The ideas themselves showcased the huge range of possibilities for what techies call “disruptive” innovations in education. Taking top honors just earlier this evening from among about eight teams was a product called CourseCheck. It’s a system that moves information and assignments from college syllabi into online calendars, helping students stay on top of their work.

GrowingAssessment, a project I tagged along with for a few hours on Saturday, was focused more on the needs of under-performing schools. The prototype is an open-source assessment bank for teachers, with items written by teachers, aimed at reducing the pain and redundancy of researching and writing rigorous assessment questions.

Another project, CodeNow, is a platform for helping underserved students learn “foundational skills in computer science and programming to narrow the digital divide.” Browse and Learn is a prototype browser plugin that helps you learn another language as you read the Internet by substituting key vocabulary words with their foreign language equivalents, allowing you to see them in context.

The event is a harbinger of the kind of collaboration between educators, businesspeople, developers, and investors that is absolutely critical to closing the achievement gap. There is a significant lack of innovation in public education, and CMs must take their teaching knowledge and leverage it to build the tools and companies we need.

While I did not join a team at the event, I made several excellent connections and new friends. I explained Exit Tickets to an executive from Wireless Generation, a leader in the new school of education software companies. I met TFA alums running their own education consulting groups, who connected me in turn to TFA alums running their own education technology groups. I swapped classroom disaster stories with former Baltimore Public Schools teachers and drank coffee with Harvard Business School grads.

Five current DC Region CMs or recent alums followed the startup beacon to Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business. Three of those alums devoted the whole weekend to projects ranging from a tool that re-imagined globes for learning about world cultures to clean, accessible visualizations of student data for parents.

I didn’t join a team on account of planning and grading to handle this weekend, so I’d best head to bed to preserve what little of that reserve energy remains. But let this serve as background for future arguments on why this event represents the dangers of an unchecked digital divide, and why we need more TFA folks working on startups during the week, rather than just the occasional weekend.

But according to one study, when it comes to Donors, they Choose middle school less often. As in, more than one third less often than high school. According to Tiffany Bergin, who tied for top honors in the “Data Analysis” category,

Projects for students in Grades 6-8 were 36 percent less likely to receive full funding than those for students in Grades 9-12 (Data -> Knowledge -> Insight)

Projects for grades 3-5 were 32% less likely to see full funding compared to 9-12; pre-k through 2 were 27% less likely. These are not insignificant gaps, and what surprised me the most is that for the grades where catching up is most critical—middle school—the additional dollars for additional resources just weren’t what the donors community supported.

Now there could be any number of reasons for this—fewer projects, projects of differing quality, more urban high school teachers asking for money, etc., etc. This doesn’t tell us anything about causes. But in terms of need for resources to make up lost ground and accelerate students on to high school and beyond, I want to figure out how to get more great middle school projects funded.

(More background on the Hacking Education data crunching competition, which gave analysis and hackers access to 10 years of DonorsChoose.org project funding data, is available here. )

Kids at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory 2009 LBL Daughters & Sons to Work Day (flickr/berkeleylab)

Perhaps I’ll follow through in the future on collaborating with some science educators to design a hybrid course on the history of science for middle or high schoolers. But that’s a post for another time.

This creative project might seem a little self-serving, but it allows me to revisit some work that I’m proud of, and which made me a better writer and editor, which in turn made me a better and more committed English teacher. Moreover, it allows me to explore and reinforce connections between what I used to spend my time on, what I’ve been reading, and what I do now. And in the recent words of Steven Johnson, speaking about where good ideas come from, “Chance favors the connected mind” (emphasis added).

Without further ado, then, here’s a list of some Science Progress Greatest Hits authored, in whole, or in part, by your humble editor, arranged in chronological order (cross-posted under Portfolio):

04-15-10 | The Weathermen Know Which Way the Wind Blows
A recent survey demonstrates that many forecasters embrace their role as informal science educators. Ed Maibach says it’s an opportunity to boost public understanding of global warming.

03-30-10 | Court Rules that DNA Is Information, Not Intellectual Property
A lawsuit argued that patents owned by Myriad Genetics on two genes connected to breast and ovarian cancer stunt genetic research and limit access to health care for women. The ruling said that genes can’t be patented.

03-23-10 | Energy for Regional Innovation
We can ensure that scientists, engineers, and taxpayers alike get the most out of federal support for basic research and development by taking what researchers know about moving ideas from the lab to the market and linking universities, business, and the government in an effort to grow regional economies.

