What if your kids refuse your help when studying

My son Jack took part 2 of his Maths GCSE today.   Over the last few years I have tried to offer advice on studying and homework but I am afraid it has manly fallen on deaf ears.  I have tried to convince him over the years that doing just a little bit of study and practice in math really pays off but he insisted on doing it his own way.  It was not really until a month ago that he started asking me for help with his studies. He is not a bad student, getting solid Bs,  it is just I know he is getting by without really having to try too hard,  and from my own experience I know this will only last for so long without studying at home.

Now some of you may know me from high school in the US and at University in the UK and will realise this is me calling   black arse to the kettle as I was not what you might have called a model student.  Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow was my motto and I paid for it with some of the grades I got.

My sons school had/has  a really odd homework policy,  and either my son never gets math homework or he is amazing at pulling the wool over my eyes.  I recall in high school regularly getting a page or two of math problems to do,  and I even sometimes did them.

Now I could have tried forcing him to study but with his personality don't really think that it would have worked.  I took my wife's advice and waited for him to come to me. So far so good. Now in the last 3 days I have been able to work with my son to go through and revise some of his math and I think we have also agreed that we will work together on the science and the math and no longer leave it to the school to teach any more taking responsibility at home for what he learns and how he studies as at school he finds it very hard to concentrate.  We have just started going to the Khan Academy to work through some of the videos and practice problems and hope to be able to report back on what difference it makes over the summer.

How we learn and how we think

A number of years ago I was really struggling to understand some of the fundamental concepts in neurobiology.  I had studied the subject as an undergraduate,  but frankly I had learned it by rote long enough to write it down in an exam and promptly forgotten it.  A few years later I returned to university to study for a masters in neuroscience.  There was a bit of overlap between what I had covered as an undergraduate and what we were covering as a postgrad and so the same subject came up a again (for background it was how a membrane potential across a nerve is generated and maintained and how this is governed by the Nernst Equation). The problem I had was my maths had always been a bit ropey, and the physics of it had been bypassed in my science education.  So heads down once again I started out learning it all by rote.  However I still was lacking in a fundamental understanding of why it worked.  So unhappy with the level of understanding I had of the subject I went back to fundamentals and had to learn the basics of resistance and capacitance as well as brushing up on my maths.  In the end it clicked.

Now this got me to thinking about how I had studied in the past and how people study and learn a subject.  If we think about a subject linearly we start at the fundamentals and over the years build up to the more complex topics eventually we may even develop new insights and discoveries in that subject.

When using this model it is obvious that I had gaps in the basics,  which in its self did not stop me learning the topic but it made it difficult for me to understand the subject and so would never be able to develop any new insights into the subject. The more I thought about it and my other experiences in education made me think that instead of a linear model we should be thinking of a spiral-and probably a 3-dimensional spiral at that.  The spiral starts out in the center with the most basic skills that we learn like counting and way way out on the edge is string theory and the unified filed theory. If we still consider a "subject" to have a linear learning path and merge the two models then it can show the dependencies and associations between different subjects aid in the understanding and make it easier to learn.  When I look at my own education my spiral would have large black holes in areas of it where I skipped class did not do the homework limiting my ability to carry on extending my understanding in that subject area.

This made me think about what makes it easy to remember and recall information. If we don't have a solid framework to hang additional information on then our mind does not know how to file the information for and it just gets put in a random folder somewhere in your brain.  However if you have a structure in place it can be filled away, correctly tagged and linked to the other pieces of information relevant to it.  

Now some people are much better at this than others and can recall facts and figures, dates and events with incredible detail. Possibly their brain is better at filing and linking new facts next to the relevant fact building up a nice ordered index of information which is easy to recall. I am not one of those people.  I imagine my brain is probably more like an incredibly messy desk with everything lying at my fingertips.  I know the information is there it is just going to take me a few minutes to find it.  However what I am exceptional at is linking different concepts and finding links and associations between then and developing new ideas -also known as ideation. So is my ability in coming up with new ideas associated with my less than exceptional ability to recall detailed facts?  And is it linked to the way my brain stores and indexes the information I take in.   By having all the information littered across my desk it makes it easier to associate what would at first glance seem like two entirely unrelated pieces of information.  Does this mean that when we explore the way memory works that we will find different types of memory, and different mechanisms? with some people having a more efficient tagging and indexing mechanism and others having a better method of associating information.

