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"Alibaba Group's research team on Monday (Jan 15) said its deep learning software has scored higher than a human being on Stanford University's reading comprehension test."
above quote from
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/technology/alibaba-s-ai-software-surpasses-humans-in-reading-test-9863010

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"This means objective questions such as 'what causes rain' can now be answered with high accuracy by machines," says Institute of Data Science of Technologies' chief scientist of natural language processing Si Luo.

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SINGAPORE: Alibaba Group's research team on Monday (Jan 15) said its deep learning software has scored higher than a human being on Stanford University's reading comprehension test - an achievement it touted as the first win for the machines.

In a press release, Alibaba's Institute of Data Science of Technologies (iDST) said its neural network generated a score of 82.44 in providing exact answers to questions, beating the humans' score of 82.304, on the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD).

However, Microsoft Research Asia appears to have at least equalled the feat, and earlier, as it scored 82.650 on Jan 3, two days before iDST notched its achievement on Jan 5, according to the SQuAD's website.

SQuAD is a large-scale reading comprehension dataset that consists of more than 100,000 question-answer pairs based on more than 500 Wikipedia articles, and participating teams are to build machine-learning models to provide answers to questions, the online site said.

Regardless, the performance of the deep learning software is a "milestone" worth noting, said iDST's chief scientist of natural language processing Si Luo.

"That means objective questions such as 'what causes rain' can now be answered with high accuracy by machines," the chief scientist said in the press release.

"To our excitement, we believe the technology underneath can be gradually applied to numerous applications such as customer services, museum tutorial and online response to inquiry from patients, freeing up human efforts in an (unprecedented) way."

According to a South China Morning Post report on Monday, the scientist said the system currently only works with questions that offer clear-cut answers, and if they are "too vague or ungrammatical, or there is no prepared answer", the software may not work as it should.

The research unit said the model is based off its Hierarchical Attention Network, which reads from paragraphs to sentences to words, in order to locate the precise phrases with potential answers.

This has been applied during Alibaba's major global shopping festivals, such as Singles Day, over the years, with machines answering the large volumes of questions sent by consumers during this period, it added.

Artificial intelligence technology have been making significant strides in recent times, with Google's AlphaGo defeating Chinese Go master Ke Jie in a best-of-three series last May, after it had defeated South Korean Go grandmaster Lee Se-dol in March the same year.

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Alibaba's AI software surpasses humans in reading test

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"This means objective questions such as 'what causes rain' can now be answered with high accuracy by machines," says Institute of Data Science of Technologies' chief scientist of natural language processing Si Luo.

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Brain Research and Education: Fad or Foundation?

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Brain Research and Education: Fad or Foundation?

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"Procedural learning requires many repetitions over a period of time; in fact there is no other way to learn them. Repetition, however, generally is not an efficient way to learn or retain declarative information."
above quote from
http://patwolfe.com/2011/09/brain-research-and-education-fad-or-foundation/

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If you've been involved in the field of education for any length of time, you've seen many innovations and programs come and go. Teaching machines, Time on Task programs, Epstein's plateaus of adolescent cognition and Madeline Hunter's Elements of Effective Instruction are just a few of the programs that at one time garnered many adherents only to fade into near obscurity several years later. The pendulum swings are so frequent in schools that many educators have adopted a "Sit tight, this too will pass." attitude.

The newest "break through" in education is neuroscience or brain research, a field that until recently has been foreign to educators. While many past programs generated a great deal of interest, rarely has one amassed a following so enthusiastic as this one. In the past few years numerous national educational conference have been devoted entirely to the brain. Some mention of brain research has become de rigeur in grant proposals and staff development plans. Hundreds of books tout everything from brain-compatible mathematics instruction to brain-based classroom environment. (I recently saw a book on an educational vendor's rack titled "Brain-compatible Worksheets...which may be an oxymoron!) An internet search of links that included "brain" and "education" produced over 400,000 sites.

