Education versus guilds

Summary

• Iteratively learns how to teach: Starting with Nadia, Leveraging short videos focused on content, Converging on mastery, With the help of neuroscience, and filling in dependent gaps; resulting in a different approach to the mainstream method. 
  
• Assesses the broken US education system: Set in its ways, Designed for the 1800s, Inducing holes that are hidden by tests, Tests which ignore creativity.  The resulting teaching process is so inefficient it needs to be supplemented with homework.  Instead teachers were encouraging their pupils to use his tools at home so they could mentor them while they attended school, an inversion that significantly improves the economics. 
  
• Enters the real world: Builds a scalable service, Working with a real classroom, Trying stealth learning, At Khan Academy full time,  In the curriculum at Los Altos, Supporting life-long learning. 
  
• Develops The One World Schoolhouse: Back to the future with a one room school, a robust teaching team, and creativity enabled; so with some catalysis, an infrastructure amplifier.   even the poorest can become educated and earn credentials for current jobs. 
  
• Wishes he could also correct: Summer holidays, Transcript based assessments, College education;
• Concludes it is now possible to provide the infrastructure for creativity to emerge and to support risk taking. 
  

The One World School House

Free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere

• Accessible, self-paced and active learning methods.  
• Concepts described and linked to dependencies for free. 
  
• Khan Academy tools, which were backed up by the promise that the source materials would remain available as the pupils' reference library. 
  

Teaching Nadia

• Nadia had lost confidence in her ability to do math.  She accepted the implications of the failure. 
  
• By default Nadia would be moved into a slow track for math, which Salman knew blocked any math based future, as more and more
  Barriers are particular types of constraints on flows.  They can enforce separation of a network of agents allowing evolution to build diversity.  Examples of different types of barriers and their effects are described. 
  
  barriers
  This page discusses the mechanisms and effects of emergence underpinning any complex adaptive system (CAS).  Key research is reviewed. 
  
  emerged over time.  
  

• Khan had no teaching experience, training, or thoughts about how to teach - except for requiring the sessions be: safe, personal & thought-provoking. 
  
• He would use a
  Walter Shewhart's iterative development process is found in many complex adaptive systems (CAS).  The mechanism is reviewed and its value in coping with random events is explained. 
  
  Shewhart cycle, trying out
  This page looks at schematic structures and their uses.  It discusses a number of examples:
  

  • Schematic ideas are recombined in creativity. 
  • Similarly designers take ideas and rules about materials and components and combine them. 
  • Schematic Recipes help to standardize operations. 
  • Modular components are combined into strategies for use in business plans and business models. 

  
  As a working example it presents part of the contents and schematic details from the Adaptive Web Framework (AWF)'s operational plan. 
  
  Finally it includes a section presenting our formal representation of schematic goals. 
  Each goal has a series of associated complex adaptive system (CAS) strategy strings. 
  These goals plus strings are detailed for various chess and business examples. 
  
  strategies and leveraging what worked, just as he did as a hedge fund is an investment fund that accepts investments from a limited number of accredited individual or institutional investors.  Hedge funds are able to use investment methods that are not allowed for other types of fund. 
  analyst at Connective.  And he provided the same opportunity to his tuties.  If they:
  
• Got an answer correct they could move on. 
  
• Didn't then they would work on the topic some more and then try another question. 
  
• Searching for the core item[s] that Nadia had failed to master, for whatever reason and exploring them at her desired pace.  
• The standard education process allocates a fixed time to each item and then moves on.  And since the pupils want to please the teacher they would accept moving-on, even as it occurred again and again to their detriment.  
• As he took on tutoring Nadia's brothers & their friends he needed a way to scale the personal pupil-paced discussions.  Khan explains a friend proposed recording the lessons & posting them on YouTube. 
  

No frills videos

• A 1985 study of recall of facts from 20 minute presentations found that most recall was from the beginning of the lecture.  There was little recall from 15 minutes onward. 
  
• Middendorg and Kalish's attention span study, in 1996 found students had:
  
  • A three- to five-minute period for settling down.  Followed by
    
  • Ten to 18 minutes of optimal focus
    
  study found these were only maintained for 10 to 18 minutes. 
  

Focusing on the content

Mastery learning

1. All students could learn if provided with conditions appropriate to their needs.  No one should be held back or tracked/streamed
2. Transition gateways designed around target levels of comprehension and achievement instead of time. 
   

• The complex, highly interconnected world requires lots of highly trained capable people 
• Technology will act as a catalyst, an infrastructure amplifier.   lowering the cost of the transition. 
  

How education happens

• Decide to learn
• Concentrate

• Short-term labile traces, which consolidate is the process by which memories are made more stable and long lasting.  Short-term memory traces maintained by attention supported working memory become represented by transduction cascades of kinase signalling pathways.  Long term memory formation starts when these cascades successfully induce transcription, translation and protein synthesis and transport to synapses to support strengthening.  Subsequently salient memories are further consolidated during sleep. 
  into
  
• Long-term memories to represent significant associations. 
  

Filling in the gaps

• Being able to do the studying at any time & place
  
• Self-pacing via tools which can: Monitor activity, Propose & support reviews,  Highlight links between subjects; encouraging a sense of wonder and excitement. 
  

Questioning customs

• Huge and complex, M. Mitchell Waldrop describes a vision of complexity via:
  
  • Rich interactions that allow a system to undergo spontaneous self-organization
  • Systems that are adaptive
    
  • More predictability than chaotic systems by bringing order and chaos into
    
  • Balance at the edge of chaos
  . 
  
