The Global Education Initiative
MOTIVATING MOTIVATION IN EDUCATION
(Development ongoing)
Since Facebook acquired Oculus Rift in 2014 there has been a rush to find the most appropriate, and of course most profitable, applications for the new Virtual Reality technology. Games are the obvious choice, but there are many other opportunities for the applications of VR including Military, entertainment, fashion, sports, healthcare, business, real-estate marketing, engineering, construction, and many others. As is usual in the early days of major new technologies, however, Virtual Reality is mostly being used to support the existing dynamics in these fields rather than to spawn entirely new dynamics based on the transcendent capacity of the new technology itself.
This tendency of the status quo to seize upon new technologies to strengthen its existing dynamics is universal and very understandable. For decades now in the field of American healthcare, for example, entrenched bureaucracy has utilized emerging technologies to support its status quo but resisted efforts to unseat its dominance through transcendent use of those same technologies (see Healthier HealthCare). It is not unexpected, therefore, that in the field of Education the most dramatic and important implications of Virtual Reality have not yet been expressed.
Birth of a new dynamic
The basic concept underlying the Global Education Initiative (GEI) grew from my thinking in the early 1980s about the need for increased effectiveness for remote communication for business purposes. Later, as my effort to reverse the ongoing destruction of the Darien Rainforest in Panama evolved the Kaimókara Project, I realized how important education would be to long term success, and that the same objective—to supercharge the possibilities of long distance communication—would apply in the Darien as well.
At that time use of the computer technology in the classroom and at home for educational purposes was widespread and becoming more available every day, but I noticed that these trends were surprisingly ineffectual in improving results in the USA—in fact, since our educational rating continued to fall internationally, I believed they were having almost the opposite effect.
It seemed to me that we were using technology mostly to facilitate the very rote and non-socially-interactive elements of education—helping with homework by acting as digital encyclopedias, or providing students with video lectures. It seemed to me that by reducing the social element which is such a big part of the educational process—they ignored the very important and subtle factors that underlie human motivation, and that this was a key factor undermining the effectiveness of our educational system.
In a nutshell, GEI involves improving long distance communication to such a degree that it is as effective as—or even more effective than face to face communications. This requires far more than the transmission of words, images and information. It requires the transmission of all the non-verbal signals, and the presence of an inspirational social dynamic as well.
“A good teacher is constantly reading the class.” my super-teacher mother once told me, “She is constantly looking for engagement and disengagement, checking to see whether a thought has been absorbed successfully and by whom, approaching the thought differently if necessary, maintaining order and trying to inspire enthusiasm.” Then she continued, “This last task—inspiring enthusiasm and building motivation—is a fundamental and very subtle element of the educational process, and interactive on many levels. So I don’t see how a computer can manage it.”
Of course I agreed with her about the importance of motivation. In high school I was an OK student and capable of X, but when I became motivated about my business, I instantly became capable of 10X.
But I wasn’t so sure that I agreed with her contention that computer technology couldn’t meet the motivational challenge. So I pondered the issue for many years until student motivation became a key objective o my Global Education Initiative, and a dominate element in its supporting software which targeted motivation arising from social interactions and mentoring at a fairly intimate level.
The goal in the development o GEI was to enable software to supply the teacher with the very same information and elements she uses in the traditional classroom to read the student dynamic and formulate her reactions, to supply her with something very close to the degree of intimacy she herself would bring to the classroom, and to tap into that invisible social dynamic between teacher and students—and between the students themselves—which is such a key part of teaching and motivation—but then to enable our best technologies to enhance her ability to capitalize on her subtle tools in order to multiply her impact. Therefore GEI needed to include:
The ability for the teacher see and interact with the class. To do so convincingly for we would need to create and combine real time virtual realties (VR) involving both students and teachers.
A technological structure which enabled student participation in such a way that it guaranteed real-time semi-private and convincing single location VR interaction between students as well as convincing real-time VR interaction between students and teachers.