03-05-10 | How Science Sparked Democracy
There are intimate connections between the scientific advances that expanded the frontiers of human knowledge and the democratic experiments that expanded the frontiers of human liberty.

02-02-10 | A First-Place Budget for Science
The budget request for fiscal year 2011 that the Obama administration released on Monday includes foundational investments that will help the United States remain the leader among innovative nations.

12-04-09 | Reason is a Casualty in the Ongoing War on Climate Science
In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal editorial section, Daniel Henninger took exaggeration of the scandal over emails stolen from scientists at the University of East Anglia to new heights, arguing that the incident undermines the entire centuries-old scientific enterprise. But the column ignores both the current observable impact of climate change and scientific history, and is merely the latest volley in the ongoing conservative war on science.

11-10-09 | Time for Family, Time for Science
A significant proportion of American women leave scientific careers between earning their Ph.D. and winning tenure-track positions. Many of these “leaks” in the pipeline are the result of decisions to start families. Changes to federal and university policy can stem the losses, say the authors of a new report.

10-21-09 | Tools for Truth Telling
Given the Obama administration’s positive approach to science and to human rights, a new CAP report argues that now is the time to craft policies that support collaborations between researchers and advocates that stop atrocities.

09-24-09 | The Coolest Platform Raises the Hardest Questions
So who is speaking here, an ethicist, a scientist, or a policymaker? Real talk on the ethics of synthetic biology.

06-23-09 | NIH Funding is Good for Your Health, and It’s Good for the Economy
Federal funding for biomedical research saves lives. Not only that, but investment in research through the National Institutes of Health stimulates the economy by helping people stay healthy and productive. So says a new report published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (open access).

06-23-09 | Personal Profiling
Will access to our own genetic information make us healthier? That’s the idea, but there’s a lot to learn as we share and interpret it. Meanwhile, questions remain about proper oversight of an industry that blurs the line between consumer and research participant.

06-16-09 | The Worn Grooves of Disciplinary Research
Is pathbreaking science the product of interdisciplinary groups or the interdisciplinary thinking of foresighted individuals? In a commentary in PLoS Computational Biology, Sean Eddy, a Howard Hughes investigator, argues that “roadmap” thinking from the National Institutes of Health for building teams of specialists to tackle complex problems in modern research is flawed, because it encourages work in the worn grooves of existing, and perhaps outmoded, disciplines.

03-27-09 | Bush’s Council on Bioethics Makes Toothless Attack on New Stem Cell Policy<
Yesterday, the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute, released a statement authored by members of the President’s Council on Bioethics critiquing the Obama administration’s stem cell policy. What the authors failed to explain in either the statement or the accompanying press release is that the current members of the President’s Council on Bioethics were appointed by George W. Bush, and will serve until the charter for the council expires in September. The critique, in effect, is an echo from the past.

Coda

The eponymous title of this post is drawn from the title of one of my favorite SP articles (“The Areas of Our Expertise”)—favorite because it’s a great bioethics/policy/history of science think-piece, and because I took a speech written for a talk at the Library of Alexandria and edited it into a real article. The author, Eric Meslin, is also a great guy (and incidentally the former Executive Director of President Clinton’s National Bioethics Advisory Council). Plus how often do you get to write about ideas with names like “Non-Overlapping Magisteria”?

A bench scientist or an engineer will tell you the same thing: the distinction between “science” and “technology” is important. Science is more about the undirected search for answers to questions about how the natural world works. Technology is more about the directed application of tools, methods, or even scientific processes to expand human capabilities. The two inevitably overlap, but if science is about figuring out how things work, then technology is simply making them work. But in James Gleick’s latest book, he masterfully describes the historical and theoretical foundations of the field that knits science and technology together, or perhaps encompasses them both: information theory.

He draws an arc from the earliest forms of human communication that aimed to compress time and distance–writing, counting, African drumming–all the way to late-20th-century quantum mechanics. But this connection is not a starry-eyed tendril that college students might invent around a dining hall table. The story he plows through Charles Babbage’s mechanical calculating machine; 19th-century telegraph economics; Claude Shannon’s seminal 1948 paper, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”; and the thicket of contemporary genetic computation is thrilling, riveting, and breathtaking.