• Tightly integrated into our culture is how we do and think about things, transmitted by non-genetic means as defined by Frans de Waal.  CAS theory views cultures as operating via memetic schemata evolved by memetic operators to support a cultural superorganism.  Evolutionary psychology asserts that human culture reflects adaptations generated while hunting and gathering.  Dehaene views culture as essentially human, shaped by exaptations and reading, transmitted with support of the neuronal workspace and stabilized by neuronal recycling.  Sapolsky argues that parents must show children how to transform their genetically derived capabilities into a culturally effective toolset.  He is interested in the broad differences across cultures of: Life expectancy, GDP, Death in childbirth, Violence, Chronic bullying, Gender equality, Happiness, Response to cheating, Individualist or collectivist, Enforcing honor, Approach to hierarchy; illustrating how different a person's life will be depending on the culture where they are raised.  Culture:
  • Is deployed during pregnancy & childhood, with parental mediation.  Nutrients, immune messages and hormones all affect the prenatal brain.  Hormones: Testosterone with anti-Mullerian hormone masculinizes the brain by entering target cells and after conversion to estrogen binding to intracellular estrogen receptors; have organizational effects producing lifelong changes.  Parenting style typically produces adults who adopt the same approach.  And mothering style can alter gene regulation in the fetus in ways that transfer epigenetically to future generations!  PMS symptoms vary by culture. 
    
  • Is also significantly transmitted to children by their peers during play.  So parents try to control their children's peer group.  
  • Is transmitted to children by their neighborhoods, tribes, nations etc. 
    
  • Influences the parenting style that is considered appropriate. 
    
  • Can transform dominance into honor.  There are ecological correlates of adopting honor cultures.  Parents in honor cultures are typically authoritarian. 
    
  • Is strongly adapted across a meta-ethnic frontier according to Turchin.  
  • Across Europe was shaped by the Carolingian empire. 
    
  • Can provide varying levels of support for innovation.  
  • Produces consciousness according to Dennet. 
    
  . 

• Length of each class period
• Number of elementary years
• Number of high school years
  

• Presenting a fresh perspective at the basics of learning & teaching.  Historical analysis suggests:
  
• Human education
  Matt Ridley demonstrates the creative effect of man on the World. He highlights:
  

  • A list of preconditions resulting in
  • Additional niche capture & more free time 
  • Building a network to interconnect memes processes & tools which
    
  • Enabling inter-generational transfers
    
  • Innovations that help reduce environmental stress even as they leverage fossil fuels
    

  
  
  developed as family group structured apprenticeship.  But language development &
  Reading and writing present a conundrum.  The reader's brain contains neural networks tuned to reading.  With imaging a written word can be followed as it progresses from the retina through a functional chain that asks: Are these letters? What do they look like? Are they a word? What does it sound like? How is it pronounced? What does it mean?  Dehaene explains the importance of education in tuning the brain's networks for reading as well as good strategies for teaching reading and countering dyslexia.  But he notes the reading networks developed far too recently to have directly evolved.  And Dehaene asks why humans are unique in developing reading and culture. 
  
  He explains the cultural engineering that shaped writing to human vision and the exaptations and neuronal structures that enable and constrain reading and culture. 
  
  Dehaene's arguments show how cellular, whole animal and cultural complex adaptive system (CAS) are related.  We review his explanations in CAS terms and use his insights to link cultural CAS that emerged based on reading and writing with other levels of CAS from which they emerge. 
  
  
  especially reading,
  An epistatic meme suppressed for a thousand years reemerges during the enlightenment. 
  It was a poem encapsulating the ideas of Epicurus rediscovered by a humanist book hunter. 
  Greenblatt describes the process of suppression and reemergence.  He argues that the rediscovery was the foundation of the modern world. 
  Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the memetic mechanisms are discussed. 
  
  
  writing & printed books supported
  This page reviews the catalytic impact of infrastructure on the expression of phenotypic effects by an agent.  The infrastructure reduces the cost the agent must pay to perform the selected action.  The catalysis is enhanced by positive returns. 
  
  infrastructure &
  This page reviews the strategy of setting up an arms race.  At its core this strategy depends on being able to alter, or take advantage of an alteration in, the genome or equivalent.  The situation is illustrated with examples from biology, high tech and politics. 
  
  evolved amplification, & encouraged specialization, including to control & standardize the content of text books.  Khan wonders if this specialization & standardization has supported good teaching.
  
• The wealthy & powerful adopted costly learning as a signal, is an emergent capability which is used by cooperating agents to support coordination & rival agents to support control and dominance.  In eukaryotic cells signalling is used extensively.  A signal interacts with the exposed region of a receptor molecule inducing it to change shape to an activated form.  Chains of enzymes interact with the activated receptor relaying, amplifying and responding to the signal to change the state of the cell.  Many of the signalling pathways pass through the nuclear membrane and interact with the DNA to change its state.  Enzymes sensitive to the changes induced in the DNA then start to operate generating actions including sending further signals.  Cell signalling is reviewed by Helmreich.  Signalling is a fundamental aspect of CAS theory and is discussed from the abstract CAS perspective in signals and sensors.  In AWF the eukaryotic signalling architecture has been abstracted in a codelet based implementation.  To be credible signals must be hard to fake.  To be effective they must be easily detected by the target recipient.  To be efficient they are low cost to produce and destroy. 
  of status is a publically accepted, signal that one possesses assets: wealth, beauty, talent, expertise, access & trust of powerful people; to be able to help others. 
  .  Elite universities still represent this form of learning as a search for truth. 
  
