Learning Unbound

It’s that time of year again.

School is in and kids are strapping on backpacks and toting around the ancient technology known as the textbook the same way kids have been doing it for the better part of 200 years.

Textbooks, first introduced, well, first introduced when writing was invented.

Granted the textbook was radically altered with the printing press made its debut, but they have changed relatively little before becoming what most of us are familiar with today: places where enthusiasm and joy go to die.

I remember when I first read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self Reliance in 11th grade. It was one page of the textbook.

One page.

And at the time I remember thinking “what a worthless bunch of garbage.” That’s what a decontextualized piece of literature will do to a 17 year old. (The full text is available here, for free. And that very fact begs the question…why are we paying textbook companies for it?)

Just two years later, at the University of Georgia, a teacher assigned six essays by Emerson. They changed my life. To what degree? Our son’s middle name is Emerson. (Don’t worry; he’s taking karate).

Textbooks take rich, meaningful material and water it down for the sake of efficiency. Over the years they have gotten incredibly lengthy, and incredibly more expensive, but the form of the textbook has not changed a bit. Too many teachers assign bits of the text for class that they “cover” and then students go home to read a bit more each night. At the end of the year, the students are better off for it.

But are they?

In 2009 I conducted an experiment with a colleague. We went into a rural high school and spent 14 weeks working with 9th grade, “at risk” students. Students who, for a variety of reasons, were at risk of dropping out.

Working with their reading teacher, we created a program that we called “Emerging Scholars.” We set up a control and an experimental, and we pre-tested both groups. The same teacher taught both classes. The control group was taught the same way it had been taught for 7 years. The experimental received the same sort of instruction with one noticeable change.

The variable.

We asked the experimental group to spend about 30 minutes, twice a week, researching whatever they wanted. Well, whatever they could access through the school’s Internet filters. Drift racing. Architecture. Guitar. Tattoos. They had to spend an additional 30 minutes blogging about what they were reading, and we required them to make 3 presentations over the course of 14 weeks.

We did not teach a single reading strategy.

We did not teach a single writing strategy.

The students were simply asked to read, write, and present their findings. At the end of the 14 weeks we post-tested the groups. The control increased their proficiency by about 10% while the experimental increased their proficiency by 59%.

The control group read textbooks. The experimental group read whatever got through the school’s search filters.

Let that sink in for a minute. The children were given the freedom to choose for only 60 minutes a week. Not the full week, not even a half or a quarter of the week…a mere 60 minutes.

It was the first time in 7 years the teacher had a group of students all move up by at least two reading levels. We had no discipline problems in the experimental group, and the teacher had parents come to parent teacher night raving about how much their kids loved her class because “they never had to do anything.”

One challenge, however, was the amount of time students spent on websites that were useless, too simple, or too complex for their reading ability.

How great would it be, I would later think, if we could have authenticated websites before the students began searching? And wouldn’t be even cooler if a teacher or a student or a homeschooling parent, could set a reading level, based loosely on age or ability, so that material was not too easy or too hard?

It took a few years, but we made a tool that does both, and you can see the proof of concept here: www.govastly.com.

If you enter the term Higgs Boson, you will see the future of educational search on the Internet.

This type of “concept map” search results is a game changer. Imagine searching on American history and getting this:

We plan on creating a similar concept map for everything ranging from photosynthesis to fly-fishing. It is a one of a kind search delivery system, and we believe it will render K-12 textbooks useless. Every fact in every textbook is available online for free. The first task for us is legitimating information and ordering it in a meaningful way.

The second task is convincing people who believe every child should learn the same thing at the same time in the same common way are leading schools and teachers down a dated path. Fortunately scientists are gaining some traction here.

The third task seems simple enough. Convince school districts to stop paying for information that is sitting online for free.

The platform is not perfect, which is why we’ve launched a Kickstarter campaign. We believe we can find 50,000 people willing to kick $5 to be a part of moving kids away from costly, boring, inauthentic texts and into channels and paths that help them learn through engaging with content that genuinely interests them.

Great teachers are already doing this, and we’re out to support them. We hope you will help them too.