It turns out that recently an article about 8 Tuition Free Colleges (see it here) included a reference to Olin College, where I go to school currently. More interestingly, in the description for our school the following description was included:

Notable: Indicative of the entrepreneurial spirit of the school, six Olin students are taking a year off to develop educational Internet software – think Google Docs meets Facebook – for local middle school students. The students expect the software, which will include built-in features that allow parents and teachers to interact with and monitor their students’ work, to be operational by mid-April.

Nobody in our team knows how or why this article heard about us, though perhaps someone at Olin mentioned us somehow. The article was on Yahoo’s home page, and a bunch of our family members found it and sent us the link. Sweet!

The project I am working on, an educational startup called Alight Learning recently submitted an entry to the NAE (National Academy of Engineering) Grand Challenges Summit at Duke under the “Advance Personalized Learning” heading. The competition submission is a 1000 word essay and a Youtube video describing how you hope to solve a problem in one of the grand challenges categories. Here is the video we submitted, which you can also find directly at http://tinyurl.com/AlightLearning

 

I find now that with all the blogs and news feed I read I actually come across online content that can be defined as a true learning experience for me. I find my computer in pain from all the tabs I have open on Firefox, Chrome, and sometimes even IE (don’t ask why).  Today I ran across a post on KnowHR   I know nothing about this blog, but it linked me to the “Top 10 Presentations of all Time.” Now, I don’t know that this list is accurate, but I’ve been through the first two now and I’m enjoying myself!

The second, called “The Art of the Start” is phenomenally instructive for any young entrepreneur. In fact, I’m still listening to the presentation as I type this blog entry. The second bit of advice that he gives has to do with defining a mantra for a company. Guy Kawasaki, the author of this talk and a great resource for anybody interested in starting their own venture, says while explaining why a mantra is useful: “A slogan is for your customers, a mantra is for employees.” Both are equally important. He cites Fedex as an example of how properly framing a mantra will help you, especially internally. Fedex could tell you exactly where your next package is, on what truck, between what toll road booths, and how long your Wii should take to arrive at your doorstep. What Fedex sells is shipping, what Fedex gives is “peace of mind.” The mantra tells workers why they stand for, and gives your company internal drive and motivation.  

I’m going to finish watching this video now…and hopefully finish off that list of 10 presentations sometime soon.

I’m home for a couple weeks for the holidays, and the task of finding summer employment is fast approaching. While I admit that the kinds of employment I’m interested in aren’t exactly maintstream, I know that there are a few things I’ll be getting done in the next week while “resting” at home.

1.-Business/Personal Cards

I’m tired of having no cards to hand out and resort to not maintaining contact with people I meet or havign to give them an old card for a student startup I worked pm that stopped operating a year ago. How embarrassing is it to say: “Oh here’s my information, but actually, it’s all wrong…” That will be fixed! I promise.

2.-Online Portfolio

I actually setup this blog and my website while at home as well. My current “portfolio” page is old, and to my recent horror, not finished at all. This isn’t to say that it gets much traffic, but it is sad that I have a partially completed product up on my website.

3.- Design Portfolio

The last time I worked on this I came up with an idea for a vision in my design portfolio, which hopefully would have gotten across to employers Olin’s approach to user-oriented design and the projects I’ve done relating to this. Since then I’ve had friends who have actually implemented the idea fairly well, but now I feel odd about actually making my portfolio the way I originally anticipated. 

Before I leave I will have an update to my resume, as well as the three described above. January will be my time to find internships. For those who are still reading, I’m interested in working in either San Diego for a design firm or Silicon Valley for a startup. Sigh…ideally of course.

PROBLEM: It has happened in elementary, middle and high schools across the United States,

Principals, teachers, school districts have complained that every day students would waste valuable “computer time” during school hours looking at Myspace, updating their profile or something of the sort. What’s the value in that anyways? Right? …

SOLUTION: The result is that popular website such as Myspace, Facebook, and other social networking sites have been blocked so that students cannot go to them at all.

REACTION: The reaction, many students are bitter with the administration of the school, their teachers, who previously “nagged” them to stop using Myspace. Still other students have found one of the many ways to go around these blocks and still go to their favorite sites while professors aren’t looking.

