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Reminds me of this TED talk:

https://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word

"MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language -- so he wired up his house with videocameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son's life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch "gaaaa" slowly turn into "water." "

Great point about forgetting the material. If you really want to learn something you need to review it more than once, and you need to encounter it in more than one environment / context (unless you're a genius, maybe). It's science, yo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition

&

context based learning --> https://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word

⬐ ianai

I learned that from math literature. To really solidify a topic you need to express it in as many ways and "different angles" as possible. It's related to the more ways you've seen a problem solved the better your understanding.

As a father, and as someone interested in this discussion (about "child learning to talk"), I think you will love Prof Deb Roy's insights into how his infant son learned language.

http://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word?languag...

As one of the other commenters pointed out - it is like a tree (words/concepts) branching out from one another. I would be fascinated by seeing if this research can be continued into adulthood, where the individual "concepts" aren't as important as the interplay between them.

A surveillance-state Montessori with a big data fetish and a bottom line doesn’t count as reform, sorry AltSchool. I was particularly struck by:

> “It’s not hard to model language acquisition if you can listen to every word a person is saying,”

This is patently false big data hubris, which I’m afraid bodes poorly for the rest of the rest of their approach. I study early language acquisition and have worked on some very large datasets (e.g. Speechome, http://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word), and there’s a lot you don’t know about the language system of a child even with a complete record of utterances and videos of everything that happens. Higher density/quality data is fantastic, but to understand language acquisition or to understand the progress of a single child you have to work out a complex system of latent variables. Education is similar— the biggest thing is that there is s different mixture of explicit pedagogy vs. observation.

I’m all for school reform that leverages technology but this misunderstanding of data, in conjunction with the for-profit aspect, leaves me pretty convinced that this isn’t the right direction.

The other thing that caught me off guard was:

> “and wearable devices that help keep track of students off campus”

I did a double-take. Why does this school track the kids off campus?

The complete lack of criticism eliminated the last shred of credibility Wired had in my mind. I don’t care if you think this is a good idea or not, tell me who doesn’t think it’s a good idea and why.

⬐ pbreit

> Why does this school track the kids off campus?

So they don't get lost on field trips?

Deb Roy's TED talk is kind of interesting on this subject. He captured the initial 3 years of son's language development and did analysis on it.

http://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word

⬐ ajcarpy2005

Yes. I saw this when it was released and the data that was collected and compiled is quite high quality compared to most related research efforts. Science needs more research on human development and change over time. Even something as simple as a photo of a person per day. Actually computers should technically be able to unobtrusively measure our heart rate and breathing via the cameras in laptops with the algorithm that amplifies subtle changes in videos such as the redness color shift denoting heart rate and the rise/fall of the abdomen to indicate the breathing rate.

Here's the TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word...

⬐ bane

I've read about this project with some interest.

Seeing this presentation was remarkable. Beyond the absolutely amazing technical achievement here, I don't know why, but I found myself incredibly moved by this.

Some of the most stunning and beautiful research I've ever seen.