Greg,

Thanks for the detail!

On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 5:10 PM, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
>...
> The meaty bill is HR 3221.  Specifically, sections 501 and 505 in
> TITLE V--AMERICAN GRADUATION INITIATIVE.
>
> http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h111-3221
>
> From Section 501:
> "$50,000,000 shall be made available for each of the fiscal years 2010
> through 2019 to carry out subsection (a) of section 505."
>
> From Section 505:
> (a) Open Online Education- From the amount appropriated to carry out
> this section, the Secretary is authorized to make competitive grants
> to, or enter into contracts with, institutions of higher education,
> philanthropic organizations, and other appropriate entities to
> develop, evaluate, and disseminate freely-available high-quality
> online courses, including instructional materials, for training and
> postsecondary education readiness and success. Entities receiving
> funds under this subsection shall ensure that electronic and
> information technology activities meet the access standards
> established under section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (29
> U.S.C. 794d).

I agree the OSFA should wholeheartedly support this legislation, too.
I hope both this and S. 1714 pass.

> Both of these issues are very real, and the second the Senate bill
> emerges from committee, I'll be writing about it on
> opensource.com/education (which I encourage all of you to read, and
> perhaps write for).  It may be that this working group could do a lot
> of good work by spreading the word and asking difficult questions, if
> it comes to that.

I have subscribed to your RSS feed: http://opensource.com/education/feed

>> I have proposed an open assessment
>> content standard at http://bit.ly/assessCont which I believe also
>> warrants support, and I hope others will join me.
>
> This is definitely a key area of interest for ed.gov.  Ideally, what
> they want to see is an open source version of a cognitive tutor
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_tutor) and/or other
> intelligent tutoring systems
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_tutoring_system).  There's a
> great deal of frustration with the folks at Carnegie Mellon, who did a
> lot of the cognitive tutor research with grant money, and then turned
> around and handed the research to Carnegie Learning, who are now
> putting intellectual property protections around that work.

I was an undergrad at Carnegie Mellon in the late '80s, and saw some
of the corruption inherent in the intellectual property provisions
imposed on faculty, students, and staff. Sadly, similar constraints
were imposed on most universities by Dole's patent reforms in the
'90s.

If there is one bright spot it is the evidence that the specialized
cognitive tutors are not much at all better than the general
assessment systems adapted by commercial software vendors like Plato
Learning and Renaissance Learning.  Those general question formats are
the kind of assessment systems described in http://bit.ly/assessCont
-- with the addition of:

1. A way for anyone, including anonymous users, to add assessment
items (questions);

2. A way for others, including other anonymous people, in
independently validate the accuracy of those questions;

3. A set of very general data structures ( http://bit.ly/assessNormal
) and methods (from del Soldato, T. and du Boulay, B. (1995)
"Implementation of Motivational Tactics in Tutoring Systems," Journal
of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 6(4): 337-78) allowing basic
cognitive tutoring functions for general questions in any domain,
including the ability to adapt the question selection to the learner's
apparent ability level and previous knowledge without detailed
assumptions about mental state modeling (only four statistics are
scored: the familiar proportion correct along with the learner's
confidence, independence, and effort levels); and

4. An expanded pronunciation question relying on acoustic spoken
production instead of choice selection or other traditional forms of
input.

> It might be a bit of an uphill climb to replicate that work as open source, but
> it's precisely that kind of project that ed.gov hopes to fund with
> their $500m over 10 years.

It would take about $60,000 for the non-speech aspects if someone
would sub-contract it out to MediaWiki developers through the
Wikimedia Foundation.  They've already done a lot of the groundwork.
Perhaps we should join the very active #mediawiki channel on Freenode
IRC some time next week to get more opinions on the question from
experienced developers.

The speech-related aspects would take about another $60,000 to
independently replicate a 5,000 word database of beginning and
intermediate English. I would be happy to explain how in writing
and/or on teleconference to anyone who's interested.

I wish someone would do this sooner with existing funds instead of
waiting for Congress. I've been going it alone for more than 13 years
on these same issues, just as a spare time hobby mostly. I hope
whatever gets approved pays for actual courseware development and not
as many deductible junkets as such funds have been squandered on in
the past.

Sincerely,
James Salsman