Reinventing the school system
School of one is an extremely cool way to go through school. Basically it uses data mining to figure out which learning modules are best advancing pupils on an individual basis, and arranges their learning day accordingly.
I first learned about it in this podcast of Freakonomics titled: How Is a Bad Radio Station Like the Public School System? but I’m quite sure that’s not the only place which mentioned this innovative system of education.
The Idea is simple: each kid gets to learn in one of the available modalities (computer, small group, full class, pairs etc.) and in his level. The System keeps track of the student at all times, seeing which modalities work in which subjects, when he is ready to move to the next level and so on. But the system also knows what was good for the rest of the kids in the class, so if someone isn’t making progress, it can “guess” what would be the best way to help them advance.
So what do we have here?
Networked workstations – for both the students to use for learning and others for teachers to fill in each class report.
Data Mining Program – for the system to be able to give each kid the best optimized learning schedule for that day.
This is brilliant idea and while it’s quite straight forward it’s probably far from easy to implement. As mining the data created in real time, using it to both advance the student and any other student connected to the system in that instance or in the future, requires the ability to process and think in algorithms, heavy math as we’d call it.
let’s leave it at that for now, and go listen to the podcast ,if your like me you’ll be asking “where was that when I grew up?”