Our fascination with the brain is not difficult to understand. We seem to have always had an innate curiosity about how our brains function, how we learn and how we remember. It's not surprising to discover throughout hundreds of years of history, theories have been generated to explain the elusive qualities of the human brain. Plato likened the brain to a ball of wax that becomes grooved as we learn and recall information over the same pathways. Aristotle thought that the heart was the source of memory and the brain served to cool the blood. In the mid 1660s, Descartes proposed that fluids in the ventricles of the brain controlled motor activity but human mental capabilities existed outside the brain in the mind. And as late as 1850, Franz Joseph Gall "reading" the innate propensities of people by feeling the lumps and bumps on their skulls, was all the rage.

We may smile at the naivete of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, or Gall ,but we have our own modern myths. For instance, the terms "right-brained" and "left-brained" are found commonly in conversation and writing. Robert Ornstein in his book, The Right Mind, calls our misunderstanding of the brain's two hemispheres dichotomania. While each hemisphere does have specialized functions, they work in concert with one another at all times. To explain a person's personality by stating that it is a preference for one hemisphere over the other is inaccurate and misleading. Another common myth is that we use only 10% of our brain. A quick look at a PET or fMRI image dispels this myth very quickly. Never will you see activity in just 10 % of the brain.

Educators are perhaps more captivated by brain research than the general public. The reason is not difficult to understand; the brain is the organ of learning but we haven't understood how it works! Our students' brains have been black boxes with their secrets locked inside. The knowledge base from which we've generated our decisions has been limited by what the behavioral sciences could provide which hasn't always been sufficient. Of necessity we've operated intuitively. Intuition has worked well in many instances but has left us without the ability to articulate our craft to others. Because of this, we've become, as Bob Sylwester puts it, a folklore profession. This lack of scientific knowledge has put us at the mercy of lay boards and politicians who have sometimes made decisions that are unrelated to what we know is best for students.

So the appeal and interest in the neuroscientific research is understandable. But where are we going with our newfound information? Will this become another fad or are we finally on the edge of acquiring a scientifically-based theory of teaching and learning? I think it has the potential to go either way. Which way depends on how we educators interpret and use the research. Unfortunately, some consultants and educators are proposing "brain-based" programs and strategies that have not been tested in classrooms. Running ahead of the research before sound clinical trials and testing of new hypotheses have been completed, makes us vulnerable to the criticism of jumping on yet another bandwagon.

Uncritical acceptance of what we read or hear in the media can be problematic. Media reports on science spare the humdrum details and sometimes exaggerate, misconstrue, and fabricate results. For example, a report in a Minneapolis newspaper reported that Fran Rauscher and Gordon Shaw at the University of California, Irvine found that 17 of 19 school children who received music lessons for 8 months "increased their IQs by an average of 46%." The actual research done by Rauscher and Shaw found that a specific type of music lesson increased spatial temporal reasoning in the students, not IQ scores.

Another article reported that Paul Gold, a researcher at the University of Virginia, had found evidence that glucose, a sugar, improves alertness and memory. The actual research on which this report was based was conducted with elderly people who drank lemonade sweetened either with glucose or with saccharin. It is true that the subjects whose lemonade was sweetened with glucose recalled almost twice as much from a narrative prose passage as their counterparts who drank the saccharin-sweetened drink. However, what was not reported was that this did not prove true for college students and that no research has been conducted with K-12 students. Yet on the basis of this newspaper article, some teachers are giving their students peppermint candy because "research proves that candy improves memory." Is it any wonder that some neuroscientists are beginning to accuse educators of engaging in pseudoscience or worse, becoming "snake-oil salesmen" for products and programs that have no real scientific foundation?

What we must do at this point is carefully and analytically sort through the data and determine which studies actually have classroom applications and which ones do not. While many studies on memory and learning are general in nature, there are some that have been conducted with student learning in mind and have strong implications for educators.

One of the most direct applications of research to the classroom can be found in the work of Paula Tallal at Rutgers University and Michael Merzenich at the University of California at San Francisco. They discovered that difficulty in learning to read in some cases stems from a language processing delay in the student's brain. Armed with this information, they developed a computer program designed to correct this delay, to actually speed up the processing of the sounds that make up the written word resulting in definite improvement in reading skills. This program, Fast Forword, is one of the first brain studies with specific applications to the classroom.