• But expertise gained through apprenticeships supports a vocational focus in: trades; and doctoral instruction: Law, Medicine residency is the apprenticeship of a medical or nursing graduate with a practitioner (attending), usually performed at a teaching hospital: Brigham & Women's, Cottage Health System, El Camino Hospital, Johns Hopkins, LSU Health Sciences Center, Rush University Medical Center, Stanford University Medical Center; skilled in the specialized techniques required for consistent success in diagnosis and treatment, or treatment execution, of medical conditions.  A first year resident is also called an intern.  Christensen, Grossman & Huang note the difficulty of presenting all the necessary case types to a resident during the limited period of the apprenticeship.  The difficulty of matching graduates with desired residency slots intrigued Al Roth who helped mitigate the problem with efficient market tools deployed by NRMP.  Docphin provides web access to categorized research information used during residency. 
  ;
  
• Noting what works, what does not and why? 
  

• Go to school at 7 or 8 am
• Sit through a sequence of class periods of regular length where
• Teachers talk
• Pupils listen
• Add time for lunch & physical exercise
• Go home and do homework. 
  

The Prussian model

• Primary schools & secondary schools executing the basics, all
  
• Tax supported and compulsory, where the
  
• State decides:
  
• What should be taught
• Who can be a teacher
  

• The information was broken up into fragmented "subjects" that could be learned by rote memorization and 
• Attention is the focusing of our mental resources onto a specific piece of information.  Attention uses valuations assigned to each potential object of thought by the basal ganglia. 
  was focused and constrained by rigid class periods of limited time. 

Swiss cheese learning

Tests & Testing

• Fails to indicate how deeply the pupil's knowledge goes. 
• Does not explain why an answer is right or wrong
• Synergizes with the Prussian architecture to reward the Swiss cheese strategy of learning for the test and then forgetting.  

Tracking creativity

1. Creativity tends to be selected against in our schools
2. Many educators don't see mathematics, science & engineering as at all creative.  They ignore all the evidence of innovations is the economic realization of invention and combinatorial exaptation. 
   in science & technology.  Instead they seek the right answer through memorizing formulas. 
   

Homework

• Some parents want lots, others a little
• Sleep deprivation does increase with homework load
• Teachers aren't trained in the theory and practice of homework
• Quantity is easy for teachers to measure
• In times when the US is externally threatened: Sputnik, Japan's economic success; more homework is assigned to US school children.  
• Some other countries require a lot of homework while others set very little.  The amount does not correlate with the relative educational achievement of the pupils.  
• The best indicator of better achievement & fewer behavioral problems was frequency & duration of family meals. 
  

Flipping the classroom

• Replacement of the passive in-class lecture which frees up time for teachers to focus on mentoring anyone who is struggling
  
• Matching of study to personal rate is a strategy of ensuring that a given concept is adequately comprehended before being expected to understand a more advanced one, explains Salman Khan in The One World School House.  It was developed in the 1920s in Winnetka school district, Illinois under superintendent Carlton Washburne.  But since the 1920s mastery learning was ignored until the 1960s when Benjamin Bloom & James Block promoted the technique and demonstrated its superior results.  However, school system inertia sustained the traditional learning processes.  Mastery learning was once again ignored until Khan Academy provided a technology supported implementation.   of learning
• Short active learning sessions matching typical attention spans
  
• Building of more durable neural structures through active strategies that fill personal holes 
• Replacement of the frustration of traditional homework with short videos selected by the pupil and watched whenever they are ready
  

Economics of schooling

• Teacher student ratios should really be judged on valuable time spent mentoring.  Lecturing does not benefit much from reducing class sizes. 
  
• Private education lavishes funding on low ratios and adds expensive tutors.  Khan asserts that this investment is unnecessary, since all education can be made more effective and cheaper. 
  
• Technologies are being deployed in shallow, ineffective and costly ways which will eventually suggest technology is an expensive gimmick.  The metrics, methods, goals and assessments must be adjusted to leverage the infrastructure.  With these setup correctly, Khan asserts, teacher mentoring time can go to 90 - 100%. 
  

Theory versus practice

• As grounded in "using data to iteratively refine an educational experience without attempting to make sweeping statements about how the unimaginably complex human mind always works."
• Use:
  
• Video-based lectures for certain contexts
• Live dialogs, when possible, for others
• Projects when appropriate
• Traditional problem sets when appropriate
• Focus both on what
  
• The students need to prove to the world through assessments
• Students actually need to know in the real world. 
  
• Focus on the pure and the thought-provoking as well as the practical. 
  
• Craft particular and individual solutions based on the availability of data from millions of students updated daily
• It is happening in the real world now. 
  

