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Posts Tagged ‘Paradigm’

Israel’s Time To Know Aims To Revolutionize The Classroom

This is the story of Time To Know, an enigmatic Israeli startup that has somehow managed to remain under the radar of Israel’s tightly knit startup scene. What makes this feat wondrous is not only because of the daunting challenge the company has chosen to meet, but that it has quietly ramped to 350 employees and no less than $60M in funding—all without attracting attention.

Time To Know is the realization of a single man’s vision to un-root teaching methodologies from their 19th century origins and thrust them into the 21st century. The entrepreneur is Shmuel Meitar, co-founder of Israeli hi-tech posterchild Amdocs. To appreciate Meitar’s commitment, consider this: He is TimeToKnow’s sole investor. That’s right, the $60M the company has taken in funding all came out of his pocket.

The basic thesis Time To Know is operating under is that today’s current classroom is following a teaching paradigm designed in the industrial age, i.e., a teacher standing in front of a class, a blackboard on the wall and students at their desks. Think of it this way… Imagine time warping a teacher from the 1800’s and implanting her in a classroom in 2010. She could basically hit the ground running with little to no adjustment in teaching style. Quite scary when you think about it.

Time To Know believes there are three main reasons why today’s classroom is ineffective: First, relevancy—or rather, irrelevancy. Kids are living in a digital world with a tremendous amount of stimulus. Expecting them to happily and effectively embrace ‘passive learning’ that requires them to just sit, listen and provide output in exams is simply unrealistic. Second, variance. There no such thing as a homogeneous level of learning and comprehension in a classroom of students. Third, assessment—aka, the feedback loop. In today’s classroom a student could have gotten lost with the material three weeks back, but the teacher would be oblivious to it.

Contrary to partial solutions such as computerized tutorials, or digital whiteboards, Time To Know set out to create a holistic solution designed to migrate from instructional to Constructivist Learning in which learning and knowledge are experience driven.

Due to the nature of the work environment (the classroom), and the content (curriculum), Time To Know has set certain infrastructure and operational prerequisites schools must commit to. These are:

Infrastructure: Every student must be allotted a laptop or netbook with a headset. No more than one student per machine. Every classroom must also be equipped with a laptop for the teacher that is connected to a projector. A WiFi Internet connection is another prerequisite. Ethernet will not do as it restricts inner-class mobility.

Support & Professional Services: Schools committing to Time To Know’s curriculum must be able to provide on-premises technical support. This means that if a student’s netbook experiences technical problems, it will dealt with immediately, rather than having to wait for an IT support professional to make a call days after.

Schools must also commit to provide their teachers with training and support. This sounds obvious, but if mis-handled it could be the Achilles heal of the entire initiative. These services can be provided by Time To Know itself or by a third party.

For all intent and purpose, Time To Know is a software company whose management application, applets and content, all reside on the cloud and are accessible via web browser. There are two main components to the system:

Learning Management System: This is the teacher’s command center, a management application that allows the teacher to review each student’s progress, view trends in the class’ performance, as well as plan for the next day’s lessons.

It also allows teachers to customize learning sequences, assign assessments to students, and create reports of student progress. As each student uses a laptop during class, the teacher can monitor individual progress and communicate with each student unobtrusively.

The application is quite robust, so here are just a few of its many features:

• Alert Management: Real-time notifications of student progress that alerts teachers on students that require extra attention and assistance.
• Content Preview & Simulation: Teachers are able to run through lessons at home, allowing them to review lesson plans ahead of class time.

  Once the teacher runs through the lesson in the classroom, the system begins to record data such as what learning activities were used, student achievement, etc.

• Gallery: Students can submit their work to the shared Gallery area for peer review and class discussion. Teachers can divide students into groups with unique assignments, and then have the groups share and discuss their work in the Gallery. They can also promote collaboration and peer review by encouraging students to write comments on peer and group projects in the Gallery. These can be performed as part of the lesson, or afterward.
• Administration: Teachers, principals and superintendents can generate various reports to monitor class progress (standard coverage for instance) and achievements (grades). The system allows data analysis, graphing and reporting. The system also comes with an administration component for control of all the technical elements.

The Curriculum: Time To Know designs and produces what it calls ‘full digital curriculum coverage,’ which is a complete year’s worth of lesson plans, learning activities, and homework assignments. To grasp just what an immense undertaking this is, multiply these by the four subjects matters Time To Know targets—math, science, language arts and social studies—and now multiply that by 13 year’s worth of education (kindergarten plus 12 formal years of schooling). To put this into perspective, in a single year Time To Know produces animation with a combined length of one and a half feature films.