The best episodes of the idiosyncratic BBC show, “Connections,” follow science historian James Burke as he cannonballs from one cultural innovation to another. Just a sampling from one Wikipedia show summary: “The search for artificial quinine to treat malaria led to the development of artificial dyes, which Germany used to produce fertilizers to grow wheat and led to the advancement of chemistry which in turn led to DuPont’s discovery of polymers such as nylon.” In a similar manner, though with more technical depth, Gleick weaves together Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene with Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.

For a concrete example of how powerful these connections are, consider his explanation of how the uncertainty principle influences quantum teleportation–via information. In short, an atom can release two “entangled” quantum particles, for instance two photons with the same spin. These photos can fly off in opposite directions, indefinitely, and they will forever share the same spin–one way of looking at this is that they will carrying an identical bit of information, encoded in the spin. The uncertainty principle dictates that “when you measure any property of a quantum object, you thereby lose the ability to measure a complimentary property”–you can know the particle’s momentum, or its velocity, but you cannot know both. But the properties of entangled particles are fixed, thought they remain unknown until an observer measures them. So if two such particles are on opposite sides of the galaxy, and we measure the spin of one, we immediately know and fix permanently the spin of the other particle–a transfer of state that appears to happen faster than light. The paradox seems to violate the fact that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. And indeed, nothing can, because what must actually travel from one particle’s location to the next to convey the other’s spin is information. And information cannot travel faster than light–so the spin is never “fixed” or “teleported” to the distant location until the information about it arrives.

Every once in a while, I am truly awed and amazed by the new intellectual soil cultivated by a writer. This sometimes happens in the areas of science writing, a field I have turned to often in the past few years. But The Information is truly remarkable in the depth and reach of the connections it conveys in exciting, imaginative prose. I could not recommend a non-fiction work more.

Update below

Teaching With Cloud Storage

So since the very beginning of TFA Summer Institute, the hands-down most important web tool for me as a teacher (aside from email) has been Dropbox. Dropbox is a feature-rich, cross-platform file-syncing service. If you don’t use it to store your lesson plans, collaborate with co-teachers and other colleagues, as well as store your most vital files in a secure, accessible place, then I really don’t know how you’re working on the Internet these days.

The problem with Dropbox is that the free storage is limited, and when you’re sharing folders with 6+ colleagues who are all generating 5-10 MB of files every week, your 2 GB of free space fills up fast. For each successful invite you generate, getting another user to install the software on a unique computer, you each get another 250 MB. But the pricing scheme for ramping beyond that just isn’t competitive: 50 GB of storage is $99 a year.

Having access to the lessons, assessments, and worksheets created by my fellow PGCPS TFA colleagues has been absolutely crucial, and much of what we generated this year will be useful next year. There’s just not enough free space in our respective Dropboxes to archive it all—and what’s more, searching within those folders, even on OS X which has Spotlight, is imprecise. What do do?

What Features Do I Need for Collaborative Storage?

I started thinking about this around mid-year, and made a list of several possible solutions that needed to meet as many of these criteria as possible:

• shared, syncing cloud storage space
• 10+ GB, accessible to at least 4 or more users
• the ability to upload existing folders of material currently stored locally
• effective searchibility of folder contents and within documents
• lowest possible cost
• scalable

Lifehacker did a nice side-by-side comparison of three competing services that provide most of this functionality: Cloud Storage Faceoff: Windows Live SkyDrive vs. Dropbox vs. Amazon Cloud Drive. Their verdict:

But aside from Dropbox, none of the colleagues I was working with had accounts on these services. Moreover, while there are things I like about SkyDrive, the OS X application for syncing files, Windows Live Mesh, requires that you tell the service when to initiate a sync, so I see it more as an archive-every-once-in-awhile tool. Finally, the syncable storage is limited to 5 of your total 25 GB on SkyDrive.

There’s also SugarSync, an early competitor to Dropbox with 5 GB free storage and a focus on syncing across platforms, PCs, and mobile devices. But going this direction would effectively mean running another syncing serving in parallel to Dropbox, and I’m wary of doing that since anything that has to stay switched on will eat valuable RAM.