An educational structure that encourages a high degree of interaction among students—probably combining the hierarchically structured teacher-led methods currently in use, with some variation of the educational methods invented by Socrates. Small student-led discussion/action groups (SGs) bonded through VR could complete tasks related to the curriculum managed at the teacher level, but also participate in projects designed to explore and capitalize on individual strengths and generated at the student group level .
As these strengths emerge, students with similar interests would be deliberately united via VR into like-minded SGs whose curriculums would incorporate specific elements skewed to favor the strengths and interests of each group. We are all more enthusiastic about the things that matter to us than about the things that don’t. The basics, like Math and History might then be couched in the language of those strengths as well.
Such combinations and permutations become consistently possible only in an integrated structure involving tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of participants who cannot be united physically for such purposes but who can be united easily via VR.
Pattern recognition software much like face-recognition software but which is capable of sensing both mood and degree of attention through body language and participation levels.
Motivational experts working in tandem with teachers. These would be trained to monitor the automated pattern recognition results and to spot student problems and initiate appropriate person to person responses at the teacher and/or co-student level as appropriate. Motivational experts and teacher would also monitor activities designed to ferret out strengths and interests of individual students in order to help shape SGs accordingly.
When I first saw the need for these parameters for effective business communications, VR didn’t even exist and I thought we would need to use two dimensional TV or smoke supported holograms. But computer and communications technology are evolving rapidly and I estimate that they will be powerful enough to process this system convincingly within five years.
Right now my need to provide a better education for my Emberá friends is driving this, and though the overall design will assume VR, we will start with existing two dimensional views and work out structural problems at that level. If we can do this successfully, it means that a deliberately inspirational education system will be available to anyone anywhere with an electric socket. We are talking the worst ghettos in Brooklyn and the most remote villages in the Darien—or in Afganistan—-and that would be huge!
Integrated global education would be a tool to help fill in the gulf between the Them and the Us—not so much because of its content, but because of its inclusive organizational structure—and help modulate over time some of the entropy which begins to engulf Humanity.
So here is my concept for a new inexpensive, accessible, and effective dynamic for global education. It is not intended to replace localized education entirely, especially in such activities as sports where physical presence is a prerequisite, but should be seen, instead, as a comprehensive complimentary resource for both parents and local schools at fundamental levels in education. If it proves effective, its use will grow and help reduce costs at the local level.
Then, as use increases and technology advances, new and better iterations will emerge and begin to help link humanity in positive ways on a grand scale. Real-time language translation, for example will allow parents to enroll their children in multinational versions where children will share their common humanity and diverse cultures and grow up less inclined to assume that others who are different are therefore simply “others”. In this sense alone integrated global education is extremely important for the future of Humanity.
The idea of an automaton-driven educational structure, however, is everyone’s worst nightmare, and I hesitate to even use the term computer when discussing the issue. But keep in mind that the objective of this proposed structure is to provide a superb education to billions at a fraction of the cost of current educational structures. And it aims to do so by deliberately empowering those human characteristics which ignite motivation in ways even more impactful than they are today within most existing educational structures—and to do so while employing and magnifying the talents of the best teachers among us. GEI is designed to be humanity-driven education fueled by technology rather than computer-driven education fueled by humanity. It is intended to support the many I have met and the millions I have not met who are so desperately in need of a decent education.
And if you look around you right now, you will see that we are already living in the very technological world I imagined. How many around you are occupied at this very moment with iPhones or iPads playing social or interactive games, for example, or communicating in any number of interesting ways with their friends—Facebook, Twitter, Snapshot, etc. In education, we need only to frame the very same trends and urges for the betterment of all of us.
Please note that the following scenario demands processing and transmission speeds not universally available at this moment. The point is that they will become available soon, and that we can begin now to perfect an ideal educational structure able to take advantage of that moment. In the meantime we may have to make do with icon substitutes or daemons to represent students.