The challenge is daunting not only because of the sheer amount of content that requires to be designed and produced, but also because the curriculum has to fulfill alignment to state and country standards. This means that curriculum which received approval in Texas will require tweaking for approval in New York. This explains why Time To Know employees a team of 350 consisting of 120 pedagogy and instructional designers (aka teachers), 60 graphics artists, illustrators and animators and 80 technologists.

To date, Time To Know has produced yearly curriculums for Israeli schools in the subjects of Hebrew, English and math for 4th, 5th and 6th grades. For American schools, it’s produced yearly curriculums for 4th and 5th grades in the subjects of math and language arts. By July 2011, curriculums will be expanded to include grades 3 and 6, with curriculums for science added across all four grades.

The curriculum combines ‘blended learning’ materials, from movies, to on-screen tutorials, to on-paper exercises. Take for example, 4th grade math aligned to Texas state standards. There are 81 lesson segments, each 120 minutes long. The lesson segments provide a complete coverage and preparation for standardized testing. Lesson segments include:

• Learning activities based on interactions with Rich Exploration Applets (more on these below). These activities include group, teacher-led, and individual work.
• Instructional games that directly relate to the concepts taught in the segments.
• Guided discussions to help teachers motivate and summarize lesson segment concepts.
• Instructional video clips used to introduce, elaborate, or reinforce lesson segment concepts.
• Review activities that help prepare students for benchmarks and standardize testing.

Teachers do have flexibility and can mix and match lesson plan modules and exercises. There’s also the ability to add external items such as videos from YouTube for example, or links to sites on the Web. Time To Know discovered from its pilots that American teachers stuck to the structured curriculum, while Israeli teachers took advantage of the flexibility at their disposal and enriched the curriculum with external materials.

The curriculum is presented to and interacted with by the students through ‘Rich Exploration Applets’. These provide guided learning sequences intended to facilitate the development of cognitive learning skills in a sequential and spiraled manner. The purpose of the applets is to motivate students to explore, experiment, discover, and discuss the concepts presented under each subject. Doing so allows students to form deeper understandings of these concepts and how they can be extended and adapted to new situations.

The Geoboard Applet for example (thumbnail on right) is designed to encourage students perform constructive problem solving. It has four areas: The first is the Work Grid in which the student can manipulate different objects, draw lines and polygons, write text, and measure objects. The second area is the Toolbox, which contains different tools for mathematical expressions, drawing, coloring, measuring and entering text. The third area is a collection of visual objects to be placed on the grid. The fourth area is the External Atoms Zone where the student receives instructions and answers different questions regarding his/her conclusions. The atoms, containing the questions and directions, are gradually exposed to coincide with progresses.

If this isn’t compelling enough, the system is also adaptive. A component called PAL, which stands for ‘Practice and Learning’, maps each student’s knowledge in response to answers given in the subjects of math and language arts. As a result, a practice path is then built on the fly to address the student’s specific strengths and weaknesses.

Students also have home remote access so they can go over materials that were taught in the classroom, do homework, or review and comment on items in the Galleries.

Time To Know has been running pilots in four schools in Texas and ten schools in Israel. The expectation for the 2010/2011 school year is for fifteen pilots in the US and around 50 in Israel.

The feedback collected from teachers is quite interesting: 86% reported an increase in instructional time. There was also a decrease in discipline and an increase in individual assistance during class time. Teachers also reported an increased sense of empowerment to guide and support the learning process.

Feedback collected from students showed that they perceived the new learning methodologies as fun and relevant. There was also an increase in motivation and positive attitude to subjects taught. Put differently, the kids started enjoying math(!)

Another dimension was brought from Israel’s Ministry of Finance and Bank of Israel, which both see TimeToKnow’s approach as being able to ultimately increase the GDP.

“LaAsot Kavod LaMedina” is an Israeli expression that sums-up Time To Know’s story. It translates roughly to “to bring national pride” and it’s used to express “bravo, I’m proud to be an Israeli because of ________”. Rarely, if at all, is it used in the context of a startup. In the case of Time To Know though, it fits hand to glove. Respect.