The Khan Academy software

• Generate math problems so he could rapidly find each tutees personal gaps.  And when asked the software explained the steps to solving the current problem. 
• Capture metrics on how many problems a student had done, what proportion were correct, how long they worked on them and when in the day.  As Khan refined this tool he realized he could start to understand what & how they were learning.  He observed huge variation in how the small number of tutees learned.  An essential step was developing a strategy for identifying mastery is a strategy of ensuring that a given concept is adequately comprehended before being expected to understand a more advanced one, explains Salman Khan in The One World School House.  It was developed in the 1920s in Winnetka school district, Illinois under superintendent Carlton Washburne.  But since the 1920s mastery learning was ignored until the 1960s when Benjamin Bloom & James Block promoted the technique and demonstrated its superior results.  However, school system inertia sustained the traditional learning processes.  Mastery learning was once again ignored until Khan Academy provided a technology supported implementation.  .  He deployed a simple metric - 10 questions correctly answered in a row.  A Shewhart cycle is the Plan Do Check Act (PDCA) cycle developed at Bell Labs by Walter Shewhart.  Each activity that an organization identifies it will 'do' is formally described in a 'plan' including a model of the expected outcomes of the act if it successfully achieves its goals.  If a subsequent 'check' of the results of the action relative to the predicted model is unsatisfactory the initial plan is modified to correct for identified problems and the cycle is re-executed.  The cycle allows learning to become represented in the improved plan.  Following the process institutionalizes the learning. 
  then allowed the proposal to be validated and refined as necessary.   A goal 'high expectations of the tutees ability to master the material' was signalled, is an emergent capability which is used by cooperating agents to support coordination & rival agents to support control and dominance.  In eukaryotic cells signalling is used extensively.  A signal interacts with the exposed region of a receptor molecule inducing it to change shape to an activated form.  Chains of enzymes interact with the activated receptor relaying, amplifying and responding to the signal to change the state of the cell.  Many of the signalling pathways pass through the nuclear membrane and interact with the DNA to change its state.  Enzymes sensitive to the changes induced in the DNA then start to operate generating actions including sending further signals.  Cell signalling is reviewed by Helmreich.  Signalling is a fundamental aspect of CAS theory and is discussed from the abstract CAS perspective in signals and sensors.  In AWF the eukaryotic signalling architecture has been abstracted in a codelet based implementation.  To be credible signals must be hard to fake.  To be effective they must be easily detected by the target recipient.  To be efficient they are low cost to produce and destroy. 
  by the strategic
  Terrence Deacon explores how constraints on dynamic flows can induce emergent phenomena which can do real work.  He shows how these phenomena are sustained.  The mechanism enables the development of Darwinian competition. 
  
  constraint. 
  

The leap to a real classroom

Fun & games

• Learning by doing
• Learning with fun is a powerful tool for learning social competence.  It appears universal among socially complex species.  It has an evolved high priority displacing foraging and using up energy stores.  There are a number of behavioral strategies practiced in play that train those participating.  Play:
  
  • Supports safe practice of using social tools.  Allows for trying out roles and honing motor skills. 
    
  • Allows a peer group to provide context for these developments: Approach to hierarchy; etc.  Parents will aim to select the peer group. 
    
  • It integrates cultural details from local neighborhoods
    
  • It supports practice of aggression. 
    
  • Demonstrates that transient stress is enjoyable. 
  • It allows the developing neuron network to identify which synapses to prune.  
  ; this aligns well with summer camp.  Khan's summer holidays were happily invested in operating summer camps with real projects: That illustrated the working of concepts by:
  
• Using programmable Lego kits and sensors to build competitive robots with different strategies for winning and 
• Iteratively improving the robots.  
• Competing at Khan designed Paranoia Risk is Sal Khan's stealth learning Risk game where each player could only win by specifically eliminating one other randomly assigned player.  Each player did not know who was assigned to try and destroy them. 
  where
  
• Six played the game learning through discovery about: Psychology, Game theory, Probability
  
• Others bet on the outcome and reviewed the operation of markets
• Critical mass freeze tag is Sal Khan's stealth learning freeze tag game where each player gets to exercise playing freeze tag while they discover how the size of the field and number of freezers, which Khan adjusts, affects the ability to freeze all the players.  The players learn that Khan has put them inside a complexity problem and how it is working. 
  illustrated through stealth learning about
  
• Complex systems, M. Mitchell Waldrop describes a vision of complexity via:
  
  • Rich interactions that allow a system to undergo spontaneous self-organization
  • Systems that are adaptive
    
  • More predictability than chaotic systems by bringing order and chaos into
    
  • Balance at the edge of chaos
  in operation
  

Taking the plunge

1. Being chosen as a finalist for a major award of the Technology Museum of San Jose.  
2. A letter from an underprivileged black boy who used Khan Academy's tools to overcome prejudice & lack of resources to reach mastery in 200 level university honors mathematics. 
   

The Los Altos experiment

• To cope with the increasing demands Khan asked his old Louisiana and MIT is Massachusetts Institute of Technology.   friend Shantanu Sinha to help lead Khan Academy. 
  
• Angel investor & Los Altos school board member Mark Goines connected them with Los Altos schools' superintendent Jeff Baier and assistant superintendent Alyssa Gallagher.  It was agreed to start a pilot using Khan Academy services and methods integrated into four classrooms.  Khan viewed it as a chance to learn how the technology could be used and improved to support the education network. 
  

• The fifth-graders weren't tracked yet and had the support of their mostly English-speaking, college-educated, affluent parents. 
  
• The seventh-graders were from the developmental tracks.  Some with learning disabilities, others struggling with English, few with college-educated parents. 
  

• The fifth-graders scored 96% at proficient or advanced grade level.  The school board concluded they would use Khan Academy as part of the math curriculum for all fifth- and sixth- grade math classes the following year. 
  
• The seventh-graders improved 106% relative to the prior year: Twice as many students were now at grade level, A handful jumped two categories, A few even entered the advanced category; underserved, underperforming, 'slow' kids were operating the same as their more affluent peers. 
  

Education for all ages

• What is a CDO is a:
  
  • Care delivery organization in health care. 
    
  • Collateralized debt obligation in finance.  The idea is to transfer the credit risk rather than the loan itself.  The bank enters into a CDS on the loans with a SPV.  The CDO allows the bank to shift its loans outside the reach of regulators.  The CDO also can distribute the risk unevenly by tranching.  Equity is most at risk.  Then any subordinated debt. 
  ?
• How did the Treasury Department is the department of the treasury.  it is a federal government executive department created by Act of Congress in 1789 to manage government revenue.  The Secretary of the Treasury is a Cabinet officer.  To support funding of high cost investments: Disaster recovery, Wars, Famines; the treasury can issue debt instruments and manage the national debt. 
  relate to the Federal Reserve of 1913 was a response to a series of banking panics with the goal of responding effectively to stresses.  It setup:
  • At least 8 and not more than 12 private regional Federal Reserve banks.  Twelve were setup
    
  • Federal Reserve Board with seven members to govern the system.  The President appointed the seven, which must be confirmed by Congress.  In 1935 the Board was renamed and restructured. 
    