UK Ofsted Report and The Math Debate

Last week I listened to discussions of the Ofsted report into the teaching of Maths in secondary schools.  

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-18152706

Quotes from the article highlight the issues:

• "Our failure to stretch some of our most able pupils threatens the future supply of well-qualified mathematicians, scientists and engineers."
• "Too many pupils who have a poor start or fall behind early in their mathematics education never catch up," he says.
• "The 10% who do not reach the expected standard at age seven doubles to 20% by age 11, and nearly doubles again by 16"
• "Schools must focus on equipping all pupils, particularly those who fall behind or who find mathematics difficult, with the essential knowledge and skills they need to succeed in the next stage of their mathematics education."

I came across a video on TED from Salman Khan which used a brilliant analogy to describe what happens when students struggle in Maths and I would extend it to include the sciences as well.

A slightly edited version of Salman's narrative is below.
"Imagine learning how to ride a bicycle, I give you some lessons and then let you go away and practice for a little bit and then you come back and I assess your bike riding ability.  Now your have real trouble with left turns and you can't quite stop, so I assess you as an 80% bicyclist and give you C.  Now we move on and start to learn to ride a motorcycle."

In essence what he is saying,  is that we are asking students to move onto the more complex subjects when they have not mastered the pre-requisites for what comes next.  I experienced this throughout my education with chemistry.  I struggled with math for a long time because during my early education I jumped from school to school, first in New York, then Belgium, Scotland, Wisconsin.  The end result is I never really got my head around a whole bunch of basic math functions, and had to pick them up along the way. It was finally when doing my Masters in Neuroscience that I worked out why,  and started going back and relearning from scratch some basic math.  Once I had done that everything else started coming easier.

The flip side of this problem was experienced by my brother.  He was in school in New York as a kid and was marked out by his teachers as being lazy and disruptive.   Truth of the matter was he was just bored.  He knew all the math subject they were teaching him.  It was only when he was assessed that it turned out he was about 2 years ahead of the rest of his class,  and he skipped two grades.  By the time he got to Madison Wisconsin he ended up having to take Math classes at the University of Wisconsin when he was 15 years old. Now although intellectually my brother was ready to go to University socially he would probably agree he was not.

We will always have classes of mixed ability, the question we have is what we do about it.  By having teachers with a fixed lesson plan with subjects like math we force everyone in the class to learn at the same pace.  This is fundamentally wrong to expect this of children or even of adults.

So how do we address this.  Salman Khan's suggestion is that we flip the class. Which means that the students get the lesson as home work by watching a video where the topic is demonstrates and the problem is worked through with examples. Then what would traditionally be homework-lots of math problems- are done in class where the teacher can guide and help.  This echoes what I suggested in previous posts- teachers would be responsible for learning and leave the teaching to the high quality professionally filmed and illustrated videos.

Now this suggestion is not new.  In fact it is the principle behind the Kumon approach to teaching math.  Kids don't move on to the next subject until they get 100%. The Kumon "teachers" are there to facilitate and encourage.

The Khan Academy
If you have children I I really suggest you take a look at the Khan Academy.  What Salman has done is not only record an enormous number of videos and exercises starting from telling the time to 2nd Order Linear Homogeneous Differential Equation,  he has also built up a curriculum to take students through the subjects to lead the student through the subjects.

Combine this with a dashboard for parent or teachers to monitor the students progress what you have is an alternative to a one size fits all lesson for children in schools.

