User-generated Software and Education

I recently read Disrupting Class by Clayton Christensen, Michael Horn, and Curtis Johnson. As I’ve discussed previously, we’re big fans of this book and Dr. Christensen’s insights on disruptive technology.

One of the authors, Michael Horn, attended the recent Hacking Education meeting hosted by Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures. We were able to follow along on Twitter. While the full transcript is not yet out, Fred Wilson’s summary makes clear that students will increasingly drive their own education: “Learning is bottom up and education is top down. We’ll have more learning and less education in the future.”

Kids and adults learn at different rates and have different preferred learning styles. One student may learn algebra based on the equations, while another may understand only by viewing spatial representations of the underlying concepts. Imagine the permutations, even within a single classroom, of learning styles, rates, and topics to be taught. And ideally the presentation of a topic would be highly engaging, so the learning experience is intrinsically motivating for the student. It would be impossible for a teacher to deliver customized instruction to each student in a learning style appropriate for that student and subject material and in an engaging manner.

Disrupting Class concludes that the classroom of the future will be student-centric rather than teacher-centric, with self-guided learning, largely computer-based, and the teacher acting as a moderator and coach. User-generated software is a key component of this future classroom – it is the only way that this huge set of specialized instructional modules can be created. And standard social community tools like ratings, tagging, recommendations, etc. will allow students to find exactly the module they need.

When nothing is available, the student may create his/her own learning aid. And in creating this tool, the student may in fact master the material. From Disrupting Class (p. 141)

We learn material much better when we teach it than when we’re sitting passively in a classroom listening to someone explain it to us. That’s why technologically enabling students to create content for this second stage of disruption will be so healthy for student-centric learning.”

Is all of this far fetched or way out in the future? Well we’re seeing examples of this already with Sharendipity.

Here is a Spanish study tool created by 10-year-old Emma Tracy. (Emma is the daughter of Greg Tracy, our president.)

Let’s step through how this application came about.

Sharendipity is a general platform for creating software. It allows sharing at any level from code snippets to objects to templates to full applications, all in an intuitive drag and drop, fully live, engaging environment. Sharendipity itself has no explicit support for flashcards or matching games – it also doesn’t provide support for the object dragging paradigm used in the Spanish study tool. But it allows these behaviors and templates to be created and shared by users – the community can evolve the platform at multiple levels.

Here is how Emma’s game, Spanish face parts, evolved:

1. The Decimal Sort educational game incorporated a drag and drop paradigm. This drag and drop capability was shared.
2. A match game was created for putting planets in the correct order: Planet Challenge. It re-used the drag and drop behavior.
3. Planet Challenge was generalized into a template, allowing anyone to create an image-to-image matching game: Image Match Template. A similar template using words was also developed: Word Match Template
4. Emma created Northeast States using the template. (In the course of creating the tool she mastered the Northeast states, and made a confident prediction in the comments section: “I’m going to ace that test tomorrow!”)
5. Emma created the Spanish face parts match game. Greg helped her add some Spanish audio.
6. The Spanish match game was turned into a template, Spanish Match Template, so now other students can easily create Spanish study tools.

This process is exactly what excites us about the potential of Sharendipity. Emma preferred to match the Spanish terms to an image of a person’s face – that’s her learning style for Spanish. Another student might prefer to match the terms to English words. Who knows how different students might want to learn this material – we don’t, just like we didn’t know that someone would develop a drag and drop UI behavior. Sharendipity has the power and extensibility to allow this evolution to occur in the community.

We’re looking for more people to experiment with Sharendipity for educational applications. If you’re interested, get in touch with us. Or just go to Sharendipity and build whatever you need!