Technological factors
In order to build the Global Education Initiative (GEI) we will harness the capabilities of five important technologies-
High-Speed Internet – we are on the cusp of access to data transmission rates 100-fold faster than those commonly available today.
Blue Screen Technology – used by the movie industry to place action into variable background scenarios
Very high-speed image processors – computer games have been pushing the limits on this for decades
Very high-speed Central Processors at the center of all the activity.
Virtual Reality equipment – the next big thing in communications technology.
And we will capitalize on two complimentary educational structures:
For Structure—The hierarchical structures which dominate teaching today
For Motivation—A variation of the Socratic Group that helped revolutionize education and thought over two thousand years ago.
Our goal is to make excellent and highly motivational education available to anyone anywhere, who has access to a computer, the internet, and an electrical socket—and to do so at a small fraction of today's costs.
Organizational Structure
Let’s first look at an overview of the organizational structure necessary to our Global Education Initiative (GEI). Precise ratios of students to professionals will evolve over time but we will start with a rough estimate.
The GEI will be organized into Subject Matter Units (SMUs), one or more for each subject matter (Natural Science, Chemistry, Math, Etc.) for each grade level. Students would enroll in multiple SMUs depending on their grade levels and their educational preferences. The overall nature of SMUs will be driven by local survival architectures since students and parents will tend to choose SMUs based on anticipated post-education pursuits which are not necessarily static nor universal.
If it overcomes conventional resistance, for example, the Transportation Renaissance detailed in Humanity's Brain would generate millions of jobs involving entirely new sets of technologies which would need support from a properly educated citizenry—and in general, if we achieve the ability to better overcome the obstacles placed before us by convention, we will tend to create entirely new possibilities for gainful employment while eliminating old—and we must ensure that our educational system reflects this reality.
Within SMUs, the students would be organized into intimate groups similar to Socratic Groups in their operation. The specific individuals in each group may change from one SMU to another since students may not all take the same courses, but in general the Socratic Groups will consist of as many of the same participants as possible in order to encourage the development of social interaction skills:
Students
Each SMU would involve up to 10,000 students per session with up to five sessions per day.
Students would be divided into 1,000 Socratic Groups (SG) per session consisting of 10 individuals in each group including one rotating student leader
Each SG would attend up to five SMUs per day (Math, History, Language, etc.)
Individuals within SGs would each be partnered with another individual who is most unlike them in participation levels.
SGs would be quite stable and assembled over time according to interest inclinations of individual students so that discussions within the groups becomes more dynamic and interesting for participants.
Because the entry of new students into GEI will be constant, there would be slow migration of students between and among groups.
Professionals within each SMU would include a total of 162 individuals:
50 Teachers
100 Aids
10 Motivational Experts
2 Technicians
Since there would be many subjects and probably at least ten grade levels (These will be determined with use) GEI would consist of many SMUs. If the GEI supported five Subject-Matters over one grade level, for example, there would be five SMUs (one for each Subject-Matter) together capable of handling a total of 50,000 students and employing 810 Professionals(62 students per professional). Ten grade levels would involve 8,100 professionals and 500,000 students.
Functionality
The overall concept envisions an educational structure all about interactivity among participants. The daily lessons will be split between the VR delivery of the lesson itself (say about salmon farming in the Northeast) and the more intimate VR discussion of that lesson in individual SGs whose participants are together inside environments which reflect the lesson of the day.
The concept assumes daily lessons that are deliberately pre-recorded in VR in order to free up the teachers and the assistants so that they all deal with the student dynamic 100% of their time and can be virtually present with the students as needed within those SGs.
An important element of GEI design will be that the greatest technological weaknesses of current VR will be deliberately designed out of GEI interactivity. Neither the problem of disorientation or nausea due to eyeball convergence below two meters, nor the nausea-inducing disparity between visual signals and individual body motion will occur within GEI because they are not necessary to its successful operation.