Go to Khan Academy, tell your friends,  show it to your children's teachers, school Govenors and start a discussion on how it could be used.  At the moment it is a bit US centric on the curriculum,  but I believe a future upgrade will allow people to create their own custom maps like the one above.  It is amazing to start with and will only get better.   http://www.khanacademy.org/

Record it and they will watch

My friend Mark Ransby was a secondary school math teacher. After getting fed up with one of his year nine classes he spent the weekend recording his next lesson. Instead of fighting with the class to get them to settle down and pay attention he put on the video. The class sat in rapt silence watching the recorded version of Mark. The video was no better than anything Mark would have done live in class, in fact it was little more than an iPhone recording of marks hand writing out problems and working through the solution. Now I am not going to try and work out what made the class pay more attention to the virtual version of Mark as I don't have access to his class to ask.
What I want to ask is how much can teachers start to use per-prepared lessons produced by others instead of the lessons they produce themselves. Now I don't want to suggest that we turn teachers into baby sitters and have them sit idly by while the calls watch videos all day.  What I am suggesting is that they could them spend more time supporting the students while working through problems.  It students were also allowed to work at there own pace it would allow students who have grasped the topic quickly to move on,  while letting students who are struggling get more support.
 I remember my own school experiences where we sat down in anticipation whenever we saw the 16 mm projector being wheeled into the classroom. We knew then that we were going to be given a break from the teacher, and in retrospect get a richer introduction to the topic.
Creating a curriculum map of topics in GCSE maths and sciences, and mapping these to the specific exams boards with sample questions is a significant undertaking.  However, once completed it is then reusable and up-datable as better content, and supporting materials are produced.  The final question is who should do this.  Should it take investment from the Government or evolve from the content being put out on the web via youtube.

The end of the classroom teacher?

Change is occurring in teaching that will revolutionise the way education is delivered . Universities, schools and organisations like TEDed are giving access to the best teachers, content and curriculum available online and for free. Youtube has videos online on subjects from how to pick a lock to Financial Accounting. What is changing is the quality of the content and the quality of the courses.

When I was at school I was lucky because most of my science teachers were pretty good, however they were not great and probably a long way from being the amazing.  Now, how much would it cost to write, video, illustrate and edit "the best" science lesson on something like the structure of the atom. Great content is out there.  The BBC produced "Chemistry a Volatile History" which was brilliant,  and Adam Savage produced a wonderful piece for TEDed on the history of scientific discovery. The two works I cite are examples of professionally scripted, shot and edited videos which in my opinion set the bar in terms of quality.

However as I said all you need to do is a quick search on Youtube and you will find a video on just about any topic you could think of. I worked with a chap called Mark Ransby who quit working in IT to become a secondary school math teacher.  Mark told me a story about his year 9 math class who used to mess about and not settle into the lesson. This went on for months and months until Mark decided he would video a lesson at home on frequency distribution and post it on Youtube.  Next day he played the lesson in class to silence.  The class sat quietly and watched the video and paid attention. They would not settle to Mark in person but happily watched him on Youtube give exactly the same lesson he would have live. He ended up filming a whole series of lessons at home.  You have to ask-and Mark did,  why would the class pay attention to him on video and not live in person?

So,  how much would it cost to create not just the best single chemistry lesson but  how much would it cost to produce the best chemistry course. If we were to take the British GCSE or European Baccalaureate curriculum for Chemistry would it cost  1 million?10 million? 20 million?  Imagine getting the best most inspiring teachers, the best animators and illustrators out of  Pixar, Dreamworks and Disney, filmed and edited by professional cinematographers.

In part this has already started with the initiative by TEDed earlier this year.  What is missing from TED is  the structure of a course. The individual videos are inspiring and wonderfully made but they are currently only snapshots into single topics of much broader subjects.

How will this change the classroom? and how will it change teachers?  Will teachers continue to try and teach classes the way they have always done.  Should lesson plans be revised, Internet connections upgraded.  Will classroom teachers be needed? replaced with teaching assistants would make sure the kids show up and don't hurt themselves.  Or maybe we would need to reassess the entire role of the teacher. Instead of being responsible for the teaching they become responsible for the learning, able to spend more time checking that children have learned what they were supposed to or maybe learning something completely different because they were curious about it and they wanted to.