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Top 10 RSS & Syndication Technologies of 2009

The web isn’t about pages any more. Now it’s about streams, feeds and syndication. As part of our annual Best of Series, below are our picks for the most important RSS and Syndication Technologies of 2009.

You can see last year’s list here and most of those remain important services. Only one service makes a repeat appearance this year. It was a very big year for this class of technologies, after a long, sleepy period the Real-Time Web began to cause substantial disruptions over the last 12 months. Check out our list below and let us know if we’ve missed anything important or who your picks might be for next year.

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Facebook has 350 million users today. Just 12 months ago there were a mere 140 million Facebook users. A syndicated stream is the default view in Facebook, meaning that 210 million more people have been introduced to this paradigm by Facebook in 2009. That’s a powerful cultural change.

Twitter may not be anywhere near the size of Facebook, nor growing as fast, but for tens of millions of people, 2009 was a year they got comfortable with streams, lists (just like cute little OPML files!) and soon geolocation data – thanks to Twitter.

Echo, from JS-Kit is a reverse syndication service for distributed social media conversations. It brings back tweets and other mentions to the page they refer to. The service is growing fast and becoming more sophisticated every week. New features come so fast and furious that it’s overwhelming but the end result is an experience that bring the dispersed social web back together again.

Fever is a gorgeous new RSS reader that costs $30 and lives on your own server. It’s got a very interesting system for ranking hot stories by your own criteria – we just wish we could change the timeframe so that ranking was for every 2 or 3 hours, not per day. Fever looks great and works wonderfully on the iPhone. If people ask you what good web-based alternatives there are to Google Reader, Fever is a good place to start looking.

PubSubHubbub (and RSSCloud) are two feed formats for the real-time web. PubSubHubbub is method for pushing real-time updates from a publisher, to a hub and then to all subscribed parties – immediately. RSSCloud is a similar technology that originated years ago as a part of the RSS spec. These are the protocols that a whole new era of user and developer experience on the web will be built on.

Superfeedr is a new service powering millions of real-time feeds. It’s a transformer, from lots of different formats into real-time feeds in PubSubHubbub or XMPP. It’s like FeedBurner for the real-time web.

Tweetdeck (and Seesmic) are the market’s leading stream readers. They are tools for reading and writing to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and someday other social network streams. There are lots of innovative stream readers on the market, from the beautiful Skimmer to the Inspector-Gadget style Favit, but Tweetdeck is the clear market leader. It’s in a perpetual back-and-forth battle of the sweet features with Seesmic. Both are dramatically changing the way users experience the flowing social web.

Postrank just keeps getting smarter. This social media analytics service tracks distributed conversation regarding blogs and feeds and scores items based on the relative engagement of those conversations. The usefulness of this service just doesn’t stop and the company’s movement into large-publisher analytics and APIs this year should bode well for customers, developers and consumers. Postrank is the only service on this list that was also on 2008’s list.

ActivityStreams is a proposed standard way to markup user activity data in social networks. If everyone adopted the standard, then streams of data would be interoperable, we could see what friends on other networks were doing and we wouldn’t be locked-in to the big networks because little innovators could provide tools for conversation. So far Facebook, MySpace, Netflix, Sun Microsystems and more are working hard at making this a reality. 2009 was a big year for ActivityStreams, right down to last week’s announcement that a feed normalization API was released by startup Cliqset.

The Breaking News Online iPhone App is the best remnant of a fabulous story that’s changed dramatically in recent weeks. BNO is a news organization that’s so fast in breaking news from around the world that the Red Cross watches them for disaster news and MSNBC syndicates their stories. Unfortunately, the company owned by now 19 year old Michael van Poppel sold control over its wildly popular Twitter account to MSNBC this Winter, but the iPhone app remains a very valuable resource. BNO’s research and original reporting is definitely one of the biggest stories in syndication of 2009 and its iPhone app is a must-have.

<img src=”http://www.family-learning-center.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/25fd2_64c148832f7b2827817ab6c8d3f59582.png” alt=”The Real-Time Web and its Future” title=”The Real-Time Web and
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Google Brings Local Business Coupons to U.S. Mobile Users

Google has announced today that, just in time for holiday shopping, they are enabling local retailers to display coupons for in-store use on mobile devices of Google-searching users.

Any business using Google Local Business Center can upload mobile coupon offers, and any user searching on Google.com using a mobile device can find the coupons on the businesses’ Place Pages – a feature that also debuted relatively recently. Altogether, the direction the company is taking seems better for users and for local businesses, as well.