  • Federal Advisory Committee with twelve members
  • Single US currency - the Federal Reserve Note. 
    
  ? 
• What is QE is quantitative easing, a monetary policy used by central banks.  It:
  • Stimulates the economy by
  • Creates money to purchase financial assets including government bonds from commercial banks
  • Helps central banks to keep inflation positive. 
    
  • Results in easy money that can be leveraged by markets and companies to purchase assets with cheap debt.  
  and how does it differ from just printing money?
  

Embracing uncertainty

My background as a student

The spirit of the one room school house

• Kids of different ages should mix.  In this setup that can happen enabling
• More advanced children can support the teachers in mentoring anyone who is behind.  They will gain respect from this activity. 
  
• Younger children sit with role models in a setting that matches the family and work environments
  

Teaching as a team sport

• Support for each other - leveraging the different strengths and weaknesses each teacher brings to the team
  
• Robust to personal holidays or illness of a teacher
  
• Additional group techniques can be deployed 
• Offers more opportunities for the children to find a teacher they relate to. 
  
• Older teachers can impart their experience to the team.  Younger ones can supply energy and fresh ideas. 
  
• With the use of active self-paced learning it allows the teachers to become coaches covering the children's backs when they struggle. 
  

Ordered chaos is a good thing

• 20 pupils working over an hour exploring Khan academy concepts with immediate coaching as they get stuck
• 20 are using board games to explore economics is the study of trade between humans.  Traditional Economics is based on an equilibrium model of the economic system.  Traditional Economics includes: microeconomics, and macroeconomics.  Marx developed an alternative static approach.  Limitations of the equilibrium model have resulted in the development of: Keynes's dynamic General Theory of Employment Interest & Money, and Complexity Economics.  Since trading depends on human behavior, economics has developed behavioral models including: behavioral economics.   & simulating markets
• 20 are working in teams building applications to do novel creative work
• 20 are in a quiet zone working on art or creative writing projects while elsewhere
  
• Some practice making music; and each pupil can switch over to another area when they gain mastery of their current focus topic
  

Redefining summer

The future of transcripts

• Exams that are expected to be retaken and learned from
  
• A multi-year record of what concepts were learned and how
  
• Details of how many relevant concepts have been mastered is a strategy of ensuring that a given concept is adequately comprehended before being expected to understand a more advanced one, explains Salman Khan in The One World School House.  It was developed in the 1920s in Winnetka school district, Illinois under superintendent Carlton Washburne.  But since the 1920s mastery learning was ignored until the 1960s when Benjamin Bloom & James Block promoted the technique and demonstrated its superior results.  However, school system inertia sustained the traditional learning processes.  Mastery learning was once again ignored until Khan Academy provided a technology supported implementation.  
  
• Open-ended design components
  
• Character assessments, inferred from the approach taken to overcoming getting stuck,
  
• Evidence of a willingness to help others
  
• Creative portfolio which allows an assessment of curiosity and creativity based on the pupil's 'own product, created from scratch, to make a solution out of an open-ended problem.'
  

Serving the underserved

• Malnourishment makes learning difficult
  
• School infrastructure and supplies are limited and under-funded
  
• There are too few teachers, their skill sets are limited, corruption is rampant and oversight non-existent.  

• DVD players and TV sets are ubiquitous and so offer a baseline for access to the videos.  
• Time-shared low-end iPads and cellular network connectivity can be financed for around two cents a child a day.  Bandwidth intense video would be pre-loaded Khan argues. 
  
• By time-sharing the iPads and networks between paying middle class and non-paying poor the startup funding can be bootstrapped.  Indeed Khan argues middle class investment in tutors could be leveraged since the Khan Academy approach would prove more effective and cheaper, allowing some of this investment to be used for bootstrapping. 
  

The future of credentials

What college could become

Making time for creativity

• The current education system does reflect an
  This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  The mechanism and its emergence are discussed. 
  
  evolved CAS, defined by a
  Plans emerge in complex adaptive systems (CAS) to provide the instructions that agents use to perform actions.  The component architecture and structure of the plans is reviewed. 
  
  schematic plan specified legislatively and transformed via
  Plans change in complex adaptive systems (CAS) due to the action of genetic operations such as mutation, splitting and recombination.  The nature of the operations is described. 
  
  memetic operators, with a path shaped by
  This page discusses the impact of random events which once they occur encourage a particular direction forward for a complex adaptive system (CAS). 
  
  frozen accidents.  Competing paths exist to the present one persisted in our customs.  But frozen accidents and
  This page reviews the inhibiting effect of the value delivery system on the expression of new phenotypic effects within an agent. 
  
  extended phenotypic alignment both make the current path highly resistant to change.  To do so it's necessary to:
  
• Strategically undermine the regressive forces -
  Kevin Kruse argues that from 1930 onwards the corporate elite and the Republican party have developed and relentlessly executed strategies to undermine Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.  Their successful strategy used the credibility of conservative religious leaders to:
  

  • Demonstrate religious issues with the New Deal. 
    
  • Integrate the corporate elite and evangelicals. 
    
  • Use the power of corporate advertising and Hollywood to reeducate the American people to view the US as historically religious and the New Deal and liberalism as anti-religious socialism. 
  • Focus the message through evangelicals including Vereide and Graham. 
    
  • Centralize the strategy through President Eisenhower. 
    
  • Add religious elements to mainstream American symbols: money, pledge;
  • Push for prayer in public school
    
  • Push Congress to promote prayer
    
  • Make elections more about religious positions. 
    

