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Teaching epistemology and methods 1

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Schools for Life. My first experience of a ‘school for life’ was as a volunteer gap year student in 1999 at Glengarry — a spectacular outdoor campus set in the sumptuous Kangaroo Valley, Australia. Yes, there were a lot of kangaroos. Since then I’ve followed and been involved with a number of innovative education projects. It is interesting how strong the sense of ‘mission’ the leaders of such projects are. I admire them hugely. So, here are my ten favourite ‘schools for life’. 1. The greatest natural resource Africa possesses is young people. These young people need more role models. Right to Dream is a residential academy based in Ghana that seeks to discover and nurture role models through education, sport and character development. Why it made my list: Developing role models is a generational project. 15 years in (and I’ve followed from the start) and it feels like this academy is just getting started and yet its results are already very impressive. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Why? 9. 10. Boot up: calculating piracy, LA boots iPads, Instagram Hyperlapses | Technology. “Who’s been downloading our movie ahead of release? " Photograph: Phil Bray A burst of 8 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team Analogue heroes, digital age >> SOCIAL CINEMA From 16 August, aiming to predict the box-office opening weekend for Expendables 3 - which had seen a leak ahead of its release. Here are the key facts and figures behind the leaked copy of the film:- On July 24th, three weeks out from release, a high quality version of the film leaks online.- A lawsuit from Lionsgate, filed on July 31st, seeks to compel six prominent websites to take down links to the pirated copies of the film.- Lionsgate estimate that, as of August 1st, the film has been downloaded 2.2 million times.In a soon-to-be-published study researchers at Carnegie Mellon University reckon on pre-release piracy reducing a movie's domestic box office by an average of 19%.

Expendables 3 had a poor opening weekend, collecting $16.2m. L.A. LA schools Supt. (Thanks @pxr4t2 for the link.) Google Opens Classroom, Its Learning Management Tool, To All Teachers. Back in May, Google announced the limited preview of Classroom, a tool that aims to make it easier for teachers to stay in touch with their students and to give them assignments and feedback. Google says more than 100,000 educators from 45 countries signed up to try it since then. Today, it is throwing the doors wide open, and anyone with a Google Apps for Education account can now use the service. Classroom, which is now available in 42 languages, gives teachers access to a content management system that allows them to post updates and homework assignments, add and remove students from their classes, and provide them with feedback (including grades). Unsurprisingly, the service is deeply integrated with Google Drive and the productivity applications, such as Google Docs and Slide.

The service is free for schools as part of the Google Apps for Education suite. With Classroom, Google closes the loop. How Can Teachers Prepare Kids for a Connected World? Educators are always striving to find ways to make curriculum relevant in students’ everyday lives. More and more teachers are using social media around lessons, allowing students to use their cell phones to do research and participate in class, and developing their curriculum around projects to ground learning around an activity. These strategies are all part of a larger goal to help students connect to social and cultural spaces. And it’s part of what defines “participatory learning,” coined by University of Southern California Annenberg Professor Henry Jenkins, who published his first article on the topic “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture,” in 2006.

His work sprang out of the desire to understand the grassroots nature of creativity, how projects are being shared online and what an increasingly networked culture looks like. “PLAY describes a mode of experimentation, of testing materials, trying out new solutions, exploring new horizons,” Jenkins said. Related. Why Is Academic Writing So Academic? A few years ago, when I was a graduate student in English, I presented a paper at my department’s American Literature Colloquium. (A colloquium is a sort of writing workshop for graduate students.)

The essay was about Thomas Kuhn, the historian of science. Kuhn had coined the term “paradigm shift,” and I described how this phrase had been used and abused, much to Kuhn’s dismay, by postmodern insurrectionists and nonsensical self-help gurus. People seemed to like the essay, but they were also uneasy about it. Was that a compliment, a dismissal, or both? Professors didn’t sit down and decide to make academic writing this way, any more than journalists sat down and decided to invent listicles. The response from the professoriate was swift, severe, accurate, and thoughtful. As a one-time academic, I spent most of the week rooting for the profs. It may be that being a journalist makes it unusually hard for Kristof to see what’s going on in academia. Photograph by Martine Franck/Magnum.