STUDENTS
So imagine yourself a student. You will be actually sitting in your blue screen environment (a wall painted blue, your laptop, and your VR goggles and your VR Camera (filming you), but you are virtually seated at a table on a platform in the middle of a salmon farm off the coast of Maine. Around you are virtually seated the members of your SG with whom you may communicate at any time. Next to you is your student partner and at one end of the table is this month’s student leader who has been chosen on a rotating basis by your group itself.
A teacher or an aid or a motivational specialist will also be virtually present at your table as needed depending on factors such as automated real-time analysis of individual and group dynamics (see below) or straightforward requests by the students themselves.
The pre-recorded virtual lecture proceeds with the teacher standing virtually on the platform at the other end of the table and referring to the environment around you as he speaks. You can indicate any point of confusion or special interest merely with the click of your mouse while the lecture continues without interruption. These clicked issues will become part of the substance of the Socratic dialogue which follows.
While the pre-recorded lecture is proceeding, the Teacher is actually at her terminal observing on a rotating basis the dynamics of the SGs which are listening to her lecture. She is taking notes and initiating action inside individual groups via direct communication to group leaders or individuals or by triggering the involvement of aids or motivational specialists as necessary. She may also project herself into the SG as necessary.
When the lecture portion is over, the Leader of the Month will initiate a dialogue based on the SGs master list of today’s clicked issues which will appear on a flat screen which acts as the classroom blackboard. When those issues have been thoroughly discussed (with an Aid or teacher who can be called in by the student leader if needed) the next phase of the Socratic Session begins.
Here is where the games and social media, which currently so take up so much of our time with no particular benefit, can make themselves useful. Instead of trying to eliminate them, we will turn them to our advantage by inviting game developers to create games containing elements of the lessons into their dynamics.
The Central Processor will transmit the appropriate game or automated exercise to the group which might then compete for fastest answer to, for example, an animated math problem relating to salmon-food to salmon-meat conversion, or one to find the break-even point in salmon farming, or another relating to the potential danger of genetic engineering in salmon farms, or to potential benefits. In each case, students would earn points depending on performance and they would receive monthly virtual prizes depending on the accumulations of points.
There must be ten thousand ways to translate serious education into intriguing and sometimes competitive games—the talent is out there just waiting to be challenged. Courses within our system might be even designed so that the students themselves are challenged to create these games.
And some of these games might take the place of organized testing and each could automatically effect individual student performance ratings.
During the entire lesson, the central processor will constantly scan all students for individual body-language and participation levels which may indicate disinterest or distraction, and if needed act on one of several levels depending on the level and frequency of the problem.
Send verbal message to distracted individual asking if help is needed
Send message to individual’s partner to check on problem
Send message to Group leader to include individual in discussion
Send message to teacher or aid to intervene either via messaging or with virtual presence within the SG
Send message to motivational expert to intervene either via messaging or with virtual presence within the SG
As we begin to build and use GEI, more and more opportunities to provide better education will surface, but at the moment that’s a broad view of you as a student.
TEACHERS/MOTIVATORS/AIDS
Now imagine that you are a teacher or an aid or a motivational expert. Since you are not delivering a live lecture, you can devote 100% of your time to individual and group dynamics. You will sit in your blue screen environment which will include your laptop, your VR Camera (filming you)—the whole connected directly to the Central Processor which will dynamically schedule your share of real time activities during the day.
Since each teacher’s lecture will be given at five sessions during the day, each teacher will be rotating through 20 SGs or 200 students at any given time. Aids, however will assist the teacher and they will be focusing on only 10 groups or 100 students at any given time.
Professional participants will not require VR goggles so that they will be easily recognizable in any virtual reality they choose to visit. Their view of events will appear on large two-dimensional flat screens before them.