Am I advocating that schools allow students to use Myspace during school hours? No, not really. Actually not at all. What I’m actually going to write about has to do with how useful applying beneficial system-level patterns and behaviors such as those found in social networking sites to other contexts where the benefits should be translatable, such as schools. To do this we’ll look at a sample scenario in the online social networking world and try to envision what a school environment would have that add similar benefits.

John comes home after a day of school that wasn’t particularly interesting. He sits down at his computer at home, skims through his junk hotmail email that he left open this morning before school, then clicks on his myspace bookmark and quickly logs himself in to see what’s new. No new messages it seems, but he has a handful of comments on his recent blog post titled “why I don’t like math class” or something. He replies to the comments, then glances around some of his friend’s profile pages for updates. He received a group event message for his “I love llamas” group, which he skimmed over but didn’t really reply to. I could go on about John and his interactions on myspace, but that’s not too exciting. …*etc*…

MySchool. (Yes, I know the name is silly.) Mary spent most of the day the same as any other school day. Her school had computers in every classroom, so she spent about a third of every school day working on projects and other things on the school laptops. This Friday her two last big social science blog entries on genetics are due. She almost finished one of these posts titled “my family history of diabetes.” Not many people had yet uploaded their blog entries, so she wasn’t able to get started reading the other 5 blog entries she was assigned to read and evaluate. She got home and went back to check her class’s points in the intramural basketball league which see could track on the group page for her “MySchool.” The school page let you chat with other students in your classroom during your open period of class, during lunch, as well as before and after school, but it wasn’t active during other classes that might be having a lecture or a focused work day. For example, that day during Biology they’d had their final talk on genetics, and a couple times they’d been asked to quickly find a biology topic they though was interesting and upload a couple links to a new assignment page in their biology class folder. They had to stand up in small groups and present two of the articles they had come up with, and then the entire class had to write a short biology class bulletin on two of the topics they found interesting. The idea was that some students who hadn’t started their genetics blog posts could get a head start themselves or with the help of others during these activities. In fact, Mary’s second post was going to be about this bizarre epidemic in Papua New Guinea someone presented on that was aggravated by the cannibalistic tendencies of the tribes that were afflicted. Now that she was home though, Mary could stop worrying so much about class work and instead signed onto her school page to chat with some of her friends that were still at school or even home at this point. She was supposed to meet with a handful of people yesterday that she didn’t get a chance to meet with about their final Math Podcast on their calculus topic of choice, which of course they hadn’t gotten started on yet. …*etc*…

Well now. I’d be very interested to see what else people have to say about connecting social networking with the current student learning environment in high schools. There are certain school districts that are moving towards what is called “electronic portfolios,” including the entire state of Rhode Island, where in 2008 15 schools have piloted a program which has begun to digitize the student learning experience. Who knows? Maybe US education would benefit from fusing the “biggest waste of student time” that is Myspace and electronic student portfolios.

On the subject of radical interdisciplinary design, we discussed in class the fusion of music and engineering, something I’m sure we will see posts about in the upcoming days. What I would like to talk about is the fusion of two disciplines which I have personally spent a lot of time thinking about before vital ideation, and am really excited to share with others. At first glance pedagogy and digital communications seem to have little in common. In fact, the notion of pedagogical research going hand in hand with network signaling and digital communications research seems outlandish and foreign at best. The thing is, any two disciplines must overlap in potentially powerful ways, and these two are no exception.

You can see from Figure 1 that the transmitter/receiver model is at least at a very basic level analogous to a teacher/student model where a lesson is transmitted to a student via some sort of signal. In this model a student’s receptivity to lesson X is based off their receptivity to specific teaching techniques. These techniques are used to varying degrees by a teacher, which can be depicted as the power spectral density of said teacher/transmitter’s transmit power, which in turn represents the amount of time teachers spend using a specific type of teaching technique. Figure 2 is a visual way to represent this last paragraph. You can see from the graph on the left, which shows professor “transmit” power as a function of the amount of time (shown on the vertical axis) they spend covering any material using different teaching techniques (shown on the horizontal axis.) Likewise the graph on the right shows student receptivity to different teaching techniques.

