Thanks for sharing the Jon, it is very interesting to see how pressure from society, family and friends make you do such things, you have see in this movie people are hanging on 4th floor just to pass cheating notes without the fear of losing their own lives, this in insane. I know culture our there demands you to get higher marks to get into good universities and good jobs, no stress on actual learning or gaining knowledge.

Another, big factor especially in developing countries to get better marks is result in better wedding, yeah that is true, it is very common practice over there to look for bride especially with higher grades, its funny when you go meet you bride to be and ask so how much you got in grade 10, but its very sad. People go to great lengths to achieve higher grades and then end up in high profile jobs, making bad decisions on their jobs.

Thanks again Jon!

Shafiq

A well reasoned argument against the exam driven system that does a great job of explaining just how much of a negative impact these have on learning.  I really enjoyed reading this and was nodding alone as I read.  I am going to be sharing this post with my trainee teachers and then encouraging some debate on this, as I am sure there will be many things in this rich post that they will want to debate.  Many thanks Jon.

- Mark Curcher

Thanks Mark! 

And thanks Shafiq - I missed replying to this. Indeed, grades all too easily turn into currency. I don't think that's going to go away and I'm not sure that it should, though it is more than a little bizarre that you might judge a life partner by their ability to pass tests in school curricula, especially in a culture where that statistically means you are much more likely to be a cheat! That said, in a society where we don't know everyone, we do need reliable means of recognizing both competence and incompetence in an individual for a particular role. It's just that it would be better if a) the grades signalled actual competence and b) they did not interfere with the educational process.

Thanks Jon

I always keep getting confused if the glass is half empty or half full. You clarify things in this instance.  - we still have half a glass!!

Terry

Thanks for sharing Jon, and that article is mind blowing and full of reality. What we are facing today is control on human thought, rather than giving everyone ability to learn in enjoyable, flexible and creative manner. In general sense, what students are racing for is to get better grades at the end of course and very few actually taking just for the sack of actual learning, is that pressure from society, your family, your co-worker and from within.

I am big fan of Open Learning Concept where there is no boundary, no restriction and at least no money involve. Anyone can share and learn from each other by collaborating.

We should consider our self as students for life, like a famous saying "Learn like you never going to die, and live like you will die tomorrow" apologies if did not say it right.

Thanks again 

At first glance, I thought to myself, "well why don't we want to leverage personalized learning?!?" Many a person has said that they are a [visual/audio/independent study] type of learning, or "I learn better when [blank condition]". 

But after reading the referenced article, I can see what was meant - it's not what I thought at all. I don't know whether the "each person has their own learning style" stuff is myth or not, but I can see the controversy. It sounds like people are capitalizing on these 'myths' - true or not.

These notions seem to be conventional wisdom, so leave it to the free market to capitalize on parents who want to believe that their *ahem* snowflake is different from every other snowflake. It seems that rather than teachers adjusting to their students, or tweaking a class or grouping of students, it makes the education system formulaic. This idea of personalized learning seems really dangerous - that it allows a computer formula to gradually adjust test (task) difficulty until individual students succeed. Sometimes we need to push people, we need to let them fail and put themselves back together. Learning can be acheived through pressure and adversity if used correctly.

Javascript unlocked the doors of closed web technologies, once again.

Having setup a few Openfire servers (including at home) I've been watching WebRTC development and from the pletora of projects Jitsi has emerged as the leader.

Just like Firefox Hello these projects aren't only handy tools but a great source of learning and while I don't mind Skype or Google Hangouts, knowing that I have control over my data is a huge bonus.

Thanks for sharing Jon, you can't beat the price but are you getting enough in return. As you mention it is good for Indian market not so much for us because we are spoil with the latest and the greatest and want to get as much as from the money we spend.

On the other hand this product has a great potential for developing countries like India where people can't afford to buy basic food and can't think about this luxury.

Govt need to step in and help spread this among schools all over the country so future of the country can achieve their real potential.

Just my two cents :-)

Shafiq 

Indeed, Shafiq, for a few more dollars we can get things that actually work properly.

From a different perspective, though, and bringing it home to AU, the average saving on e-textbooks compared with paper ones is around $37, I think. There has been a bit of resistance to our move at AU to e-textbooks, not all well-informed (there are big learning advantages to e-books as long as they are not used on traditional PCs and not locked in by unreasonable publisher-set conditions) but some of the criticism is well-justified, and most of it relates to inadequate technologies for reading. For an extra $6 on top of our current spend, we could give everyone a device that not only adequately replaces the paper book (and improves it in many ways) but also gives access to most of the online teaching tools we offer and much much more. For courses with two textbooks or for students taking two or more courses, we could give away these devices, greatly improve the learning experience for students, and still save money. The price therefore might make this a pretty disruptive technology. I want to try this out: it might not be adequate and maybe we need to wait a little longer for the right technology to arrive, but it's worth doing the research!