Other research is being conducted with the goal of improving students' ability to read. At the New Haven based Haskins Laboratories, researchers Sally Shaywitz, Bennett Shaywitz and Kenneth Pugh have found that the brain of someone with dyslexia functions differently from a typical brain when processing phonemes. They are working on combining brain imaging with sophisticated cognitive-behavioral work to better understand how reading failure occurs and to develop better techniques to correct it.

Gordon Shaw, mentioned earlier, is a retired physicist who became interested in the connections between music and mathematics. His research, conducted over the past several years has resulted in a program that uses piano keyboarding lessons and a computer program called STAR (Spatial Temporal Animation Reasoning) with elementary school-age children. The students in the study have made exceptional gains in proportional math and fractions, math skills that require good temporal spatial reasoning.

While these specific studies have potentially important implications for educators, so do many of the more general studies that have been conducted on memory and learning over the past decade. The following is a generally accepted list of what we have learned about the brain and what I think are the potential applications of these findings for educational practice.

1. Experience shapes the brain.

The brain is the only organ in the body that sculpts itself from outside experience. In a sense our experience becomes biology. We used to think that the brain you were born with was the brain you were stuck with, but we now know that learning experiences change and reorganize the brain's structure and physiology. Several studies have shown actual structural changes in various parts of the brain depending on the way in which these structures were used. The changes can be observed in behavior as well as structure. It should be fairly obvious that this finding has strong implications for education. We now know that learning is a matter of making connections between brain cells and that the experiences our students have shape their brains. Obviously we do learn from reading and hearing, but the strongest connections are often made through concrete experience. Which do you think would make the most lasting changes in the brain, reading about an experiment someone conducted, or performing the experiment yourself?

2. Memory is not stored in a single location in the brain.

When an experience enters the brain, it is "deconstructed" and distributed all over the cortex. The affect (or the emotional content) is stored in the amygdala, visual images in the occipital lobes, source memory in the frontal lobes and where you were during the experience is stored in the parietal lobes. When you recall information, you have to reconstruct it. Since memories are reconstructed, the more ways students have the information represented in the brain (through seeing, hearing, being involved with, etc.) The more pathways they have for reconstructing, the richer the memory. Multimodal instruction makes a lot of sense.

3. Memory is not static.

It would be nice if memory were a matter of experiencing something once and then retrieving it at a later date in exactly the same form as it was originally stored. But memory doesn't work that way; it is dynamic. It decays naturally over time as new experiences infiltrate older ones. Fortunately, this natural decay can be minimized by using elaborative rehearsal strategies. Visualizing, writing, symbolizing, singing, semantic mapping, simulating and devising mnemonics are strategies that can be used to reinforce and increase the likelihood of recall. They often have the added benefit of enhancing students' understanding of concepts as well as retention.

4. Memory is not unitary.

There are two distinct types of memory each of which involves different brain structures. Declarative Memory is our everyday memory, the conscious ability to recall what you ate for breakfast yesterday, the names of your favorite musicians and the formula for finding the area of a rectangle. It is information that you can declare. Procedural Memory refers to skills and habits that you engage in without conscious recall such as driving a car, decoding words, touch typing and playing the piano. Procedural learning requires many repetitions over a period of time; in fact there is no other way to learn them. Repetition, however, generally is not an efficient way to learn or retain declarative information. Understanding the differences between these two types of memory is essential in designing classroom instruction and practice. Rote rehearsal is essential for procedural memory while elaborative rehearsal strategies are much more effective for declarative. In discussing declarative memory, Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter writes, "For better or for worse, our recollections are largely at the mercy of our elaborations; only those aspects of experience that are targets of elaborative encoding processes have a high likelihood of being remembered subsequently."

