What Does a Tablet Do to the Child’s Mind? I recently watched my sister perform an act of magic. We were sitting in a restaurant, trying to have a conversation, but her children, 4-year-old Willow and 7-year-old Luca, would not stop fighting. The arguments — over a fork, or who had more water in a glass — were unrelenting. Like a magician quieting a group of children by pulling a rabbit out of a hat, my sister reached into her purse and produced two shiny Apple iPads, handing one to each child.
Suddenly, the two were quiet. Eerily so. After our meal, as we stuffed the iPads back into their magic storage bag, my sister felt slightly guilty. “I don’t want to give them the iPads at the dinner table, but if it keeps them occupied for an hour so we can eat in peace, and more importantly not disturb other people in the restaurant, I often just hand it over,” she told me. “We really don’t know the full neurological effects of these technologies yet,” said Dr.
But Dr. Which brings us back to the dinner table with my niece and nephew. Ms.
Singapore’s Lessons for an Unequal America. Inequality has been rising in most countries around the world, but it has played out in different ways across countries and regions. The United States, it is increasingly recognized, has the sad distinction of being the most unequal advanced country, though the income gap has also widened to a lesser extent, in Britain, Japan, Canada and Germany.
Of course, the situation is even worse in Russia, and some developing countries in Latin America and Africa. But this is a club of which we should not be proud to be a member. Some big countries — Brazil, Indonesia and Argentina — have become more equal in recent years, and other countries, like Spain, were on that trajectory until the economic crisis of 2007-8. Singapore has had the distinction of having prioritized social and economic equity while achieving very high rates of growth over the past 30 years — an example par excellence that inequality is not just a matter of social justice but of economic performance.
Overprotective Parenting May Make College-Age Children Depressed. Helicopter parents, stop hovering: it’s officially not good for your kids — especially if they’re already grown. A new study in the Journal of Child and Family Studies found that being overly involved in your grownup kids’ lives can do more harm than good. The research was conducted by the same scientists who showed last year that intensive parenting — constantly stimulating your children — can make moms more depressed. You may think you’re helping out by phoning your kids’ college professors to haggle over the difference between a B+ and an A–, but that interference may be undermining young adults’ ability to problem-solve and fend for themselves.
Constantly texting adult children and friending them on Facebook — letting them fly the coop but still demanding daily check-ins — is not exactly building a generation of confident and resilient grownups. And the problem only snowballs. (MORE: The Growing Backlash Against Overparenting) But her work should help moms to shift that perspective. Procrastination. The Depressing Data on Early Childhood Investment. Photo by Marc Romanelli/Getty Images. Jerome Kagan is one of the pioneers of developmental child psychology. But I interviewed him a few weeks ago with an economic motivation. PBS NewsHour has begun to explore a virtual reality project designed to help close America’s deeply troubling and widening economic gap — between those in the bottom rungs of the income and wealth ladder and those at the top. I explored this in 2011 when I visited Sesame Street, reporting on the effectiveness of the “marshmallow test.”
The idea: to help kids learn to delay gratification and learn how to save, for example. The general aim: to do better in school, do better in life. Jerome Kagan was skeptical, however of any short-term technology or test that claims it can close the achievement and economic gap. Jerome Kagan: The income inequality gap keeps on increasing. Paul Solman: The achievement gap between richer and poorer?
Jerome Kagan: Yes, between the affluent and the bottom third of the population. A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design. So, here's a Vision Of The Future that's popular right now. It's a lot of this sort of thing. As it happens, designing Future Interfaces For The Future used to be my line of work. I had the opportunity to design with real working prototypes, not green screens and After Effects, so there certainly are some interactions in the video which I'm a little skeptical of, given that I've actually tried them and the animators presumably haven't.
But that's not my problem with the video. My problem is the opposite, really — this vision, from an interaction perspective, is not visionary. This matters, because visions matter. This little rant isn't going to lay out any grand vision or anything. Before we think about how we should interact with our Tools Of The Future, let's consider what a tool is in the first place. I like this definition: A tool addresses human needs by amplifying human capabilities. That is, a tool converts what we can do into what we want to do. That's right! And that's great! 5 Tips to Achieve Real-Time Collaboration in Google Docs. This was a problem, but only before Google Docs came into existence. Below are five ways to achieve real-time collaboration with Docs: 1. Easy Access. Since Google Docs is completely web-based, anyone can easily access a shared document and also see when another person is viewing it.
Google Docs allows multiple people to view one document at once and, essentially, make changes available to other viewers immediately. 2. A great use case for Google Apps would be when a team is on a conference call, discussing the details of a particular document. 3. 4. 5. While all truly desired ‘real-time’ tools are not yet available on Google Docs, such as exact cursor movements available on all screens and track changes, it is a great starter tool for teams in need of instantaneous collaboration.
Seven Sins of Our System of Forced Education. In my last post I took a step that, I must admit, made me feel uncomfortable. I said, several times: "School is prison. " I felt uncomfortable saying that because school is so much a part of my life and the lives of almost everyone I know. I, like most people I know, went through the full 12 years of public schooling. My mother taught in a public school for several years. My beloved half-sister is a public schoolteacher. I have many dear friends and cousins who are public schoolteachers.
Sometimes I find, no matter how uncomfortable it makes me and others feel, I have to speak the truth. Now you might argue that schools as we know them are good, or necessary; but you can't argue that they are not prisons. Sometimes people use the word in a metaphorical sense to refer to any situation in which they must follow rules or do things that are unpleasant. Now here's another term that I think deserves to be said out loud: . It is not easy to force people to do what they do not want to do. The Seven Sins of Forced Education - Review. "Seven Sins of our System of Forced Education" (Sept. 2009) is an article written by Peter Gray that was featured in Psychology Today. I was passed on this link by a member of a LinkedIn group of teachers that I belong to. I thought the name seemed familiar, so I checked my bookshelf and discovered that this is the same Peter Gray that wrote the 1st Year Psychology textbook that was used when I went to Queen's University.
This man has important things to say and the psychological training and field experience to back it up. I explored his blog entitled "Freedom to Learn" and read the titles of some of his recent blog posts. There is a great deal of overlap on what he tackles and the main ideas of my blog posts, since starting it in January of this year. That's not to say that I should be held in the same company as Dr. "Seven Sins" has many harsh and blunt moments. Many who read this article will debate and refute the merits of such a scalding exposition. Cloud-Based, Open-Source Future For Teachers? A computing device for every teacher and student so they can access the Internet at school or at home? That, along with an embrace of cloud computing, Creative Commons, and open-source technologies is part of a new set of recommendations from the U.S. Department of Education. On March 5, the department released an 80-page draft of its National Educational Technology Plan entitled Transforming Education: Learning Powered by Technology.
The plan lays out an ambitious agenda for transforming teaching and learning through technology. Much of the NETP emphasizes “21st Century learning” as the path to transforming education: “engaging and empowering learning experiences for all learners… and leveraging the power of technology to provide personalized learning instead of a one-size-fits all curriculum.” In addition to changes to the US education model, there are some bold technology recommendations in the plan. Vicki Davis, author of Cool Cat Teacher Blog is similarly cautious. .