Forget All of the Above: Google to the Rescue

Around the beginning of April, Google unveiled a new feature in Docs: the ability to upload and share folders. This might be the solution I’ve been waiting for, I thought. Here’s how the features add up for Google Docs:

• YES shared, syncing cloud storage space
• YES 10+ GB, accessible to at least 4 or more users
• YES the ability to upload existing folders of material currently stored locally
• YES effective searchibility of folder contents and within documents (really the only service that does this—PLUS Google Docs now features “Descriptions” which add additional metadata to files, something not really possible in the other services)
• YES lowest possible cost ($0.25 per 1GB, compared with $2 per 1 GB for Dropbox)
• YES scalable (you can buy many terabytes of Google space if you need it)

So here’s what we’re doing. I just set up a new shared “Collection” in my personal Google Docs account and shared it with the appropriate people. There are two top-level folders within an encompassing “pgcps-ela” folder: “2010-2011″ and “2011-2012.” In these, we’ll upload and archive the folders of unit plans, lessons, and materials we have accumulated over the year. That will clear out our Dropboxes, allowing use to start using those for day-to-day backup and sharing next year. But now anything in the shared Docs collection will be searchable, previewable in-browser, and as soon as we get close to the 1 GB personal limits, I’m going to throw down $5 for an additional 20 GB a year.

I’ll update on the successes and bumps in this project as we start archiving. If anyone else has other effective ways that you share and archive teaching materials, leave a comment.

Update 1: Cyberduck Connects to Google Docs

So I’d messed around with this a little bit previously, but hadn’t gotten the settings right. The newest version of Cyberduck, the open-source file transfer software, interfaces with Google Docs, meaning that you can upload and download files from your storage area without even having to use the browser interface. Huge (Mac & Windows, too!):

View Embassies in the Park in a larger map

(I totally tweeted this last night, so it was on time.)

View Standard Run in a larger map

The trouble is that while some 70.1 percent of new high school graduates started college last fall, many people already enrolled in community colleges don’t finish. Leonhardt reports:

Less than a third of all students who enroll in community colleges with the intention of getting a two-year degree — a degree leading to jobs in nursing, auto repair, preschool education — ever do so at any college, statistics suggest.

On top of that, data on students in community college is apparently scarce. A CAP colleague explains that the federal student loan and Pell grant structure is designed to get students enrolled, but does little to track them on their way to a degree or credential.

While that’s unfortunate, it’s not surprising. Lack of data is a consistent problem in many corners of the education system. Another CAP report demonstrates the problems that arise from the fact that most high schools only pay attention to how many of their students move on to college, not how well prepared they were to make the transition. Fortunately, there are success stories of schools that have recalibrated their learning goals to ensure that students aren’t just exposed to college preparation work, but that they actually learn how to do it.

Now TFA is all about capturing as much student tracking data as possible, within the context of a given year. That’s no small order, but the year is the scope of your work as a teacher. What if, as a teacher, you kept track of this information from year to year, and were able to follow your student through the school system to see how they were doing in the subject you taught? And what if the district also kept data on college enrollment, and those systems synchronized with college data. What if, years down the road, you knew what role you and other teachers played in shaping that student’s education?

Complicated, sure, but it’s just text in a database.

Research demonstrates that leaders who set exceptional expectations for their teams can get exceptional results. TFA’s own data bears this out for teachers who set lofty goals for their students. But new teachers will lack an important component of the argument that their students can meet these big goals: evidence that that teacher’s students have successfully hit high expectations before.

Addressing a new class of chemistry students on the first day of school, Paul Holloman says in the video for this exercise: “If you don’t care about making an A, there’s the door. Hit it. Get gone now. Because I don’t want to have you in my class if you’re not willing to work and make an A.”

His tone, as he admits, is blunt. He is stern and even intimidating as explains his expectations for hard work and attendance. “There’s nobody in here who can’t make an A,” he says. At first glance, this might sound like an ambitious but brutal pep talk. But for an observer, what makes his expectations talk absolutely convincing is the data he has to back it up from his previous three years in the classroom.

Over those three years, his class average has been a 93, he tells the new students. He points to a chart on the wall by the door displaying the test scores from the previous semester’s end of course exam. “This is my job,” he says in an after-class interview, “It’s serious business.” To demonstrate his commitment to his job, he tells the class that he is regularly available to help them, even answering question for athletes during halftime at basketball and soccer games.

Taken altogether: the firm classroom rules, the willingness to be available for many hours of outside-the-class help, and the record, written right there on the wall, of producing some of the highest student achievement in the state of North Carolina, all make the goal of a class A average on the final exams seem both sufficiently ambitious but also feasible.