5. Emotion is a primary catalyst in the learning process.

Some of the most important findings from neuroscience have been in the area of the role of emotion in learning and memory. Two small but powerful structures deep within in each hemisphere called the amygdala regulate our emotional responses. These emotional responses have the ability to either impede or enhance learning. On the one hand, for survival purposes, our brains are hard-wired to pay attention to and remember those experiences with an emotional component, whether it is the Challenger explosion or a particularly vivid simulation in which you took part in the 8th grade. However, emotional responses can have the opposite effect if situations contain elements that a person perceives to be threatening. In these situations, the amygdala starts a chain of physiological responses (commonly called the fight or flight response) to ready the body for action. Under these conditions, emotion is dominant over cognition and the rational/thinking part of the brain is less efficient. The environment must be physically and psychologically safe for learning to occur.

I think it is important to note that there is much in the research that confirms what experienced educators have long known and used in their classrooms. What the research adds for these practices is an understanding of why certain procedures or strategies work so that we no longer have to operate intuitively but can articulate and explain the rationale for what we do. It is obvious that brain research is not the elusive "silver bullet" that will answer all our education problems. However, I do think that the new research offers educators an unparalleled opportunity for building a scientific foundation for educational practice which will allow us to make more informed decisions. To make certain that the brain research becomes a foundation rather than a fad, educators need to take a proactive stance. Here are some suggestions as to about what I think we need to do:

1. Become literate in the general structure and function of the brain.
We don't need to become scientists, but we do need to learn the terminology they use. If you don't know what the cortex of the brain is you won't be terribly impressed to learn that it changes as the result of experience! If you are not familiar with the basic structure and function of the brain, you cannot read the literature analytically.

2. Learn how to determine whether a study is valid or not.
Not all studies are equal. It is critical to be cautious when using the phrase, "Brain research proves......" To determine whether or not the study is valid, the following questions need to be answered. How many subjects were there in the study? What were the ages and characteristics of the subjects? Was there a control group of subjects who were matched with the subjects in the experimental group? What was the methodology used for this study? Has the study been replicated by other scientists using the same methodology? Are there similar studies that have contradictory findings? No one will consider educators true professionals unless we act like professionals in analyzing and applying the research.

3. Be cautious when making applications of research findings to the classroom.
Eric Chudler from the University of Washington points out that there is a wide divide between bench science and the classroom. Many are working towards closing the gap but it takes time and money. Think about how a new drug gets on the market. There are animal studies to show how it works (benefits, possible side effect, etc.) Then, if the benefit to risk ratio is good, it may advance to clinical trials. These trials can take many years to insure that the drug works. Finally, the drug may go on the market. Much is being sold to teachers about the benefits of water, color, odors, etc. in the classroom that has never been put to the test in actual classrooms. Chudler suggests we question the findings of the research by asking: Will it work in actual classrooms? What specific benefit will be realized, higher math scores, reading scores, quieter classrooms? What are the side effects or problems? For example, if water increases brain functioning, for whom and how much water produces these effects?

4. Marry the findings from neuroscience with other fields.
As important as the brain research is, we want to be certain that we don't ignore the research from other fields such as behavioral and cognitive psychology and educational research. For example, a recent large study completed in the Chicago schools found that elementary students scored higher on math and reading skills when teachers used more interactive instruction than when they employed the more traditional didactic methods. This certainly seems to fit with what we know about how the brain learns best, but the study was conducted by educational researchers, not neuroscientists.

5. Too often at conferences scientists speak and educators take notes.
I would like to see more of a dialogue taking place between these groups. We educators must let the scientists know what kinds of information we need to best educate all children....including theirs! Ken Kosik, physician and professor of neuroscience at Harvard, suggests that we look at the option of establishing research schools where teachers and neuroscientists work together. Stephen Hyman, director of the National Institute of Mental Health says we need a stepped-up collaboration between neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, physicists, computer scientists, physicians and teachers.