What a mouthful. To attempt to explain how this model might be useful, we consider the simple case of 30 students and a choice between two possible teaching techniques, Q_a = Auditory Learning and Q_b = Visual Learning. You can plot a student’s receptivity to these two teaching “techniques” on a two dimensional grid, where one axis is Q_a and the other is Q_b. The axes would range from 0->1 for each technique, where 1 is the hypothetical scenario were you as a student understand EVERYTHING that you learn using a specific technique. The ideal student would of course have a receptivity of 1 for both these values, but that wouldn’t make our model useful. The vector G₁ would represent the 2-D vector representing these two student receptivities. We can create 30 students with randomly generated receptivity vectors [G₁, G₂, …G₃₀] such that each student’s total receptivity||G|| is within an arbitrarily-defined range such as 0.3 < || G|| <>

Now, in the digital communications world you represent the power spectral density of a signal by multiplying the transmit power and channel receptivity. For us this means that in order to determine amount learned we can multiply the learning technique time distribution vector (in our 2-d example) for a professor by a student’s receptivity vector (for the two techniques) to give the amount “received as a signal” by a student from each “technique” The sum of the area under this student curve is the “amount learned”!

I will conclude the following post with an explanation of the following figure, which shows the example case of our 30 randomly generated students and the imaginary teacher who hypothetically could teach them any possible range of two specific techniques. What this translates to in the end is the following choice for a teacher: How much time do I spend say, watching videos as opposed to lecturing? Now, this case is obviously ideal because we can’t assume that we will know the exact “receptivity” of each student to a specific technique, and that this directly translates to amount learned, but in this end this is just a model of a teacher/student system. Every model is broken right? The only perfect model of a classroom environment is the classroom itself!

Each parabola shown in the figure above represents the projected learning efficiency E for a given student across the different mixes of auditory and visual learning techniques output by a professor. The vertex of each parabola corresponds to the student being taught by a teaching style that most perfectly matches his(her) receptivity G_n This value corresponds to the mix that represents that student’s highest learning efficiency. If we were teaching only one student, we would therefore choose the Auditory-Visual mix to coincide with the student’s vertex in this plot. However, we must teach to the entire class; so how can we select the direction of T_x? If our goal were to teach at a rate that did not exceed any student’s learning efficiency, the plot above implies that we should select about an equal mix of Auditory and Visual techniques, and we should choose a teaching rate (i.e. learning efficiency) of approximately 0.27. Qualitatively speaking, this corresponds to the highest learning efficiency in the plot that is below every parabola (or, the teaching rate below every student’s maximum learning efficiency). Instead of choosing this “lowest common denominator” approach, we may elect to forgo the few students with the lowest receptiveness in order to increase our teaching rate. Based on our understanding of the figure, any intelligent selection will exist at either the intersection of two parabolas or at the vertex of a parabola. We therefore limit our search to these points. You could envision a graph where you highlight only these two types of points and as you eliminate students you would move further up on the graph and around to different points to maximize the learning efficiency for the remaining N students.

The process for choosing this path up the graph can also be described intuitively as follows. Imagine you pressed a single finger up from the bottom of the last image shown. It would naturally center itself at the highest vertex or parabola union, which corresponds to the teaching technique mix (and the maximum learning efficiency threshold) that you would use to teach all 30 students. Next, say you wanted to exceed this threshold; you would effectively “ignore” one of the lowest parabolas and move to the next highest available point. This would be akin to teaching above the maximum learning efficiency for one of your students. This allows your technique mix to adjust itself to find the next maximum point. We can also plot the learning efficiency threshold height as a function of the number of students above the threshold; as discussed above, you can expect the maximum available threshold to increase as the number of students above the threshold decreases. With one student, assuming of course that our professor can transmit something perfect to that student’s receptivities, you achieve a learning efficiency of 1. With a decreased number of students under the threshold you achieve a lower perfect teaching efficiency for those students.