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Printable coupons have long been available on Google Maps, but – let’s face it – more and more consumers have abandoned the desktop/printer paradigm for a more mobile/digital approach to search, on-the-go directions, and local business research.

Product manager Alex Gawley wrote on the Google Mobile blog, “With more of you going mobile to search for this information, it makes sense for coupons to go mobile too… We hope you find these mobile coupons useful and that they help you save money, trees (fewer printed coupons), and your hands (from paper cuts) when you’re on the go.”

Place Pages for the desktop have also been revamped to ensure that mobile and printed coupons will share a common look and feel, regardless of the device, the OS, or the browser in which they originated.

It will be interesting to hear and read post-holiday metrics and success (or “opportunity for improvement”) stories about these new mobile coupons. While we certainly hope the setup will allow users to quickly and conveniently engage with the world around them – and we likewise hope local retailers can reach out to customers wherever they are – we wonder how many quickly the coupons will take off and how much users will be inclined to use them.

Would you redeem a mobile coupon you found through Google search, and under what circumstances or conditions? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

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Walky robot understands iPhone gestures, football fanaticism (video)

Hey there sailor, we imagine you’ve been doing your fair share of button mashing what with a certain new bit of software out and about, but how would you like a whole new control paradigm? Taking up Steve Jobs’ war on buttons, a group of grad students at Japan’s Keio University have put together a comprehensive robot control interface that relies solely on finger swipes, taps, and presses. By employing the iPhone’s built-in accelerometer and multitouch screen, the robot can replicate a humanistic walking motion, perform sidesteps and, when called upon, kick a football with gusto and presumed passion. Your destination is just past the break, where the video demo awaits.

[Via HDBlog.it]

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Filed under: Cellphones, Robots

Walky robot understands iPhone gestures, football fanaticism (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 Nov 2009 04:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Samsung showing off 55 inches of 240Hz 3D LCD glory

Look, we know this 3D thing is as likely to sink as it is to swim right now, but we have to hand it to Samsung — it’s pursuing the idea with some pretty hefty ambition. A 55-inch 1080p panel with a true 240Hz refresh rate is a decent base on which to build your paradigm-shifting new offering. Using a set of “shutter” glasses, which rapidly alternate between blocking out the left and right eye, the set is capable of delivering the full 240Hz quality, debatable as its benefits may be. Of course, the value or otherwise of a TV like this is going to be found only by experiencing its output in person, so if you’re somewhere near Seoul this week, head on down to the IMID 2009 conference to get an eyeful of an early model.

Filed under: Displays, HDTV, Home Entertainment

Samsung showing off 55 inches of 240Hz 3D LCD glory originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 14 Oct 2009 05:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Wikitude Launches User Generated Augmented Reality Browser for Android Users, iPhone Soon

Austrain augmented reality startup Wikitude announced today that it has released the 3.0 version of its software for Android handsets, fully integrating its OpenID-enabled wiki markup of physical locations around the world with a more sophisticated mobile user experience and preparing for the launch of its iPhone version. Unfortunately the company’s content adding site, Wikitude.me, appears to have crashed already.

Wikitude is one of the most high-profile augmented reality services on the market. It’s a market that’s fast growing crowded and everyone wants to know if interoperability will be a priority or if we’re looking at the next browser wars.

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Wikitude competes with the more commercially oriented service Layar and an unlaunched brand-centric AR iPhone browser from AcrossAir. Japanese AR firm Tochnidot says it will launch an app similar to Wikitude soon. Will these services become interoperable so users of one AR browser can see the content created on the other systems? That’s the key question.

Augmented reality (AR) is a technology paradigm that puts layers of data on top of a user’s view of the real physical world around them. After years in the labs, AR development is heating up fast this summer. Several AR apps are available for Android and numerous companies are waiting for the next version of the iPhone OS to be released this Fall with support for location (if not marker-based) augmented reality.

Last week what looks like the first AR app to do so snuck into the iPhone app store, yesterday a red hot app for road conditions in major US cities made an appearance and now Wikitude quietly let AR bloggers know today about its new release.

Wikitude’s application appears to be more user-centric than its competitors. By enabling content creators to add points of interest by simply logging in with their Google, Twitter, Yahoo or OpenID accounts there will be a lower barrier to entry than there is to creating a Wikipedia entry for a location with proper location markup that can be viewed through other AR browsers.