6. Begin to incorporate in our classrooms and schools what we have learned about the brain.
The goal of brain-compatible instruction is more than high test scores. Our students need to develop an in-depth understanding of concepts to the point where they are able to use what they've learned in school in the world outside of school. Granted, there is much more to be learned from neuroscience that will assist us in making our classrooms more compatible with how the brain functions, but it would be foolish to wait until all the research is completed to begin to incorporate the knowledge we now have. As mentioned earlier, many teachers are intuitively already using many brain-compatible strategies in their classrooms such as making the environment conducive to learning, providing opportunities for interaction, engaging students in projects and problem solving, giving students hands-on concrete experiences, using music, rhyme and mnemonics, teaching students to construct graphics and opportunities to simulate events and concepts. However, these strategies need to be brought from the intuitive to the conscious level so that educators can articulate their knowledge.

Fad or foundation, which will it be? The choice is ours.

References:

Chudler, E. (2001) Personal communication by email, February, 2001.

Kosik, K. From a speech given at the Brainy Bunch Renewal, Yountville, CA, January, 2001.

Ornstein, R. (1997). The right mind. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace & Company.

St. Paul Pioneer Press (1999)

Tallal, P. (2000). Experimental studies of language learning impairments: From research to remediation. In Bishop, D. V. M., & Leonard, L. B. (Eds.), Speech and language impairments in children: Causes, characteristics, intervention, and outcome. Hove, UK: Psychology Press.

Shaw, G. (2000). Keeping Mozart in mind. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

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Brain Research and Education: Fad or Foundation? - Pat Wolfe - Mind Matters, Inc.

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If you've been involved in the field of education for any length of time, you've seen many innovations and programs come and go. Teaching machines, Time on Task programs, Epstein's plateaus of adolescent cognition and Madeline Hunter's Elements of Effective Instruction are just a few of the programs that at one time garnered many adherents only to fade into near obscurity several years later.

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Salman Khan of the Khan Academy: Firing up an education revolution

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Salman Khan of the Khan Academy: Firing up an education revolution

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"We do testing to plot our students' growth. As educators, we need to understand why some students are learning something well and why some are lagging behind."
above quote from
http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/firing-up-an-education-revolution-0

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It was perfect timing - taking a disruptive approach to traditional ways of learning, for the age of disruption.

That's the worldwide phenomenon that is the Salman Khan effect. His non-profit educational organisation, the Khan Academy, has become famous for giving free online tuition with an effectiveness that Singaporean parents forking out big bucks for extra tuition can only marvel at.

And it all began because Mr Khan's cousin Nadia was struggling with maths in 2004 and he decided to tutor her remotely. "Then the rest of the family heard there was free tutoring," he says, and more relatives started taking part.

The demands got too much. Then a friend suggested he film the tutorials, post them on YouTube and the family could view them at will.

The videos became an Internet sensation and Mr Khan quit his hedge fund job in 2009 to focus on his education endeavour.

He went on to take his ideas and practices into a bricks-and-mortar classroom setting as well, launching Khan Lab School for students from kindergarten to Grade 12 (ages five to 18) in 2014 at his home base of Mountain View, California.

As the school is meant to be a testing ground for new approaches to learning, Mr Khan hopes to share the best practices that the school and Khan Academy develop with educators around the world.

As he says, it is "an open source approach to educational innovation". For example, instead of grouping learners by age, Khan Lab School does it by level of independence, based on skills like time management and self-regulation.

Other differences from the traditional way of learning include the fact that it takes a competency-based - or as they call it, mastery-based - approach to learning, where the focus is on conceptual understanding and mastery of content before students move on to the next level.

Every week, students identify their unique needs and set goals that determine the school work they undertake - such as a maths concept they hope to master, or a book to read and review.

They learn skills in a variety of ways, from meeting a teacher for a "pop-up class" to going into blended learning platforms like Khan Academy or Newsela, which allow them to move at their own pace.

The afternoons are usually given over to broad, real-world projects.

Each student's progress is charted so teachers can identify where they are struggling and offer assistance.

Half the teachers act like tutors, helping with academic work. The rest, called advisers, help learners to know themselves and understand their own learning.