  
  Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames them from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  Strategy is the art of the possible.  But it also depends on persistence. 
  
  
  demonstrated in Kevin Kruze's One Nation Under God, or
  
• This page reviews Christensen's disruption of a complex adaptive system (CAS).  The mechanism is discussed with examples from biology and business. 
  
  Disrupt the network, as Khan Academy has an opportunity to do; but it's not typical.  Khan appears to be more interested in working within the current network arrangement.  
• Khan explains his logical concerns about undermining the pupil's creativity. 
  Friedman and Martin leverage the lifelong data collected on 1,528 bright individuals selected by Dr. Lewis Terman starting in 1921, to understand what aspects of the subjects' lives significantly affected their longevity.  Looking broadly across each subject's: Personality, Education, Parental impacts, Energy levels, Partnering, Careers, Religion, Social networks, Gender, Impact from war and trauma; Friedman and Martin are able to develop a set of model pathways, which each individual could be seen to select and travel along.  Some paths led to the traveler having a long life.  Others were problematic.  The models imply that the US approach to health and wellness should focus more on supporting the development and selection of beneficial pathways. 
  
  Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments from the perspective of CAS theory.  The pathways are most applicable to bright individuals with the resources and support necessary to make and leverage choices they make.  Striving to enter and follow a beneficial pathway seems sensible but may be impossible for individuals trapped in a collapsing network, starved of resources. 
  
  
  Terman's studies indicate that children that started formal school before age 6 'early starters' were prone to trouble throughout life. 
  
• Dorner
  Dietrich Dorner argues complex adaptive systems (CAS) are hard to understand and manage.  He provides examples of how this feature of these systems can have disastrous consequences for their human managers.  Dorner suggests this is due to CAS properties psychological impact on our otherwise successful mental strategic toolkit.  To prepare to more effectively manage CAS, Dorner recommends use of:
  

  • Effective iterative planning and
    
  • Practice with complex scenario simulations; tools which he reviews.   
  explains that understanding a CAS like education
  The complexity and problems of the US Health network is described in terms of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. 
  
  The network:
  

  • Is deeply embedded in the US nation state. It reflects the conflict between two opposing visions for the US.  The emergence of a parasitic elite further constrains the choices available to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the network. 
    
  • Is incented to focus on localized competition generating massive & costly duplication of services within physician based health care operations instead of proven public health strategies.  This process drives increasing research & treatment complexity and promotes hope for each new technological breakthrough. 
    
  • Is amplified by the legislatively structured separation and indirection of service development, provision, reimbursement and payment. 
    
  • Is impacted by the different political strategies for managing the increasing cost of health care for the demographic bulge of retirees.  
  • Is presented with acute and chronic problems to respond to.  As currently setup the network is tuned to handle acute problems.  The interactions with patients tend to be transactional. 
    
  • Includes a legislated health insurance infrastructure which is:
  • Costly and inefficient
  • Structured around yearly contracts which undermine long-term health goals and strategies.  
  • Is supported by increasingly regulated HCIT which offers to improve data sharing and quality but has entrenched commercial EHR products deep within the hospital systems. 
    
  or medicine is difficult to do.  Khan notes the risk of overgeneralizing.  That is a capability baked into medicine's off-label prescribing. 
  
• Pinker provides an explanation of how hunter gatherer's evolved minds enable formal education. 
  
• Khan hopes to avoid the pitfalls of advocating a general theory, with his approach, personal philosophy and skepticism about pseudo-science.  Using CAS theory we:
  
• Regard hypothesis formation as assisted by general theory.  But we agree with Peter Medawar
  Peter Medawar writes about key historic events in the evolution of medical science. 
  
  that CAS science is conjectural. 
  
• Doubt for a CAS subject that the scientific method alone will achieve all that Khan hopes in the short term.  These are situations where the right answer is legitimately open to question and future clarification will depend on strategic success,
  This page discusses the impact of random events which once they occur encourage a particular direction forward for a complex adaptive system (CAS). 
  
  frozen accidents and which path gets taken. 
  
• See
  Walter Shewhart's iterative development process is found in many complex adaptive systems (CAS).  The mechanism is reviewed and its value in coping with random events is explained. 
  
  Shewhart cycles as using
  Plans emerge in complex adaptive systems (CAS) to provide the instructions that agents use to perform actions.  The component architecture and structure of the plans is reviewed. 
  
  schematic plans as modifiable templates used to ground each instance's set of strategies and assist in subsequent inclusion of proposed changes.  Without this methodological rigor
  This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  The mechanism and its emergence are discussed. 
  
  evolution would not work.  We assume that Sal uses a 'plan' to focus his work in developing a new educational video.  If these plans aren't written down it will be hard to ground further iterations and the core may itself develop holes. 
  
• Note Mervin Kelly's impact on the world from adding theory to Edison's practice. 
  
• Khan's observations, insights and strategies have thrust him to the
  This page discusses the benefits of bringing agents and resources to the dynamically best connected region of a complex adaptive system (CAS). 
  
  center of the education network.  To achieve his vision he must operationalize it.  But that brings complex challenges:
• Hiring effective
  Plans are interpreted and implemented by agents.  This page discusses the properties of agents in a complex adaptive system (CAS). 
  It then presents examples of agents in different CAS.  The examples include a computer program where modeling and actions are performed by software agents.  These software agents are aggregates. 
  The participation of agents in flows is introduced and some implications of this are outlined. 
  
  agents, when he is depending on the problematic education network to make them available and identify them to him.  He asserts he is hiring the best.  
• Developing strategies, associating them with the vision, prioritizing them, assessing their impact and learning from the assessment.  And then updating the priorities and strategies for the next iteration. 
  This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  The mechanism and its emergence are discussed. 
  
