Most actors I see in movies are really good. I realize that's because I do not watch most of the movies that are being made. Those that do get my attention tend to be big-budget high-end productions that got good reviews from viewers and critics I like. (I don't have much time for movies, so I like to play it safe.) We can have great actors for two reasons. One, it doesn't take very many of them. A few highly talented people -- not just actors, but also directors, camera people, etc. -- can entertain an audience of millions in the age of reproducible data. Two, everybody wants to be a superstar. Sure, there are plenty of excellent drama schools that turn talented people into even better professional actors. But you cannot just put anyone into a drama school, no matter how good it is, and expect them to turn out top-grade actors. The real bottleneck is the amount of talent; and acting probably gets more of this than any other field. There are not many slots for superstars. But the attraction -- and the payoff -- of being a superstar is so big that hordes of talented (and less talented) people are pushing into the field every year with fierce determination, trying to outcompete each other at every turn, and allowing producers to pick and choose from the best of the best. For many struggling actors, this is not a very good deal; for us as consumers, it certainly is. You might ask, at this point, whether the marginal value of slightly better movies is really great enough to justify all of this effort and expenditure. I'm not convinced it is, mostly because I do not really care that much about movies. But I do care a lot about education, and this is why I want the same thing for teachers. The problem with teachers is twofold. First, in most countries teaching does not tend to attract top talent. In some cases this is about prestige, in others about pay and the lack of career options, or a combination of all those. But it gets worse, because even if you are both talented and altruistic, reason suggests you should not go into teaching but apply your talents in another field where you could have a bigger impact. Because that right there is the second problem: In teaching as it is traditionally done, a teacher's talent stays inside the classroom. A great teacher might have a marginal impact on maybe 100-200 students a year, totalling a few thousand over the course of their career -- that's not completely terrible in terms of impact, but not all that impressive either. More importantly, their successes and insights usually do not influence other teachers. In most school systems, there are next to no mechanisms or incentives for teachers to learn from one another, for successful methods to spread and for colleagues to compare the effectiveness of different approaches. Every once in a while, a particularly innovative teacher might merit a portrait in a local newspaper or contribute to a new textbook; but that is about the extent of teacher stardom in most places. All of this is about to change. As the central role of teachers shifts from being a bearer of knowledge towards that of a coach and enabler, it makes more sense than ever to outsource the explaining and input part to outside experts. This opens up new avenues for talented teachers to become highly visible and scale their impact by creating video lectures, interactive online courses, and other teaching materials. At the moment, only a minority of teachers use these materials. But as soon as the early adopter stage gives way to widespread implementation of these teaching materials in schools, we can expect to see a race to the top, as producers and distributors rush to get a share of the market. Eventually, the most engaging and effective materials can be expected to reach an audience of millions, hopefully leading to the sort of professionalization and selection effects that currently give us supremely engaging movies and TV series. This is already happening, but we can help speed it along -- and in doing so, profit from it at the same time. As school administrators, we will want to attract top talent by making our school into a place that allows teachers to become superstars -- e.g. by allowing for and incentivizing the production and sharing of scalable teaching materials, and providing the infrastructure to publish and spread these materials in a way that profits both the teacher and the school. As teachers, we can seek out and use the best of the teaching materials that are currently out there and spread the word to increase their exposure. As technologists, we can help along the development of platforms that allows producers and distributers to profit from their work. And as everybody else, we can curate and use learning materials for our own purposes, because the time when learning started and ended in school is over. I'll end with a quote that looks even further into the future: "If a concerted effort were made, we could develop methods for transferring bodies of understanding — intellectual mastery — far more rapidly, cheaply, and efficiently than we do now. Universities still use medieval (!) techniques (lecturing) to noisily, haphazardly and partially transfer fragments of 21st century disciplines, taking many years and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per transfer per person. But what if people could spend four months with a specialized AI — something immersive, interactive, all-absorbing and video game-like, and emerge with a comprehensive understanding of physics, or materials science, or evolutionary psychology? To achieve this, technological, scientific, and entertainment innovations in several dozen areas would be integrated: Hollywood post-production techniques, the compulsively attention-capturing properties of emerging game design, nutritional cognitive enhancement, a growing map of our evolved programs (and their organs of understanding), an evolutionary psychological approach to entertainment, neuroscience-midwived brain-computer interfaces, rich virtual environments, and 3D imaging technologies. Eventually, conceptual education will become intense, compelling, searingly memorable, and ten times faster. A Gutenberg revolution in disseminating conceptual mastery would change everything, and — not least — would allow our species to achieve widespread scientific self-understanding. We could awaken from ancient nightmares." (John Tooby's answer to the 2009 Edge question, "What will change everything?")
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
OPENschoolOur new page: Archiv
August 2017
Kategorien |