Older students mentor younger ones, and community members such as entrepreneurs, artists and Khan Academy employees, including Mr Khan himself, visit classes regularly to share their expertise.

Time is set aside from 4pm to 6pm for electives like art, sport, robotics, dance and music classes.

Since opening, the school has quadrupled in size to 140 students.

When he decided to tutor his cousin Nadia, in Louisiana, the US-born Mr Khan was working as a financial analyst after earning degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard.

The online videos he produced then, supplemented with exercises, are still going strong today. Mr Khan's friendly style, coupled with his knack for making difficult maths sums seem simple, caught on with YouTube viewers and his audience grew from a handful of family members to millions.

His supporters include Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who has publicly stated that he was a huge fan of Khan Academy and was using it with his children.

Mr Khan lived on his savings after he quit his job, until he started receiving significant donations, including from Google and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

He has no regrets moving from a lucrative career in hedge fund management into education, telling The Straits Times: "On a day-to-day basis, I do exactly what I would do if I had all the money in the world and my family is comfortable. So what else can you ask for?"

Q&A
1 You were a well-paid hedge-fund guy. Why go into education?
Before I was a hedge-fund guy, I was a mathematics guy and before that, I spent many summers trying to research education, so that's always been my passion. I got rejected for the Rhodes Scholarship twice - my goal was to do a PhD in education at Oxford University.

Even in the hedge-fund world, I thought: "If I could do really well over the next 10 to 15 years, I could retire and start a school on my own terms.
2 Why is the Khan Lab School called a "lab" school?
Because we want to always question set norms and practices in education. Questions such as: Why have vacation, why not have full-day, full-year schooling? Why don't we decouple independence level and academic mastery?

And of course, the big question, given what the world is going to be like over the next 50 years, what should education be like? So we have ideas and we want to test them.

When a school or system works well, the temptation is not to want to change it. You must have that in Singapore as well. But that's why the word "lab" is there, because we want to keep pushing the school out of its comfort zone so that it keeps challenging its own assumptions.

The team at the school is constantly gathering data, self-reflecting and re-evaluating - willing to press the reset button, if necessary. We hope that their learning, protocols and practices can ultimately be shared with the world - providing an entry point for other pioneers.
3 You believe strongly in mastery learning. Why?
It doesn't mean that you have to be the absolute master of every skill before you move on, but you should have reasonable proficiency, a reasonable foundation, before moving on.

About Sal Khan

Mr Salman "Sal" Khan, 41, is the founder and chairman of Khan Lab School. In his best-selling book, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined, he outlines his vision for the future of education - one in which schools abandon "outdated" practices, such as daily schedules of 50-minute periods and classes organised by age.

Instead, there would be 75 to 100 students of widely varying ages. They would work at their own pace, learning offline and online, with teachers tracking their progress and helping out as needed. He imagines a school suffused with a spirit of experimentation, with teachers testing out new ideas and students learning in new ways.

Mr Khan has been profiled on TV news show 60 Minutes, has appeared on the cover of Forbes magazine, and is recognised as one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People.

At Khan Lab School, he keeps his finger on the pulse by teaching a weekly world history seminar.

He is also the founder and chief executive of Khan Academy, a non-profit organisation with a mission to provide free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. It provides instructional videos, practice exercises and teacher tools to empower students to learn at their own pace.

The videos have been translated into dozens of languages and more than 10 million people worldwide learn from them each month. Mr Khan still makes many of the videos himself.

He holds three degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Say, for maths, I get 70, 80 per cent of a topic. That means I didn't know 20 to 30 per cent of the material, but the whole class is then forced to march into the next subject, probably a more advanced subject like algebra. And we keep getting pushed and those gaps keep accumulating so at some point, we get to an algebra class and nothing makes sense.

With mastery learning, students get to revisit a topic until they understand it well. Then they will be more confident in moving to the next level.
4 Despite being a progressive school, why do you emphasise content?
There are two schools of thought. There's a traditionalist approach where the kids have to have a lot of practice, they've got to do multiplication tables and we've got to test them. And then you have the ultra-progressives who go: "No, no. We want our kids to make stuff and explore."