Do we need to regulate Artificial Intelligence research

Some day, perhaps not too far into the future we will develop a computer that truly has Artificial Intelligence.

The question is what will be the legal status of a computer once it has been proved to demonstrate Artificial Intelligence, and for that matter do we have a legal definition of what AI is. Does true AI mean when the computer exhibits human intelligence, or would we be happy with dog intelligence or snake intelligence? Wikipedia has a good succinct definition of the different types of AI but does not go into what I would consider defining levels of AI (human, monkey, dog, dolphin, whale, sheep) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artifical_Intelligence

My background before moving into IT was Neuroscience. The research I carried out for my Ph.D was governed by two sets of regulations in the United Kingdom. I had to abide by the  UK Home Office regulation concerning the use of animals for research and the UK Health and Safety (HSE) regulation for the control of hazardous materials. One set of rules governed what and how I used any animals I was using in my research, and the other set of rules protected myself, my co-workers and the rest of society from the research I might be doing.

Protecting Animals
The Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 regulates the experimentation on animals. The 1986 Act was the first key UK legislation relating to the use of animals introduced since the Cruelty to Animals Act of 1876. The stated purpose of the 1986 Act is ‘to make provision for the protection of animals used for experimental or other scientific purposes’. The 1986 Act makes it an offence to carry out any scientific ‘procedure’, except under licence on protected living animals which include all non-human vertebrates (later extended to cover Octopus vulgaris).
For a complete copy of the act go to http://www.archive.official-documents.co.uk/document/hoc/321/321-xa.htm

The rules governing animal research apply not just to the furry animals but include snakes, fish and the other less photogenic animals (however it appears we have open season on bugs, molluscs and worms). Before embarking on any experiment that involved the use of animals I had to be trained and certified (Home Office regulation), and depending on the type of experiment, gains approval from a University Ethics Committee. This process of registering animal researchers and the experiments ensured that institutes obeyed the guidelines laid down by the government and no one could plead ignorance.

Protecting Artificial Intelligence
Do we need to wait until someone produces a machine demonstrating AI before we lay down the rules governing how the research is registered, and define what rights a thinking machine should and should not have. Do we need to wait until the machine achieves a level of human intelligence before we define the regulations? The 1986 Act does not stop animal research but it does say what can and cannot be done. As a starting point for regulation of artificial intelligence, it looks like it would be worth reading the 1986 act and taking a few notes. My fear is that we will wake up one day with a front page story about AI and we will get the UK equivalent of "Dangerous Dog Legislation" a knee jerk piece of legislation designed in the UK to protect the nation against the threat of dangerous dogs (actually it has great similarities to the US Patriot Act post 9/11). My other fear is that a smart lawyer would move in a start representing the "rights" of its client.

Protecting People
"The Health and Safety Commission is responsible for health and safety regulations in Great Britain. The Health and Safety Executive and local government are the enforcing authorities who work in support of the Commission. The HSC is sponsored by the Department of Work and Pensions and is ultimately accountable to Parliamentary Under Secretary (for Work and Pensions)".
Quote directly from the HSE website http://www.hse.gov.uk/aboutus/index.htm

The regulations concerned with protecting people is managed in the UK by the Health and Safety Executive and specifically when it comes to chemical and biological agents COSHH (Control of Substances Hazardous to Health). If I were working with radiation I would need to follow rules concerned with protecting myself in the lab as well as the other lab workers. The disposal of the radioactive waste would also be governed by the COSHH regulations. Now if I were working with pathogens (Ebola, Anthrax or HIV) I would have a whole set of rules and regulations to protect myself and other. The difference with the HSE regulations and the Home Office regulations is about who is being protected, the researcher and the community or the research subject (animal).