You could envision a scenario in this model where you chose your teacher signal at a point along this “path” up the vertexes and parabola union points that would maximize the overall amount of learning in the classroom. The “perfect learning efficiency” model up to this point hasn’t taken into account the fact that in the end the choice of a teacher’s T vector will lie somewhere on the 2-D student receptivity space for each student, and that on this space each student has their own perfect learning receptivity point. A teacher wanting to optimize his signal output would first decide an acceptable threshold for student learning, and then determine which of these points minimizes the distance between all the students he(she) is trying to teach for.

I welcome others to come up with two other seemingly random disciplines and merging them together somehow! I’m sure you can think of something in a quick 10 minutes. The basic idea for this post came about after a discussion asking the question “What if all knowledge could be plotted on a n-dimensional grid?” Without meaning to this successfully put linear algebra and digital communications in the same discussion space as pedagogy and learning. There are many more questions where this one came from, the real question is, do you ask yourself silly questions often enough to find real value in some of them?

Hey everyone! Just checking in for a short update in our MaunaLOA project idea on Ideablob!

We are still at the top of our sprint! We have 4 more days, and then we get ready for the final week of December’s showdown with the other top 7 ideas…Assuming we can stay in the top two for the sprint of course.  You can vote for us by clicking the link below if you haven’t already though.

 

 

Tomorrow I will hopefully be writing posts about the seminar on “Designing the New Engineer” I went to today, as well as an update on our LOA project! (preview: We have a name!)

NOTE: Hey everyone, this post is actually an old blog post I wrote up for a student-run course called Vital Ideation at Olin. Sorry if you’ve already seen these posts, but I do plan to post a couple of old articles like this one. Enjoy. 

Well, isn’t it? Maybe not a fad, but it is at least an idea that has caught on for one reason or another. For what it’s worth, ’tis a “sticky” idea at the least. What is the value of a design notebook? Part of me feels that individuals walking around with a notebook feel better about the fact that they carry one than about how much usefulness they get out of carrying it. I mean, it can be a hassle. Get changed, get stuff for class, oh yeah! grab my design notebook :). What makes someone do that in the first place? Well, carrying a design notebook is a sticky idea. Hopefully by the end of this post I will have made a bit of sense out of why this is the case.

So, I decided last week that I would hold out on writing about design notebooks until I thought of something interesting to write about. The topic of the second Vital Ideation lecture was “Stickiness,” and part of me feels that the act of carrying a design notebook is something that falls in line with many of the principles we discussed when talking about a product’s stickiness.

The first things that come to mind…
First off. I think that the act of carrying a notebook around is the sticky part of this whole idea. The “design” modifier is really only a specific case of this phenomenon. The carrying of some sort of notebook, whether for ideas, doodling, sketching, tasks, or some combination thereof is what can be considered “sticky.” The first things that come to mind when I think of a design notebook are the following:

1. Moleskine –
   

   “the legendary notebook used for the past two centuries by great artists and thinkers, including Van Gogh, Picasso, Hemingway and Chatwin. With an elastic closure and an expandable inner pocket made of cardboard and cloth, which contains the history, they are ideal for students” 

   It is actually kind of ridiculous how many different types of notebooks they have on their website. There is something special about this personal notebook idea. Something that makes people pay lots more than they should for bound paper for your pocket. Notice the sketch-book of Vincent Van Gogh himself to the right. How it shimmers with knowledge, uniqueness, genius and who knows what else. Is this what makes personal notebooks so sticky? Here is one of Olin’s very own on personalizing their Moleskine.

   “I just retired a Moleskine and got a new one that I have to set up - I figured I’d take you guys along for the ride. ”  

   So begins the blog post, which describes the act of setting up the notebook as a “ride” itself. From tables of contents to specialized lists and such, the customization that goes into this moleskine rivals that of a personal computer. Crazy huh? It’s only a notebook you might say, but it seems to be more than just this.