Hopefully, just like with desktop and other mobile browsers, we’ll be able to see all the AR content someday through any AR browser. Probably the market leader right now, Layar told us this week that interoperability is something they are big proponents of, though they haven’t done any legal work in that direction yet and seemed to us most interested in their own technology becoming the agreed-upon standard.

Interoperability is a technical, business and legal challenge that’s much easier said than done. That work is being done by data portability, identity and open web advocates on the web at large, but augmented reality appears set to be the new way that people around the world view a web of data. We’ll be watching eagerly for movement towards a single AR web that browser providers compete on by trying to offer the best user experience.

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AT&T, Apple and Google respond to the FCC over Google Voice and the iPhone App Store

Whoa — we were just sent AT&T response to the FCC’s investigation into the rejection of Google Voice apps from the iPhone app store, and Ma Bell isn’t pulling any punches: according to the letter, AT&T “had no role in any decision by Apple to not accept the Google Voice application.” That puts the ball pretty firmly in Apple’s court, but it doesn’t close the door on AT&T’s involvement in App store approval shenanigans entirely, since the letter also says “AT&T has had discussions with Apple regarding only a handful of applications that have been submitted to Apple for review where, as described below, there were concerns that the application might create significant network congestion.” Not only did that result in CBS and MobiTV killing the Final Four app’s ability to stream video over 3G, it also explains what happened to SlingPlayer Mobile — we’ll see what the FCC says about that.

Update: And here come Apple and Google’s responses as well! We’re digesting everything as fast as we can, we’re going to do this semi-liveblog style after the break, so grab a frosty and dive in.

Update 2: Okay, so we’ve read through all three filings and broken them down after the break. Our main takeaway? Apple’s being pretty hypocritical by claiming on the one hand that the iPhone is at the forefront of a mobile revolution and then saying iPhone users can’t figure out how Google Voice is different than the iPhone’s built-in functionality on the other. Either your customers are paradigm-busting visionaries or they’re not very smart at all, Apple — you have to pick one. As for AT&T, well, it just seems like it’s worried about its network above all else, and while we think it’s ridiculous that it enforces the VoIP and SlingPlayer ban on the iPhone and not, say, Windows Mobile devices, we can see why the carrier would push those contract provisions hard. In the end, we’re just hoping the FCC forces everyone involved to be more open and transparent about what they’re doing and the deals they’re making — Apple’s not necessarily exaggerating when it says these are entirely new problems, and whatever happens next will set a precedent for a long time to come.

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Filed under: Cellphones

AT&T, Apple and Google respond to the FCC over Google Voice and the iPhone App Store originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mobile More Important Than Ever, But 80% of Businesses Will Overspend

This month, two painful but impossible to ignore facts have emerged about mobile use by business. First, research from Forrester suggests IT support for business use of personal mobile devices has a big impact on enterprise collaboration, with fewer of the challenges that new technology like cloud computing present.

Second, a new report from Gartner asserts that despite mobile IT support just beginning to really blossom, a full 80% of businesses will spend more than they need to on voice and data costs in the next five years. That dichotomy. the one between big expectations and overeager spending, is a paradigm that could cripple the sustainable growth of mobile in the enterprise.

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Mobile Collaboration

The new report by Forrester Research, Technology Populism Fuels Mobile Collaboration, tracks both how enterprises are using mobile now, and how increased assistance for it by employees can have tangible results for the level of collaboration that goes on.

82% of working adults have a personal mobile device. To not support their business use of it would be a enormous missed opportunity. According to Forrester, the key benefits are faster team work and decision making.

The fact that mobile access to corporate data would be a booster is hardly a surprise, but backing it up with this kind of data should be a first step in goading management to commit to mobile in the enterprise.

Widespread Overspending

As something of a counterpoint to Forrester’s research, Gartner has issued a stern warning to enterprises: 80% of you will overspend on mobile services.

Gartner predicts that in the next year five years, at least 15% of the money for mobile devices and plans for voice and data will be unnecessarily spent. Particularly troublesome is the inefficient strategies companies have for reducing costs and negotiating contracts tailored to businesses, rather than piecemeal personal plans purchased on an enterprise scale.

The combination of rising expectations for ROI plus the potential to overspend could very well cripple the support for mobile in the future, if enterprises aren’t careful.

Image credit: James Cridland

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