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A Better Way to Teach?
Any physics professor who thinks that lecturing to first-year students is the best way to teach them about electromagnetic waves can stop reading this item. For everybody else, however, listen up: A new study shows that students learn much better through an active, iterative process that involves working through their misconceptions with fellow students and getting immediate feedback from the instructor. The research, appearing online today in Science , was conducted by a team at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, in Canada, led by physics Nobelist Carl Wieman. First at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and now at an eponymous science education initiative at UBC, Wieman has devoted the past decade to improving undergraduate science instruction, using methods that draw upon the latest research in cognitive science, neuroscience, and learning theory.
Andrew Ng is an associate professor of computer science at Stanford, and he has a rather charming way of explaining how the new interactive online education company that he cofounded, Coursera, hopes to revolutionize higher education by allowing students from all over the world to not only hear his lectures, but to do homework assignments, be graded, receive a certificate for completing the course and use that to get a better job or gain admission to a better school. “I normally teach 400 students,” Ng explained, but last semester he taught 100,000 in an online course on machine learning. “To reach that many students before,” he said, “I would have had to teach my normal Stanford class for 250 years.” Welcome to the college education revolution. Big breakthroughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary.
Come the Revolution
Guide to Open Learning
ABSTRACT: This document is an introduction to Open Learning. It examines briefly what "Open" means and the different facets of the open movement and what "Learning" means and how it is different for every person. Attention is brought to the issue of the digital divide and ways to reduce or eliminate barriers to education.
Hi Simulacron3 - Great Stuff here. Would you consider joining the team Free Education. I like your pearls on the future of learning, Khan Academy Information and especially the path you have started that includes the virtual classroom and social media in education...and well...I have a bit of wandering to do on your pearls as I see a lot of other paths that are of interest by your pearl titles. Ah, I need more time in the day! Next thing I have to do is figure out how to invite you to team up to FreeEducation, I'm a newbie to pearltrees. Sincerely, Peggy by May 14
Chomsky: How the Young Are Indoctrinated to Obey | Education | AlterNet
Forty years ago there was deep concern that the population was breaking free of apathy and obedience. Since then, many measures have been taken to restore discipline. Public education is under attack around the world, and in response, student protests have recently been held in Britain, Canada, Chile, Taiwan and elsewhere. California is also a battleground. The Los Angeles Times reports on another chapter in the campaign to destroy what had been the greatest public higher education system in the world: "California State University officials announced plans to freeze enrollment next spring at most campuses and to wait-list all applicants the following fall pending the outcome of a proposed tax initiative on the November ballot."
The Wrath Against Khan: Why Some Educators Are Questioning Khan Academy
An Explainer Post There's an article in this month's Wired Magazine about Khan Academy. The headline speaks volumes -- " How Khan Academy Is Changing the Rules of Education " -- as do the responses I've seen to the article. As usual, there's plenty of praise for Sal Khan and his one-man-educational-video-making machine.The federal school turnaround program is mostly failing in Washington state, even though teachers and administrators are trying their best to make a difference for kids, according to a report issued Thursday by education researchers at the University of Washington. The federal government is spending more than $3 billion nationwide to help districts turn around their worst-performing schools. Washington school districts are failing to make aggressive reforms with their more than $50 million share of the money, researchers from UW's Center on Reinventing Public Education say. Teachers are working very hard but their efforts are mostly wasted because the districts don't have a good plan, said Sarah Yatsko, a UW research analyst and lead author of the study. She said part of the problem is that districts were rushed into reform by the federal government. Another issue is the hodgepodge approach they are taking.
Local News | Report: School turnaround mostly failing in Wash. | Seattle Times Newspaper
LEARNING x FREEDOM x THE WEB Learning gets more agile, more active, more participatory, more like the web. The web strengthens its public mission and its place in human history. Everyone gets to invent his or her own end to the story.
Learning, Freedom and the Web
A $3M grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will fund development CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – With a new $3 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the MIT Education Arcade is about to design, build, and research a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) to help high school students learn math and biology. In contrast to the way that Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) are currently taught in secondary schools – which often results in students becoming disengaged and disinterested in the subjects at an early age – educational games like the one to be developed give students the chance to explore STEM topics in a way that deepens their knowledge while also developing 21st-century skills. As director of the Education Arcade and the Scheller Teacher Education Program, Professor Eric Klopfer has been conducting research into such educational gaming tools for over ten years.
s Education Arcade Uses Online Gaming to Teach Science | MIT STEP
Science starts, and ends, with the natural world, the one we can consistently sense, the big mystery of whateverness, this ether, that we swim in. Everything in a science class should get back to stuff and energy. If it's not grounded in the stuff of the world, it's not science.
Science teacher
James Bryant Conant was a scholar whose talents extended over a wide range of activities. He was a scientist, writer, and concerned citizen. Harvard University selected him to be its president, and he filled that position for twenty years.
Bennett
Photograph by Max Whittaker Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. A prolific researcher and author who specializes in cognitive development, her most recent book is The Philosophical Baby: What children’s minds tell us about love, truth and the meaning of life.
In conversation: Alison Gopnik - The Interview - Macleans.ca
Seattle University | Seattle U teacher honored for innovation | Seattle Times Newspaper
Originally published November 17, 2011 at 12:03 AM | Page modified November 17, 2011 at 11:18 AM Fourteen years ago, Vicky Minderhout did something very radical for a university professor: She set aside her biochemistry-lecture notes, moved away from the lectern and began teaching from the center of the classroom. She wanted to coach her students at Seattle University to think about how biochemistry works, to puzzle their way through the structures of proteins and work out the functions of carbohydrates. She wanted them to discover answers for themselves. "I view it as a coaching role," Minderhout said.Critical & Creative Education
Why Education Needs to Get Its Game On
Gerard LaFond is the VP of marketing for Pearson’s College and Career Readiness division and the co-founder of Persuasive Games. He’s currently working on the gamification of education through the Pearson start-up, Alleyoop. Kids spend hours a day on sites like Facebook and YouTube. They play highly immersive video games, watch engrossing shows on their HDTVs and interact with apps on their mobile devices. All of this is in stark contrast to how they spend their days at school, where educators lecture and write on blackboards, then ask kids to read boring textbooks and practice abstract skills or memorize obscure facts.Online education is often dismissed as a pipeline for expensive degrees of little value and a sponge for veterans’ tuition payments . But while it’s true that for-profit universities have made a hefty business out of e-learning, it’s becoming apparent that learning online can also benefit almost everyone else. “It’s very clear that five years from now, on the web, for free…you will be able to find the greatest lectures in the world on the web,” Bill Gates recently predicted in an interview at Techonomy 2010 .
The Case for the Virtual Classroom
I am an associate professor of Information Science in the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University , Bloomington. In addition, I am a co-director of the Graduate Certificate in Information Architecture (GCIA) program. My research is primarily in Social Informatics, and especially focuses on communities of practice, knowledge sharing, and online mobilization. I am also a fellow of the Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics . I served the ASIS&T (Americay Society for Information Science & Technology) Special Interest Group on Social Informatics ( SIG-SI ) as a co-chair. Currently I am studying tacit knowledge sharing in life science graduate programs ( NSF #08-30137 ).