Mobile Learning Proves to Benefit At-Risk Students Digital Tools Teaching Strategies Wireless Reach/Qualcomm As we explore the potential of mobile learning, especially as it relates to reaching out to disenfranchised students, the most recent results from Project K-Nect seem that much more relevant. The pilot program based in North Carolina, which we covered here on MindShift, was designed to make math more engaging for low-income kids with the use of mobile phones in Onslow County School System. This is just a math program. Imagine how it could play out with other subjects. In its third year, the program has more than proven successful. By the end of the fall 2010 semester, 89 percent of the Algebra I students reported they are more motivated to learn math compared to 76 percent at the beginning of the semester. 90 percent of the Project K-Nect students in Algebra I and 100 percent of the Algebra II students demonstrated proficiency on their end of course exams. And this is just a math program. Related
"Economics in Denial" by Howard Davies Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space PARIS – In an exasperated outburst, just before he left the presidency of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet complained that, “as a policymaker during the crisis, I found the available [economic and financial] models of limited help. Trichet went on to appeal for inspiration from other disciplines – physics, engineering, psychology, and biology – to help explain the phenomena he had experienced. So far, relatively little help has been forthcoming from the engineers and physicists in whom Trichet placed his faith, though there has been some response. These are fertile fields for future study, but what of the core disciplines of economics and finance themselves? George Soros has put generous funding behind the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET). Some of the recommendations that emerged from that conference are straightforward and concrete. I am sure they learn fast at HSBC.
Review: The Edupunks' Guide, by Anya Kamenetz I have now had the chance to read The Edupunks' Guide and can now form some opinions based on what I've seen. And if I were forced to summarize my critique in a nutshell, it would be this. Edupunk, as described by the putative subculture, is the idea of 'learning by doing it yourself'. The Edupunks' Guide, however, describes 'do-it-yourself learning'. The failure to appreciate the difference is a significant weakness of the booklet. Let me explain. By contrast, the edupunk way is to cook Thai food, and in so doing, learn how to be a good chef. Now based on the discussion that has already taken place in this iDC forum, I would expect Anya Kamemetz's first response to be something along the lines of "I know that; I do encourage learning by doing." A simple example is learning to make pizza. But watching a video instead of watching a person (or taking a class) isn't what makes something edupunk. What DO we mean by education, exactly? That's very good. Oh, and how. Should I go on?
A Preventable Massacre Thirty years later, the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila camps is remembered as a notorious chapter in modern Middle Eastern history, clouding the tortured relationships among , the United States, and the Palestinians. In 1983, an Israeli investigative commission concluded that Israeli leaders were “indirectly responsible” for the killings and that , then the defense minister and later prime minister, bore “personal responsibility” for failing to prevent them. While Israel’s role in the massacre has been closely examined, America’s actions have never been fully understood. This summer, at the Israel State Archives, I found recently declassified documents that chronicle key conversations between American and Israeli officials before and during the 1982 massacre. Israel’s involvement in the Lebanese civil war began in June 1982, when it invaded its northern neighbor. By Sept. 16, the I.D.F. was fully in control of West Beirut, including Sabra and Shatila. In Tel Aviv, Mr.
Wired Campus A Web-based game that uses the brainpower of biology novices to understand molecules key to life and disease is producing working designs of those molecules in a Stanford University laboratory—and the process could influence the way scientific discovery works. RNA molecules—DNA’s single-stranded relative—play key roles in cell function. Those roles depend on RNA shapes, the way the shape of a key determines which lock it can open. And that’s where things get tricky. RNA shapes depend on how the molecules’ components fit together, but the rules that govern what fits where are not well understood. The game EteRNA, which was started by the Stanford biochemist Rhiju Das and the Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Adrien Treuille, allows researchers to farm out some of the intellectual legwork behind RNA design to 26,000 players, rather than a relatively few lab workers. The community of players then votes for the blueprint it thinks will have the best chance of success in the lab.
You Won't Need a Driver's License by 2040 | Autopia Photo: U.S. DOT The timeline for autonomous cars hitting the road en masse keeps getting closer. GM’s Cadillac division expects to produce partially autonomous cars at a large scale by 2015, and the automaker also predicts it will have fully autonomous cars available by the end of the decade. But while we know that robo-cars are coming, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) recently released predictions that autonomous cars will account for up to 75 percent of vehicles on the road by the year 2040. IEEE envisions an absence of traffic signs and lights since highly evolved, self-driving cars won’t need them, and it believes that full deployment could even eliminate the need for driver’s licenses. While this all sounds sci-fi, we’re already starting to see separate threads of this autonomous-car future being weaved in current real-world tests. It’s been assumed that the largest hurdle for autonomous cars is building the infrastructure.
Online video lessons flipping classrooms left and right In soothing tones, he explains everything from chemistry to credit default swaps, from algebra to economics, to about 2 million students a month, imparting roughly 200,000 lessons a day. And Salman Khan never loses his voice. As an educator, he's just now finding it, as the improbable creator of a free, Web-based video library whose pitch-perfect approach to bedeviling concepts has vaulted him into the education reform conversation — in Colorado and worldwide. "It's weird for me," says the 34-year-old Khan. "You don't expect people to recognize you, especially when you make math videos on YouTube." That task has expanded a bit since he first lashed together an online algebra lesson to help a cousin. Using technology to reach schools and homes around the world as either a stand-alone curriculum or a supplemental tool, the nonprofit Khan Academy (khanacademy.org) has doubled its users from over just three months ago and increased its audience 10-fold over last fall. Start of a legend?