2. Lifehacker. Oh lifehacker and other such “tech trick tips for getting things done” websites. If I actually listed all the posts on maintaining, purchasing, improving, creating, modifying, and streamlining personal notebooks, I would be spending hours compiling all the posts and linking to them all in this lowly blog post of mine. If you pass the lifehacker test* of being described in more than 3 or so blog articles, I think you qualify to internet and/or nerd sensation (see also: fad & obsession.) Well, maybe not. (*note this term has never been used before and will never be used again in any formal writing)
   
3. PDAs, the Internet, and all other Electronics. Funny that this is one of the first things that comes to mind when I think of (personal) notebooks, but it is true. One of the intrinsic values of the personal notepad, whether for design or otherwise, is that it isn’t a technical gadget, but it can be as personal and individualized as a computer, cell phone, misc. Apple product.

So, I started carrying a notebook myself. sort of.
I started carrying my own notebook mostly because I thought it was nice to be able to keep track of tasks, add tasks and then rip them out when I was done. It was also a convenient source of doodle space and paper during French class. But the real reason was that I had finally convinced myself that carrying a personal notebook wasn’t completely a “hey they do it, I should do it too!” thing. Additionally, I found that carrying a notebook could be particularly useful personally as a way of keeping track of tasks from random things I am involved in which I sometimes forget to do/not put into outlook or any other-sort-of-reminder format.

The idea of carrying around a notebook to write down random thoughts on was one that I’veheard suggested for about a year now. …Moleskine this, ideas notebook that… Maybe being at Olin has something to do with this….ok fine. It has a lot to do with this. I know my friends from back home would scoff at the idea of carrying a notepad around. “What the hell for?” they would surely tell me. Often times in this past year I have thought–”Wow that would be a really cool thing to keep track of, maybe in an ideas notebook!” Finally I have one, but I don’t use it for ideas.

Most people don’t use notebooks for idea generation.
That’s odd. I don’t actually use my notebook for idea generation. And I don’t think many people do either. I supposed I am very biased in this, but I generally don’t sit around by myself and come up with ideas. If I’m sitting around thinking about something that is interesting enough to warrant being copied down in a notebook of ideas, then I’ll find people who I know would be interested and talk to them, who will not only potentially polish the idea if it isn’t a horrible one, but the discussion that the idea will kick off will likely be of the variety that keeps me up for hours longer than I should instead of doing “coursework.” Silly academics.

I suppose the only time that I have used my notebook to jot down random stuff has been during lectures from cool speakers, or while I was supposed to be doing other things, like during French class, when I sort of do other work I find more engaging in my notebook while i sort of interact with the rest of the class. I guess my notebook has been useful to me. And I guess in the end that’s the point right?

A low-tech! personal ___(insert word of your choice)___ notebook is a sticky idea. For me, it allows me to _______ and also _______ wherever I am, sort of like a PDA or something. The best part is that when ____ happens, I can _____ using my notebook. How sweet is that?

My notebook represents who I am as a designer, engineer, over-committed student. Tis my PN. “Personal Notebook” :D

-Marco

Hey all,

So most of you know I’m taking this year off from school to start up some sort of entrepreneurial venture with 5 of my Olin peers. Our idea is still very loosly defined, as we are still in the trailing end of the first round of user studies and immersion.

Our vision is to design a web based tool for middle school students, parents, teachers, and administrators. It serves to enhance communication and collaboration in the middle school environment by virtually extending the current time and space boundaries of the classroom. It aggregates the best internet software into an intuitive environment, keeping the entire learning community involved and engaged in learning. The participants will each have individualized access to our secure software through their preferred browser. We provide a safe space for students to begin learning how the internet can bolster their learning experience, in and outside of school, while fostering mentorship, friendship, and professional relationships for the educational community.

We’ve actually uploaded our idea on IdeaBlob, an online community for ideas which allows you to vote for other ideas and give advice, and the grand prize winner for every month gets $5000 to get their idea off the ground. Being the poor still-college students-but-not-taking-classes-right-now that we are, it would be amazing to have those funds for the next 6–8 months of work! It might even allow us to survive during the summer and work on this another two months!

You do need to create an account, but I don’t feel bad about that because IdeaBlob is a cool website anyways. Sign up, show your friends! Vote for us! (or whoever you think has the best idea, but still…vote for us!)

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