And my personal view is both. I am quite traditional in that I believe students should have fluency of subject matter, a core knowledge base.

I hear people say in a world of Google, why do kids have to learn this stuff? I was like, yes, but how do you know what to search for? Kids won't even know what to search for if they don't know the basics.
5 I was surprised - you believe in tests.
We do testing to plot our students' growth. As educators, we need to understand why some students are learning something well and why some are lagging behind.

We need to talk about it to the students as well. And it's not about whether you are a C student or you're an A student. It applies to the students who are three grade levels ahead - if he or she didn't grow much in that three months, we will have a conversation. And if a student was a bit behind but is progressing well, we'll say keep doing what you're doing.
6 You are also going to introduce Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Tests (PSAT) and SATs, as well as third-party benchmark tests such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) test conducted by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
It's easy to pat yourself on the back if your students are doing well. But in fairly affluent areas, you have to ask if it is indeed the school that is making the difference. If all the kids come from families where both parents are college educated and can offer the extras like tuition, it's almost like the kids are going to do fine. This might be happening in Singapore as well.

You have good students to begin with and all the variables are in your favour, then how do you know if you have added value? That's why you need these third-party benchmark tests.
7 At Khan Lab School, there is a lot of focus on collaborative and peer-to-peer learning. Why do you emphasise this?
If you visit the school... it really feels like a family. I've seen a six-year-old skin her knee and the first two responders are 12-year-olds because the teacher might be on the other side of the field. And that's really powerful.

As you develop your individual skills, you also develop your leadership skills and your ability to explain. So it's win-win. When you explain something, you learn it better.

And I do think sometimes a 16-year-old who's just learnt the material but has developed some communication skills can sometimes explain a topic better than the 30-or 40-year-old who just assumes a lot.
8 How would you define success for Khan Lab School?
Education is a long-term endeavour. It will take many years - 10, 15 years down the road - to show if our students are more successful in life. But in three to four years, we will be looking at whether our kids are getting strong college admissions and if they are thriving there because of their high school experience.

We also want to make Khan Lab School into a hub where we can collaborate with other educators.
9 What's next for Khan Academy?
Well, we're most well-known for maths and we're already providing much more than maths. We've got lessons in world history, grammar, economics and art history, just to name a few.

Looking even further out, I am thinking of some form of certifications. So, for example, right now you can learn algebra in Khan Academy but there's no way to show the world that you know algebra. So I would love in the next five years to have some way for someone who has mastered a subject through the Khan Academy to sit for a test and show that they have, say, high school equivalency in this subject.
10 What about in higher education?
Is there a Khan Academy college in the making? I don't think Khan Academy is going to open up a university or we're going to offer college degrees.

But you're going to see more higher education options such as 42, the tuition-free coding school, where once you get in, students are put through several projects and internships to learn a set of skills in three to five years.

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Salman Khan of the Khan Academy: Firing up an education revolution

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1 You were a well-paid hedge-fund guy. Why go into education? Before I was a hedge-fund guy, I was a mathematics guy and before that, I spent many summers trying to research education, so that's always been my passion. I got rejected for the Rhodes Scholarship twice - my goal was to do a PhD in education at Oxford University..

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How does getting data from padlet compare with other interactive software like polleverywhere

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I like the the approach of engagement and conversion in using analytics. Is there some resource I can get to help understand this better? And also how to use this approach?

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Can you explain a little bit more about personalisation in immersive experiences NOT lessons

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How do you get the analytics from this padlet blog?

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please click post on Padlet to see full document

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Data and Analytics for 15th APMEC symposium padlet

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https://www.slideshare.net/dnrgohps/applied-learning-analytics-for-e-teachers      https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/dnrgohps/learning-and-training-for-transfer

# data[].attributes.headline
Created on sidelines of day 1, ESME course @ 15th APMEC

# data[].attributes.subject
Created on sidelines of day 1, ESME course @ 15th APMEC