Fact-Checkers Howl, but Both Sides Cling to False Ads Todd Heisler/The New York Times Fact-checkers said Representative Paul D. Ryan’s speech at the Republican convention contained many questionable claims. There was one problem: the quotation was taken so wildly out of context that it turned Mr. Obama’s actual meaning upside-down. The truncated clip came from a speech Mr. PolitiFact.com, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking Web site, rated the advertisement “Pants on Fire,” its most deceptive rating possible, but it achieved what the Romney campaign had hoped: people started talking about the sluggish economy and how Mr. “We’re not going let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,” Neil Newhouse, the Romney campaign’s pollster, said this week during a breakfast discussion at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., that was sponsored by ABC News and Yahoo News. Every four years there are lies in campaigns, and at times a blurry line between acceptable political argument and outright sophistry.
"High-Tech Fun: The Best of Online and Face-to-Face Learning" Henry J. Eyring Author Henry J. Eyring (Rexburg, ID) serves as advancement vice president at Brigham Young University-Idaho. He was invited to BYU-Idaho in 2006 by Kim Cl... There is a timely lesson for today's education innovators in an Isaac Asimov short story that this year will celebrate its sixtieth birthday. The story's young protagonist, eleven-year-old Margie, comes upon a real book found by her older friend Tommy in the attic of his house. Even more amazing to Margie is the idea that these students of long ago didn't stay at home to learn from their personal mechanical teachers. Upon reflection in her own private study room, though, Margie begins to imagine the unique benefits of this old style of learning: All the kids from the whole neighborhood came, laughing and shouting in the schoolyard, sitting together in the schoolroom, going home together at the end of the day. And the teachers were people... Margie was thinking about how the kids must have loved it in the old days.
Mission accomplished for big oil? In 2011, after nearly nine years of war and occupation, U.S. troops finally left Iraq. In their place, Big Oil is now present in force and the country’s oil output, crippled for decades, is growing again. Iraq recently reclaimed the number two position in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), overtaking oil-sanctioned Iran. Now, there’s talk of a new world petroleum glut. So is this finally mission accomplished? Well, not exactly. Here, as a start, is a little scorecard of what’s gone on in Iraq since Big Oil arrived two and a half years ago: corruption’s skyrocketed; two Western oil companies are being investigated for either giving or receiving bribes; the Iraqi government is paying oil companies a per-barrel fee according to wildly unrealistic production targets they’ve set, whether or not they deliver that number of barrels; contractors are heavily over-charging for drilling wells, which the companies don’t mind since the Iraqi government picks up the tab.
Reflections on Inflections Email Share August 19, 2011 - by Tom Vander Ark 0 Email Share Inflection point Inflection points reflect a change in the slope of a curve—a point of accelerated growth that, combined with linked events, marks the beginning of a different future. Midway through 2011 we can look back on a few recently passed milestones and can predict a few learning innovation inflections just ahead. Learning anywhere. It started with search, then Wikipedia, and then open educational resources with Kahn Academy being the most publicized, new resource. Learning on the go. Access devices (tablets, netbooks) are so cheap, schools can’t afford not to shift from print to digital instructional materials. Blended universe. There will be three related inflection points in the next few years. Flood of data. Your brain on customization. A few individualized networks (Big Picture, AdvancePath*) give us pictures of alternatives to a system based on age cohorts and seat time. Closing the global secondary gap.
The murder fields of Marikana. The cold murder fields of Marikana. Of the 34 miners killed at Marikana, no more than a dozen of the dead were captured in news footage shot at the scene. The majority of those who died, according to surviving strikers and researchers, were killed beyond the view of cameras at a nondescript collection of boulders some 300 metres behind Wonderkop. On one of these rocks, encompassed closely on all sides by solid granite boulders, is the letter ‘N’, the 14th letter of the alphabet. Here, N represents the 14th body of a striking miner to be found by a police forensics team in this isolated place. There is a thick spread of blood deep into the dry soil, showing that N was shot and killed on the spot. Approaching N from all possible angles, observing the local geography, it is clear that to shoot N, the shooter would have to be close. Photo: At sites like 'N', all four sides are hemmed in by rock. And on the deadly Thursday afternoon, N’s murderer could only have been a policeman. Other letters denote equally morbid scenarios.
Study: Kids Are the Road to Tech Innovation Over the course of 2010, Latitude Research completed a multi-phase innovation study, Children's Future Requests for Computers and the Internet, asking kids across the world to draw the answer to this question: "What would you like your computer or the Internet to do that it can't do right now?" This study is part of a larger research initiative by Latitude that positions younger generations as a window into the future of technology, capable of informing tech experiences that resonate with people of all ages. Download the study summary (PDF) for Children's Future Requests for Computers and the Internet. Kim Gaskins is Director of Content Development at Latitude, an international research consultancy. Visit latd.com/ for other studies in Latitude's open innovation series. More than 200 kid-innovators, ages 12 and under, from North America, Latin America, Europe, Africa, South Asia and Australia, submitted drawings of their imagined technologies. To view a larger version, click here.