  Evolution does this by using
  Plans emerge in complex adaptive systems (CAS) to provide the instructions that agents use to perform actions.  The component architecture and structure of the plans is reviewed. 
  
  genes,
  Plans change in complex adaptive systems (CAS) due to the action of genetic operations such as mutation, splitting and recombination.  The nature of the operations is described. 
  
  genetic operators and competition.   But it is
  Richard Dawkin's explores how nature has created implementations of designs, without any need for planning or design, through the accumulation of small advantageous changes. 
  
  a long, slow and destructive process. 
  This page looks at schematic structures and their uses.  It discusses a number of examples:
  

  • Schematic ideas are recombined in creativity. 
  • Similarly designers take ideas and rules about materials and components and combine them. 
  • Schematic Recipes help to standardize operations. 
  • Modular components are combined into strategies for use in business plans and business models. 

  
  As a working example it presents part of the contents and schematic details from the Adaptive Web Framework (AWF)'s operational plan. 
  
  Finally it includes a section presenting our formal representation of schematic goals. 
  Each goal has a series of associated complex adaptive system (CAS) strategy strings. 
  These goals plus strings are detailed for various chess and business examples. 
  
  Planning presents alternative dilemmas in complex situations as Khan and Dorner both highlight.  And if his organization is successful at structuring to deliver its actions centrally, how should it change the current network?  Can the organization avoid misinterpretations? 
  
• Khan's network of freely available educational concepts provides bedrock for learners to depend on.  It is a significant and valuable shift from what came before.  But it also threatens the revenue streams of powerful companies who benefit from corralling knowledge within their text book product offers.  While Khan is aiming to support the current educators with his tools he can
  This page reviews Christensen's disruption of a complex adaptive system (CAS).  The mechanism is discussed with examples from biology and business. 
  
  disrupt the publishing network.  We expect they will respond to the threat. 
  
• Khan notes the potential to continue learning throughout life.  His tools will certainly make this easier for the motivated.  But CAS theory suggests, as he concedes, learning is an evolutionary developmental is a phase during the operation of a CAS agent.  It allows for schematic strategies to be iteratively blended with environmental signals to solve the logistical issues of migrating newly built and transformed sub-agents.  That is needed to achieve the adult configuration of the agent and optimize it for the proximate environment.  Smiley includes examples of the developmental phase agents required in an emergent CAS.  In situations where parents invest in the growth and memetic learning of their offspring the schematic grab bag can support optimizations to develop models, structures and actions to construct an adept adult.  In humans, adolescence leverages neural plasticity, elder sibling advice and adult coaching to help prepare the deploying neuronal network and body to successfully compete. 
  strategy to provide young adults with an effective tool kit.  Sapolsky notes that adolescence in humans supports the transition from a juvenile configuration, dependent on parents and structured to learn & logistically transform, to adult optimized to the proximate environment.  And it is staged encouraging the adolescents to escape the hierarchy they grew up in and enter other groups where they may bring in: fresh ideas, risk taking; and alter the existing hierarchy: Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates & Paul Allen.  It marks the beginning of Piaget's formal operational stage of cognitive development.  The limbic, autonomic and hormone networks are already deployed and functioning effectively.  The frontal cortex has to be pruned: winning neurons move to their final highly connected positions, and are myelinated over time.  The rest dissolve.  So the frontal lobe does not obtain its adult configuration and networked integration until the mid-twenties when prefrontal cortex control becomes optimal.  The evolutionarily oldest areas of the frontal cortex mature first.  The PFC must be iteratively customized by experience to do the right thing as an adult.  Adolescents:
  • Don't detect irony effectively.  They depend on the DMPFC to do this, unlike adults who leverage the fusiform face area.  
  • Regulate emotions with the ventral striatum while the prefrontal cortex is still being setup.  Dopamine projection density and signalling increase from the ventral tegmentum catalyzing increased interest in dopamine based rewards.  Novelty seeking allows for creative exploration which was necessary to move beyond the familial pack.  Criticisms do not get incorporated into learning models by adolescents leaving their risk assessments very poor.  The target of the dopamine networks, the adolescent accumbens, responds to rewards like a gyrating top - hugely to large rewards, and negatively to small rewards.  Eventually as the frontal regions increase in contribution there are steady improvements in: working memory, flexible rule use, executive organization and task shifting.  And adolescents start to see other people's perspective. 
    
  • Drive the cellular transformations with post-pubescent high levels of testosterone in males, and high but fluctuating estrogen & progesterone levels in females.  Blood flow to the frontal cortex is also diverted on occasion to the groin.  
  • Peer pressure is exceptionally influential in adolescents.  Admired peer comments reduce vmPFC activity and enhance ventral striatal activity.  Adults modulate the mental impact of socially mean treatment: the initial activation of the PAG, anterior cingulate, amygdala, insula cortex; which generate feelings of pain, anger, and disgust, with the VLPFC but that does not occur in adolescents.  
  • Feel empathy intensely, supported by their rampant emotions, interest in novelty, ego.  But feeling the pain of others can induce self-oriented avoidance of the situations. 
    
  is significant in this regard.  Mostly such processes shut down when evolution detects further investment added risk, is an assessment of the likelihood of an independent problem occurring.  It can be assigned an accurate probability since it is independent of other variables in the system.  As such it is different from uncertainty. 
  .  
• Khan highlights the difficulty of accurately identifying future niches and what skill-sets they will make valuable.  RSS is Rob's Strategy Studio sees the current tactical network expansion as initiated by
  A government sanctioned monopoly supported the construction of a superorganism American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T).  Within this Bell Labs was at the center of three networks:
  

  1. The evolving global scientific network. 
     
  2. The Bell telephone network.  And
     
  3. The military industrial network deploying 'fire and missile control' systems. 

  Bell Labs strategically leveraged each network to create an innovation engine. 
  They monitored the opportunities to leverage the developing ideas, reorganizing to replace incumbent opposition and enable the creation and growth of new ideas. 
  Once the monopoly was dismantled, AT&T disrupted. 
  Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the innovation mechanisms are discussed. 
  