Goals this specific have not driven most of my professional work. Somewhat by necessity, they have been more abstract and my colleagues and I have not tracked them with quantifiable metrics. For instance, Science Progress, the magazine of progressive science and technology policy I work for currently, set out to draw a clear connection between science and the progressive values of pragmatism, justice, and equality. The project began with the understanding that 1) no such publication existed in this specific space, 2) there were influential conservative journals generating a significant amount of discussion around issues of science and public policy, and 3) at the time of the launch, in 2007, a conservative presidential administration had severely damaged the relationship between science and policymaking by attacking science that did not support favored policy outcomes.

Three years later, the magazine enjoys the respect of colleagues and contributors, has generated good responses to certain pieces of content, and has generally seen steady attention as measured by website traffic and email list metrics. But while we may have a big goal that is fairly easy to state—to influence public policy by connecting science and progressive values—our ways of measuring whether or not we have hit that goal have remained qualitative and imprecise.

Considering where the project is now alongside the readings on the importance of setting big goals, two facts stand out. First, setting goals and working hard did make the first two years of the project a success: my colleagues and I worked hard, often outside normal hours, to ensure the success of the magazine and the larger political goals it represented. In that regard, I see the clear benefits of setting lofty goals to aim for and the utility of not setting a prescribed path to get there. We experimented with a variety of topics and types of content and attracted more of the same as a result. Likewise, students in my future classroom will see big, ambitious goals before them, and we will experiment with the best instructional tools to help them learn and reach those expectations.

But second, I see clearly now that part of the problem with our plans for Science Progress lie in the fact that we have articulated few measurable goals for checking our progress toward the lofty expectations we set. What’s heartening to learn is that there are proven ways of creating quantitative milemarkers for abstract goals. As Steven Farr explains in Teaching As Leadership, the Cleveland Orchestra set out to define its success as something highly abstract and subjective-sounding: “artistic excellent.” To measure their progress towards that goal, they crafted proxy indicators, including the number of standing ovations, the number of pieces they could play perfectly, invitations to prestigious festivals, ticket demand, requests from composers to debut new works with the orchestra, and other groups that imitated their style.

The point being that even for something as abstract as achieving “artistic excellent,” setting measurable indicators was not only possible, but facilitated getting a large group of people to move towards the same big goal. While I won’t be able to walk into my classroom this fall with three years of data, like Mr. Holloman, to back up my claim that I can motivate a group of students to work together with similar ambition, I will understand the method and know that it is possible.

Take this report that my humble employer, the Center for American Progress, and College Summit released last week. The authors explain that while many public high schools have a rigorous college preparation curriculum that includes Advanced Placement classes and the like, smart successful students often make it to their first year of college and find themselves totally adrift, unprepared for the academic expectations of higher ed. High schools, despite their best intentions, often don’t know whether or not they’re preparing students for success in college because they don’t keep track of how those students perform in their “13th” year. Simply put, they don’t measure the outcome of their work. It’s a matter of counting.

Now, building a data system that follows students from secondary school to potentially far-flung colleges is not trivial, but the principle—take note of what you do, measure, and make adjustments to better meet your goals—is one of those simple ideas that made for a lot of successful projects over the past decade.

The business community is generally out ahead on this whole counting and measuring thing, but it’s also worth noting that much of the exponential growth of web-based and social media technologies over the past 10 years is due, fundamentally, to the ability to use computers to measure what people are doing and craft tools and products that fit people’s needs. Google does this, incrementally, billions of times day. Similar story for most everything else you clicked on around the Internet today. But in a whole variety of other fields, counting has been around for decades, and its impact has snowballed in the face of cheap, fast computing, and the basic acceptance that if you want to understand a problem, you need data.

Atul Gwande’s Better offers a terrific tour of how measurement has improved various corners of medicine since the middle of the 20th century. Hospitals have beaten back onslaughts of drug-resistant bacteria by persuading everyone to wash his or her hands and counting the results. The introduction of the Apgar score, which enumerates on a 0-10 scale the health of newborn infants upon delivery, lead to a dramatic upswing the in the quality of care for infants and dramatic upswing in survival rates, which are now about 8 times better than they were in the 1930s. And the 90 percent survival rates for U.S. combat troops wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan is due in large part to the fact that military physicians diligently record copious information on injuries, treatments, and outcomes—so they can constantly find ways to improve on their success.

The next big step in education and in medicine is to take what we’ve counted, standardize the information, and compare it. That means national testing and data standards for education and interoperable electronic health records for medicine. Fortunately, there’s federal money for both of those projects: $4.35 billion for schools and $19 billion health information technology.