select schools, manage the application process, and look into financial aid. Eduinreview is a site dedicated to helping students through all areas of the education process. Check out the first post from last weekend.

Ari's Interview with Politics Daily

brian buser July 30, 2009

Check out Ari’s interview with Politics Daily about Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) and the web. Here is a sample:

Ari explains, “I think the AIED systems of the future will be less about teaching directly, and more about providing guidance: when and how a student would benefit from working with someone else (perhaps a teacher, tutor, or peer.) When I get stuck solving a particular type of problem, who (that’s online and available) can best help me understand it? A good system will have predicted the frustrating challenge, and will have already lined up the person best-suited to explaining it to me in a way that I will understand. After I’ve demonstrated that I mastered the necessary skills, who can I then explain it to, both to help them and to clarify it for myself? A good system will be able to seamlessly coordinate this process.”

Ari’s interview was used in a larger story, which featured Grockit, about web 2.0 technology entering the education industry. We expect you will be hearing a lot more from Ari and his great work in the months to come. Stay tuned!

Virtual Schooling Works

farbood nivi April 6, 2009

Here are a couple of interesting quotations from a recent article about virtual learning and schooling on Education Week.

‘“We know it’s ‘as good as, if not better,’ in terms of student achievement,” says Rick E. Ferdig, an associate professor of educational technology at the University of Florida, in Gainesville, who runs the Virtual School Clearinghouse research project. The project enables states to analyze their own statistics and pool data, making it publicly available for researchers to conduct studies.’

‘Cavanaugh says some of the states that are starting to see good results are also using adaptive-intelligence technology that allows students to skip over content they’ve already mastered and move on to the concepts that give them trouble.’

The article also goes on to mention that there is still a lot to be learned in terms of which methods work and which don’t.

If you have any experience with virtual schooling, please share!

Announcing Grockit’s Summer 2009 Graduate Research Internship

ari bader-natal March 2, 2009

Update (3 Feb 2010): Our 2010 internship program has been posted.

I’m happy to announce that Grockit is offering a paid summer internship for a doctoral student pursuing research in an area related to our own. We’ve just posted details about this program (and the application form) on the 2009 Summer Research Internship page on our blog. I wanted to share a few thoughts on why we’re offering this, what we have in mind for the program, and why you (or perhaps someone you know) should consider applying.

Grockit, as you may know, is a San Francisco-based web startup building a platform for — and a community around — live collaborative learning games. We strive to provide our growing global network of learners with a smart platform informed by educational research, peer assistance, and data analysis. Towards this end, we’re constantly exploring ways to better support collaborative learning online, and we’re frequently examining and applying techniques for analyzing the learning data that we’ve been collecting. One reason that we’re offering this program is to expand on the ways in which we pursue these goals.

Two of the challenges in studying computational systems for peer learning — both of which I faced in completing my own graduate research — is that these systems can take quite some time to build, and it can often take even longer to cultivate a sufficiently large community of participating learners. As a result, the time required to get from hypothesis to data analysis can be (or at least can feel) quite long. At Grockit, we’ve been making good progress with regards to both challenges, and hope that this internship will provide an enterprising graduate student with the opportunity to speed up this process for their own research questions.

For hypotheses that can be tested within our existing system, experiments can be set up easily, and analysis can begin quickly. For hypotheses that require additional application features or data collection facilities, the intern would have the opportunity to pair with Grockit developers (as part of our agile development process) to code and test the necessary changes. Ideally, the ten-week duration of the internship will offer enough time to do a bit of both types of studies. At the end of the summer, the completed work will be presented to the team. Depending on the nature of the projects, jointly-authored publications may follow.

In addition to the research opportunity, we’re offering a stipend for the program. Several other perks are included: accommodations are provided in one of our nice lofts in the Mission, breakfast and lunch is provided on weekdays, and San Francisco is a fun spot to spend a summer. So if you are a doctoral student attending or publishing at conferences like AIED, CSCL, or EDM and interested in a summer research position with us, I encourage you to apply today.