  
  Bell lab's strategic innovations is the economic realization of invention and combinatorial exaptation. 
  .  The actual paths that develop in a CAS are likely to reflect such strategic influences but the details and timing will get impacted by tactical details.  Khan fears potential resistance from the establishment.  For RSS the risk is broader.  For example Phyllis Vogel's Portal School successfully adopted the one room school house model, gathering interested teachers to operate it in the late 20th century Cupertino, California.  But while parent's rushed to leverage the impressive results on their children, they reacted against what they judged a suspect process and insisted on shifting to the 'traditional model'.   
• Khan reviews the increasing competition for attractive positions within the US network.  CAS theory indicates this fight is part of a
  Peter Turchin describes how major pre-industrial empires developed due to effects of geographic boundaries constraining the empires and their neighbors' interactions.  Turchin shows how the asymmetries of breeding rates and resource growth rates results in dynamic cycles within cycles.  After the summary of Turchin's book complex adaptive system (CAS) theory is used to augment Turchins findings. 
  
  multi-cycle cliodynamic process.  It will benefit the powerful to treat the situation as a war where they can strategically improve their chances.  As such Khan's alternative transcripts will be seen as a significant
  The page describes the SWOT process.  That includes:
  

  • The classification of each event into strength weakness opportunity and threat.  
    
  • The clustering process for grouping the classified events into goals.  
    
  • How the clusters can support planning and execution. 
    

  Operational SWOT matrices and clusters from the Adaptive Web Framework (AWF) are included as examples. 
  
  opportunity or threat.  Turchin notes how education is an indicator of intra-elite competition.  
• Khan suggests no one knows how to teach creativity.  CAS theory argues for any agent to have development and operational phase.  Human adolescence in humans supports the transition from a juvenile configuration, dependent on parents and structured to learn & logistically transform, to adult optimized to the proximate environment.  And it is staged encouraging the adolescents to escape the hierarchy they grew up in and enter other groups where they may bring in: fresh ideas, risk taking; and alter the existing hierarchy: Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates & Paul Allen.  It marks the beginning of Piaget's formal operational stage of cognitive development.  The limbic, autonomic and hormone networks are already deployed and functioning effectively.  The frontal cortex has to be pruned: winning neurons move to their final highly connected positions, and are myelinated over time.  The rest dissolve.  So the frontal lobe does not obtain its adult configuration and networked integration until the mid-twenties when prefrontal cortex control becomes optimal.  The evolutionarily oldest areas of the frontal cortex mature first.  The PFC must be iteratively customized by experience to do the right thing as an adult.  Adolescents:
  • Don't detect irony effectively.  They depend on the DMPFC to do this, unlike adults who leverage the fusiform face area.  
  • Regulate emotions with the ventral striatum while the prefrontal cortex is still being setup.  Dopamine projection density and signalling increase from the ventral tegmentum catalyzing increased interest in dopamine based rewards.  Novelty seeking allows for creative exploration which was necessary to move beyond the familial pack.  Criticisms do not get incorporated into learning models by adolescents leaving their risk assessments very poor.  The target of the dopamine networks, the adolescent accumbens, responds to rewards like a gyrating top - hugely to large rewards, and negatively to small rewards.  Eventually as the frontal regions increase in contribution there are steady improvements in: working memory, flexible rule use, executive organization and task shifting.  And adolescents start to see other people's perspective. 
    
  • Drive the cellular transformations with post-pubescent high levels of testosterone in males, and high but fluctuating estrogen & progesterone levels in females.  Blood flow to the frontal cortex is also diverted on occasion to the groin.  
  • Peer pressure is exceptionally influential in adolescents.  Admired peer comments reduce vmPFC activity and enhance ventral striatal activity.  Adults modulate the mental impact of socially mean treatment: the initial activation of the PAG, anterior cingulate, amygdala, insula cortex; which generate feelings of pain, anger, and disgust, with the VLPFC but that does not occur in adolescents.  
  • Feel empathy intensely, supported by their rampant emotions, interest in novelty, ego.  But feeling the pain of others can induce self-oriented avoidance of the situations. 
    
  provides the developmental transition from juvenile to adult.  Learning creative strategies during this transformation is in line with
  This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  The mechanism and its emergence are discussed. 
  
  evolution's design.  Steven Johnson
  Good ideas are successful because they build upon prior developments that have been successfully implemented.  Johnson demonstrates that they are phenotypic expressions of memetic plans subject to the laws of complex adaptive systems (CAS). 
  
  describes a framework for generating 'good ideas.'  And Johnson explains that common place, a format of note book where multiple areas of interest were recorded, described, cross referenced, and iteratively developed over a period of time.  Steven Johnson explains how the idea of a common place book inspired Tim Berners-Lee's design for the world-wide-web.  Walter Isaacson notes Leonardo da Vinci's use of a 'zibaldone' or common place book.  Charles Darwin also used the format in his note books. 
  note books provided Darwin & his peers with a mechanism for describing complexity.  Walter Isaacson details the contribution of the common place book to Leonardo da Vinci's developing genius.  It is unfortunate, but not surprising, that mass education would have ignored the common place toolset. 
  

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