http://www.wired.com/2012/03/ff_aiclass/
Khan Academy and the Effectiveness of Science Videos This must-watch video is from our friend Derek Muller, physics educator and science video blogger. Derek writes: It is a common view that “if only someone could break this down and explain it clearly enough, more students would understand.” Khan Academy is a great example of this approach with its clear, concise videos on science. However it is debatable whether they really work. Research has shown that these types of videos may be positively received by students. Human Body Part That Stumped Leonardo da Vinci Revealed Leonardo da Vinci's 500-year-old illustrations of human anatomy are uncannily accurate with just one major exception: the female reproductive system. That's probably because Leonardo had a tough time finding female corpses to dissect, explains Peter Abrahams, a practicing physician at the University of Warwick Medical School in the United Kingdom. Abrahams, a clinical anatomist, has lent his knowledge to an audio tour of the exhibit of Leonardo's anatomical drawings that opened May 4 in Buckingham Palace. The Italian Renaissance artist learned anatomy as a way to improve his drawings of the human form, but he also brought a scientist's eye to the discipline. "He wanted to understand how it worked," Abrahams told LiveScience.
Stanford Professors Launch Online University Coursera - Liz Gannes There seems to be something in the water at Stanford University that’s making faculty members leave their more-than-perfectly-good jobs and go teach online. Coursera co-founders Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller Stanford computer science professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng are on leave to launch Coursera, which will offer university classes for free online, in partnership with top schools. Mountain View, Calif.-based Coursera is backed with $16 million in funding led by John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins and Scott Sandell at NEA. It has no immediate plans to charge for courses or to make money in other ways.
Coursera Raises $16 Million To Bring Free Online Education to Millions The Internet is revolutionizing education, as several companies and organizations disrupt the online education space including Open Yale, Open Culture, Khan Academy, Academic Earth, P2PU, Skillshare, Scitable and Skype in the Classroom. The Internet has changed how we interact with time and each other. We can be learning all the time now, whenever we want, and wherever we want. And because of that, we’re seeing explosive growth and new models in online education. For the past year, renowned Stanford University professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng have experimented with new online learning tools like videos, quizzes and peer-to-peer platforms to teach free classes to just under a million students. In the fall of 2011, the two developed Stanford University’s first online education platform, which served two courses and had a total enrollment of 200,000.
Shape Science: The Bouba-Kiki Effect Key concepts Language Speech Shapes Sound Psychology Human behavior Introduction Do shapes have certain "sounds" to people, regardless of what language people speak? For example, does everyone associate certain physical characteristics, like sharpness and roundedness, with certain sounds? Understanding such similarities may not only help people better understand how languages develop, but it may also improve people's ability to communicate, especially when trying to cross language barriers. In this activity you'll investigate the "Bouba–Kiki effect" to find out how abstract shapes may be linked to sound. Background One of the most amazing things humans do is use language to communicate.
Top Schools from Berkeley to Yale Now Offer Free Online Courses On average, it will cost $55,600 to attend Princeton, Penn, Michigan or Stanford next year. But now you can enroll in online courses at all four universities online for free. The universities won't just be posting lectures online like MIT's OpenCourseWare project, Yale’s Open Yale Courses and the University of California at Berkeley’s Webcast.
Stanford Professor Gives Up Teaching Position, Hopes to Reach 500,000 Students at Online Start-Up - Wired Campus The Stanford University professor who taught an online artificial-intelligence course to more than 160,000 students has abandoned his teaching position to aim for an even bigger audience. Sebastian Thrun, a research professor of computer science at Stanford, revealed today that he had given up his teaching role at the institution to found Udacity, a start-up offering low-cost online classes. He made the surprising announcement during a presentation at the Digital–Life–Design conference, in Munich, Germany. The development was first reported earlier today by Reuters. During his talk, Mr. Four-year-old discovers 100-million-year-old dinosaur If Wylie Brys decides on a career in paleontology, he will have an impressive head start – at just four years old, he has already discovered his first 100 million-year-old Cretacean dinosaur. Wylie came across the fossil in September 2014, while digging for marine animal bones with his father. Researchers from Southern Methodist University, who excavated the remains last week, have tentatively identified the fossil as a heavily-armored nodosaur. The specimen could be upwards of 100 million years old – but Brys didn’t know it at the time. “My dad told me it was a turtle,” Wylie told the Dallas Morning News.
Stanford President Hennessy and Khan Academy Founder Khan (Video) - Liz Gannes - D10 Stanford President John Hennessy and Khan Academy founder Salman Khan are coming at online education from very different angles — one is an elite institution being shaken up by experiments, the other is a widely loved upstart that’s increasingly being used in traditional schools. In conversation with Walt Mossberg at D10, Hennessy and Khan talked about the future of the education credential; the opportunities for “flipped classroom”-style education, where class time is spent on collaboration, tutoring and projects; the move away from lectures and toward social media; and the opportunity to provide practical education for kids in a sort of “shadow school district,” as Khan called it, with classes in computer science, statistics and law. Here’s a highlight reel: Full D10 Conference Coverage
Self-Powered Liquid Metal Could Change Robotics Inspired by mollusks, researchers have developed a liquid metal that can move on its own, powered by aluminium “food”. Described in a paper published in Advanced Materials, the new compound could make big waves in robotics thanks to its ability to change shape to negotiate bends and curves. A team led by Dr. Liu Jing at the Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Tsinghua University used a mixture of gallium, indium and tin to make the metal compound.
4 Reasons Your Brain Loves to Learn Online Are we offloading our brains onto the web? Are programs better than teachers at knowing what we know? Do virtual badges motivate more than grades? What is it about cartoon foxes that helps us learn to code? Man with restored sight provides new insight into how vision develops California man Mike May made international headlines in 2000 when his sight was restored by a pioneering stem cell procedure after 40 years of blindness. But a study published three years after the operation found that the then-49-year-old could see colors, motion and some simple two-dimensional shapes, but was incapable of more complex visual processing. Hoping May might eventually regain those visual skills, University of Washington (UW) researchers and colleagues retested him a decade later.
In 2011: How the Internet Revolutionized Education As connection speeds increase and the ubiquity of the Web pervades, free education has never been so accessible. An Internet connection gives lifelong learners the tools to become autodidacts, eschewing exorbitant tuition and joining the ranks of other self-taught great thinkers in history such as Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, Paul Allen and Ernest Hemingway. We can be learning all the time now, whenever we want, and wherever we want. And because of that, we’re seeing explosive growth in online education. We’ve featured several companies and organizations in the past year that are disrupting the online education space including Open Yale, Open Culture, Khan Academy, Academic Earth, P2PU, Skillshare, Scitable and Skype in the Classroom.