While teachers and aids are attending to their scheduled activities, the Central Processor (possibly enhanced by distributed processing operating on each student’s computer) will be scanning for problem issues among students—inattentiveness, aggression between students, and other kinds of disruptive activity. In most cases, and for many minor issues, however, interventions by professionals will not be required at all because such problems will be resolved automatically by the Central Processor using the dynamic of the SG itself through automated suggestions to the group leader (please bring Tommy into the discussion) or automated suggestions to individuals (your partner is falling asleep).
But in the event a professional is deemed necessary (repeated infractions, levels of aggression, etc.), the central processor will first present a history and whatever details of the issue are available so that the professionals will have an idea of the problem going in and be able to decide what action is appropriate. The professionals may choose with a click of the mouse to send prerecorded standardized responses to Group Leaders or to individual students directly, or they may choose to participate virtually in its resolution.
In any case, during any given Session, Teachers and/or aids will together be present and interacting virtually inside each SG reacting to specific issues. Since that time will be scattered over 100% of the actual time in each SG it will contribute greatly to the group dynamic and add to a general sense of continuity and inclusion.
DIVERSITY
Sometimes when subject matter warrants it, professionals may choose to combine SGs into larger discussion groups, and this they can do via simple verbal commands to the Central Processor. Since geographic location is no barrier to intimacy in GEI, combinations favoring diversity will be emphasized.
Individuals would regularly attend SGs in other countries made up of students with similar intellectual preferences, and SGs would sometimes share projects with other SGs from other countries, say the construction of a virtual engine, or the preparation of a shared volume of short stories while real time translation helps them learn other languages.
COST
Assuming average professional compensation including benefits of $70,000 per year in the USA, total annual compensation for the fifty SMUs covering five basic subject matters and ten grade level, and involving 8,100 professionals and 500,000 students, would be $567,000,000 or approximately $1,134 per student. These costs would vary greatly from country to country depending on local teacher compensation and would be far lower in most localities outside the USA.
Infrastructure costs are difficult to calculate for these emerging technologies but economies of scale should bring cost somewhere in line with current infrastructure cost or better, and if need be it would be possible to group students locally for computer sharing.
The primary cost would be the hardware – computers and Virtual Reality equipment - and GEI could partner up with governments to supply much of this equipment. By the time GEI is implemented, student-level equipment will be mainstream and subject to competitive pressures and will probably cost between $400 and 1,600 amortized over four years or $100 to $400 per student per year. Central processors of sufficient power already exist and might cost $100 per student or less but there is also the possibility that much of the central processing could be replaced by coordinated distributed processing shared among student and teacher level laptops (or equivalent) with a much smaller central processor.
So let’s add $300 per student for infrastructure and add it to our personnel cost giving us $1,434 per student.
Annual educational costs in the USA average about $10,000 per student.
To educate 32,000,000 children around the world in five subjects based on worst-case-scenario salaries of $70,000 per professional and including equipment, would cost about $46 Billion per year and this would perhaps be exorbitant. But if we began by teaching only one subject, the history of Humanity, for example, that cost would be only $9 Billion, or a little more than what the Iraqi War cost us every two weeks, and if we asked local societies to contribute and fund half to three quarters of the professional staff, we are now looking at 4.5 billion - or less than one week’s expense for Iraq....for 32,000,000 children.
Might this be a better use of our national wealth?
Now let’s look at what might be involved in implementing GEI.
IMPLEMENTATION
One would think that a system designed to provide a better education and better understanding of each other for potentially hundreds of millions of people would be welcome in this world of ours plagued by so much ignorance and violence—but this will not be the case by any means.
Simple math reveals that on average GEI will require one professional for every 62 students to provide what might eventually become the best educational experience for the most people for the least money. In most developed countries the student to educator ratio is currently much higher—the USA is somewhere around one professional for every 16 students. And here we can see why GEI, even if it could be demonstrated to be the most perfect system of education in the Universe, would be vigorously opposed.