Now here is the analogy between research using pathogens and AI research:
Different levels of research into disease need to be carried out in various levels of containment (for a definition of Biosafety Levels 1-4 see Annex A). Would different types of research in AI research need the equivalent ComputerSafety Levels? Do we have a mature definition of different levels of AI?

Controls and Security
For each Biosafety is a set of rules and regulations of the types of containment required when engaged in research using pathogens in the different Biosafety Levels. Going back to one of my questions at the beginning of this paper what do we define as Artificial Intelligence and should different levels of Artificial Intelligence be classified with an equivalent standard to the Biosafety Level. Should researchers need to perform a risk analysis as part of their research? Has any one carried out a risk assessment (other than watching Terminator 1,2 and 3) concerning connecting a machine with AI to an open network? As far as I am aware this remains in the realm of science fiction, but should governments and NGO's be looking at the same level of categorization.


Summary
Having looked at AI research from the point of view of a biological researcher provides me a unique view of what I believe needs addressed. Research into AI crosses so many ethical, moral and spiritual boundaries. If we create an artificial intelligence have we created life? As a biologist, I would probably have to say no, unless it met the conventional criteria set down to define what life is (see Annex B). However, if we get rid of metabolism and take a wider view of growth then I think we would have created life. A different kind of life, but life none the less. Considering the number of issues we will face if and when we do create a "Human Intelligence" AI machine then we should take as much effort to deal with the issues that will arise from this now, rather than wait until we get a knee jerk/tabloid moderated set of regulations.

Conclusion. In my opinion, we need an International committee to look at putting some definitions together as to what AI life would be, what rules would govern its research, and what if any protection needs to be in place. The rules that already govern biological research can be used as a template, but instead of having two agencies covering the two stakeholders (researcher and subject) we would need one, and a consistent one across international borders.

Annex A
The following definitions were taken from www.globalaecurity.org. http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/intro/bio_production.htm

BL-1 Biosafety Level 1 – suitable for work involving well-characterized agents of no known or of minimal potential hazard to laboratory personnel and the environment.
BL-2 Biosafety Level 2 – suitable for work involving agents of moderate potential hazard to personnel and the environment. Agents which may produce disease of varying degrees of severity from exposure by injection, ingestion, absorption, and inhalation, but which are contained by good laboratory techniques are included in this level.
BL-3 Biosafety Level 3 – applicable to clinical, diagnostic, teaching, and research or production facilities involving indigenous or exotic strains of indigenous agents which may cause serious or potentially lethal disease as a result of exposure by inhalation.
BL-4 Biosafety Level 4 – required for work with dangerous and exotic agents which pose a high individual risk of life-threatening disease.


Annex B
Conventional definition of Life(taken from Wikipedia)
Homeostasis: Regulation of the internal environment to maintain a constant state; for example, sweating to reduce the temperature.Organization: Being composed of one or more cells, which are the basic units of life.
Metabolism: Consumption of energy by converting the nonliving material into cellular components (anabolism) and decomposing organic matter (catabolism). Living things require energy to maintain internal organization (homeostasis) and to produce the other phenomena associated with life.
Growth: Maintenance of a higher rate of synthesis than catalysis. A growing organism increases in size in all of its parts, rather than simply accumulating matter. The particular species begins to multiply and expand as the evolution continues to flourish.
Adaptation: The ability to change over a period of time in response to the environment. This ability is fundamental to the process of evolution and is determined by the organism's heredity as well as the composition of metabolized substances, and external factors present.
Response to stimuli: A response can take many forms, from the contraction of a unicellular organism when touched to complex reactions involving all the senses of higher animals. A response is often expressed by motion, for example, the leaves of a plant turning toward the sun or an animal chasing its prey.
Reproduction: The ability to produce new organisms. Reproduction can be the division of one cell to form two new cells. Usually, the term is applied to the production of a new individual (either asexually, from a single parent organism, or sexually, from at least two differing parent organisms), although strictly speaking it also describes the production of new cells in the process of growth.