[education-wg] My Race to the Top Public Comment

Fri Nov 20 16:34:28 CST 2009

My personal experiences with Ontologists have not been happy.
Essentially, the discussions I have observed have reduced to

[1] Hammer
[2] Nail

only with hundreds of kinds of hammer and thousands of kinds of nail.
The problem with a formal ontology is the idea that you know about
everything that you need to consider. This shuts off even the
possibility of considering thinking about innovation. My informal
personal ontology starts off

[1] What we think we know about, which has become quite substantial,
but still contains errors

[2] What we know we don't know about (Our best current set of questions)

[3] What we have no idea of yet, such as the state of math, physics,
the arts, politics, or economics in 2100

[4] What we cannot possibly know about, such as this alleged reality
beyond what we can access through our senses, even with prosthetics
(scientific instruments and math), or what is The Best for Humans. The
first is inaccessible by definition, and there is no standard for the
second.

Politics, and therefore genuine education, is the means by which we
choose between competing visions of The Good in the absence of any
possibility of definitive answers, and in the presence of those
ideologues who deny that impossibility.

I have started to talk with local, state, and national politicians
about what OLPC brings to the discussion, particularly collaborative
discovery. If people here are interested, I would be happy to tell you
more.

On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 08:16, Tom Hoffman <tom.hoffman at gmail.com> wrote:
> My public comment on the $350 million Race to the Top Assessment
> Program (subsection Technology and Innovation) ended up being pretty
> specific, but certainly relevant to open source and open data.
>
> In general, among the participants and general discussion at the
> forum, there was a general sense that almost everyone acknowledges at
> least in principle that there is a role for "open" stuff, and that the
> task now is to figure out how much, where, etc.
>
> Anyhow, my comment, which I managed to present in exactly five minutes:
>
>
> My name is Tom Hoffman, from Providence, Rhode Island.  I am a
> technology consultant, specializing in student information and
> assessment systems.  I am project manager of SchoolTool, an open
> source administrative platform for schools.  I also work with the
> CanDo project, which is an open source competency tracking application
> used by Career and Technical Centers in Virginia.  I am a former
> English teacher in the Providence Public Schools with a Masters in
> Teaching English from Brown University.
>
> I would like to recommend some specific facets of the technology
> platform for assessment, particularly in reference to Race to the Top
> Criteria:
>
> B.(C)(2) Accessing and using State data:  ...support decision-makers
> in the continuous improvement of efforts in such areas as policy,
> instruction, operations, etc...
>
> B.(C)(3)(iii) Making the data from instructional improvement systems,
> together with statewide longitudinal data system data, available and
> accessible to researchers...
>
> These requirements suggest a high degree of data portability,
> interoperability, and integration, with aspirations for complex data
> warehousing, business intelligence and inferencing expert systems.
>
> One of the technical foundations of this type of platform is the
> development of ontologies, defined as "a formal representation of a
> set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those
> concepts." (1)  Dr. Baker introduced this concept earlier.
>
> The potential role of ontologies in educational research and
> throughout the implementation of educational technologies and data
> systems parallels to their growing role in biomedical research.
>
> I would specifically propose funding the creation of a National Center
> for Educational Ontology, modelled on the National Center for
> Biomedical Ontology, which is funded by the National Institutes of
> Health (NIH).
>
> "The goal of the Center is to support biomedical researchers in their
> knowledge-intensive work, by providing online tools and a Web portal
> enabling them to access, review, and integrate disparate ontological
> resources in all aspects of biomedical investigation and clinical
> practice." (2)
>
> The Center is funded by the NIH Roadmap for Biomedical Research's
> Bioinformatics and Computational Biology initiative.  The Roadmap "was
> launched in September, 2004, to address roadblocks to research and to
> transform the way biomedical research is conducted by overcoming
> specific hurdles or filling defined knowledge gaps... These are
> programs that might not otherwise be supported by the NIH ICs because
> of their scope or because they are inherently risky." (3)
>
> With a consistent, ongoing commitment to the development and use of
> ontologies, the National Institute of Health's Recovery Act fund is
> already supporting 61 current research projects using or contributing
> to biomedical ontologies. (4)
>
> By comparison in education, despite contributions from a disparate set
> of actors including the National Center for Research on Evaluation,
> Standards, & Student Testing (CRESST) at UCLA and Jes and Co., a 501c3
> education research organization, there is no central hub for research,
> development and use of ontologies, individual projects tend to emerge
> and disappear, and in particular there is no commitment to the kind of
> open and collaborative environment that now typifies biomedical
> ontology.
>
> For example, the National Forum on Educational Statistics at the
> Department of Education has created a National Educational Data Model.
>  It is similar to an ontology, but the data model is more constrained
> and potentially much less rich and powerful than an ontological
> approach.  However, it would be an obvious foundation for development
> of a subsequent set of educational ontologies.
>
> CRESST has developed several detailed domain ontologies for specific
> subjects such as Algebra as part of their research, however, unlike
> their peers in biomedical research, publishing, collaborating and
> promoting those ontologies does not seem to be a priority, which
> limits their influence and impact.
>
> Similarly, I can see from their presentations that CRESST have
> developed a tool called CRESST Knowledge Mapper that looks quite
> useful, but does not seem to be publicly available, either
> commercially or for free, and thus does not contribute to or promote
> further development of domain ontologies in education.  In contrast,
> the National Center for Biomedical Ontology's Protege editor is an
> active and prosperous open source software project that has become an
> industry standard application.
>
> As was the case in the biomedical field, an investment in educational
> ontology is relatively high risk and does not fit obviously into
> existing programs.  If we don't start the process while we have this
> unique stimulus windfall, I don't know when we will.
>
> Be assured, however, that this is essential foundational research.
> Given the vast ambition for educational data systems, ontologies will
> become as integral to educational research as they have become in the
> biomedical field, and sooner or later the value of our solutions will
> be bottlenecked by the quality of our ontologies.
>
>
>
> (1) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ontology_(information_science)&oldid=324836821
>
> (2) http://www.bioontology.org/about-ncbo
>
> (3) http://nihroadmap.nih.gov/about.asp
>
> (4) http://projectreporter.nih.gov/reporter_SearchResults.cfm
>
> _______________________________________________
> education-wg mailing list
> education-wg at opensourceforamerica.org
> http://opensourceforamerica.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/education-wg
>

-- 
Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin
Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
http://www.earthtreasury.org/