In the absence of any strategy to prevent it, the teaching population would be devastated by GEI and would naturally “fight to the death” any effort to implement it. Unfortunately, that doesn’t change the fact that such an educational system might very well be absolutely necessary to return the nation to preeminence in education and to create a global education dynamic capable of diminishing the divides among people.
The real question is—how could such a system be implemented so that everybody wins.
In developed countries, GEI could make inroads only by being a tool controlled by the current educational system which might use its advantages in a selective manner. But even in those countries, if time proves GEI superior, parents, wanting the best educations for their children, may give it an additional push, especially in those neighborhoods that have poor systems to start with.
It is in countries with undeveloped or poorly developed educational systems where GEI might find its first welcome and its first opportunity to begin to heal the world—and this itself begins to solve the problem of unemployed teachers in developed countries as well.
For example, what if an implementation strategy, understanding that global survival depends on reducing ignorance and increasing tolerance on a massive scale, utilized the “excess” professional educators in developed countries to underpin the proliferation of GEI in undeveloped countries?
Would this not be in the interest of enlightened societies now at grave risk from dangerous polarization fed by isolation and ignorance?
FIRST STEPS
Our first objective will be to build a computer model embodying all components of the dynamic and including all anticipated elements of the system including representations of the human participants. Here we may find that we will need to increase Teacher presence or diminish that of Teacher Aids, and we may find the need for administrative personnel (though GEI design anticipates that it will be mostly self-administering). Here we may find that transmission speeds cannot yet accommodate real time images for all participants and we may replace some elements for the first edition with icons or pencil-sketch likenesses.
Once that model is functioning to our satisfaction we will tackle the GEI system itself working first within our own organizations to work out the kinks, and then implementing a real-world model project within Kaimókara and including my Emberá friends in the Darien.
After working out the kinks at that level, we will begin to offer it to individuals and school systems all over the world including particularly those groups from which terrorist mostly emerge. And there would be only three conditions regarding its use.
It cannot be used to promote violence or intolerance.
It cannot be used for political propaganda
All SGs must participate in projects with SGs from other countries on a regular basis.
SGs will be monitored electronically so that a hint of any of these first two within any GEI structure anywhere, would trigger investigation by international committee. If they prove true, and the participants refuse to change, that version of GEI could be destroyed remotely.
Why, you ask, would the Muslim community, for example, want to participate?
During its beginnings, the Muslim Faith was the most inclusive and tolerant Faith on the face of the Earth and its followers were among the best educated. With GEI, Muslim Leaders themselves would determine content within the three constraints listed above, and could use GEI to remind students of this and to help them return to that ideal.
But won’t they just use it to supercharge their own terrorist propaganda machine?
First, the vast majority of Muslims have nothing to do with Terrorism at all and might welcome such a tool for educating their youth. It would help them prevent their children from taking a path which no mother could possible wish for her child.
Second, GEI could be preloaded with the positive elements of destination cultures which could form the basis of its first use so that it would begin by being constructive.
Finally as mentioned above, it will be so constructed that it could be remotely disabled and destroyed if it were used for violent purposes and this would give the larger Muslim Community the incentive and the obligation to monitor its use.
You say that the vast majority of Muslims have nothing to do with Terrorism, but it happens to be a fact that the vast majority of Muslim terrorists emerge from these very communities. Are we starting with invalid assumptions?
This is exactly the point. Parents in these communities need precisely the kinds of inclusive tools like GEI to fill the time of youth with positive activity and prevent them from falling into the fissures in broken societies. Their children need to become aware of the true nature of others in the wide world and capable of participating in the modern age.
A perfected GEI is just the tool needed to accomplish this.
Of course as we proceed we will encounter both new possibilities and new difficulties, but this in normal for all transcendent ideas and with patience we should be able to craft a superb and globally available educational structure that will help bond Humanity together in healthy ways.
Join us!
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