According to a Child Rights Information Network report, an estimated eight million children aged between six and Fourneen do not currently attend school in India. And these children are the ones the Right to Education (RTE) Act now promises to reach out and provide education to.
To enforce this, a huge amount—to the tune of Rs 55,000 crore, according to an estimate by the Ministry of Human Resource Development—is needed. This is the primary hurdle for the Government of India is making this law become reality.
Michigan schools are getting a $318 million boost from the federal government this year, but is that really a helping hand?
Experts speaking at an Education Commission of the States conference suggested schools used the time to start planning for when the cash by sharing services and combining their purchasing power — ideas discussed this week in orMichigan 10.0 series.
Alyson Klein of Education Week reports that school finance expert Michael Griffith told the recent gathering that states are becoming more and more dependent on the federal government, and that might not be a good thing, unless they don’t mind giving up bigger chunks of their authority.
For professors, publishing in elite journals is an unavoidable part of university life. The grueling process of subjecting work to the up-or-down judgment of credentialed scholarly peers has been a cornerstone of academic culture since at least the mid-20th century.
Now some humanities scholars have begun to challenge the monopoly that peer review has on admission to career-making journals and, as a consequence, to the charmed circle of tenured academe. They argue that in an era of digital media there is a better way to assess the quality of work.
What’s the best relationship between teachers and students? Love? Admiration? Respect?
What would you do if your class were deeply involved in a creative project, like a movie or a newspaper or a play, and the principal came along and said you had to get back to basics because standardized test time was coming up?
Those were the kinds of questions that teachers in Riverview Gardens faced over the summer when they wanted to get rehired for their jobs, after the district was taken over by a state-appointed board. For years, teachers around the country have been tested in the same way by the Haberman Star Teacher program, which tries to determine who is most likely to succeed in a school environment that seems to get tougher every year.
To those of you that joined us at the 2010 Learning Conference in Hong Kong, or if you’ve participated in a previous conference, please share your photos of the conference with your friends and colleagues that you met while at the conference. Pictures of the conference sessions, dinner, tours and ‘down time’ are all welcome!
Join our Learning Conference Flickr group here, and upload your pictures to easily share. Once you’ve joined, simply click on ‘Add something?’, and upload your photos or videos of the conference.
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Washington - The Senate on Wednesday cleared the way for a $26 billion package of aid to states and school districts, and the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said she would summon members from their summer recess to grant final approval to the bill.
The measure had been hung up by partisan wrangling between Democrats, who said it was necessary to avert layoffs of teachers and cutbacks in services by strapped states, and Republicans, who objected to another round of government spending and characterized it as a political payoff to unions.
“My ideas evolved from long hours in local bars, talking, talking, talking, always about morality. People were always asking ‘Who do you think you are, Socrates?’ They said it with contempt, but I would smile and say, ‘Thank you.’” – Tim Cooney
The television show Sesame Street recently celebrated its 40th anniversary. To commemorate the occasion there have been a host of events, including the publication of several books. A review of one of them, Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street by Michael Davis, caught my eye when I saw a mention in it of the late Timothy J. Cooney, ex-husband of Joan Ganz Cooney, the creator of Sesame Street. Tim was a fascinating person in his own right, and I immediately bought the book to see what it had to say about him, for I had gotten to know Tim in the last decade of his life, well after his marriage had ended.
A first-grade teacher in Vallejo, Calif., works with students. Schools across the country are struggling with deep budget cuts.
For more than 40 years, Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin, the third-ranking member of the House, has been a fiery and highly effective legislator. Any history of how the country avoided another depression must include Obey, who shepherded the $787 billion Recovery Act through Congress last year with great skill (and no earmarks). He has been an inspiring antiwar liberal dating back to Vietnam and a rare man of conscience in Washington.
Education Secretary Michael Gove tells Channel 4 News why he is scrapping a major school building project put in motion by Labour, as a separate row is sparked over civil service pay.
Mr. Gove has called time on the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme, which he said had failed to meet its own targets. He described it as “massively flawed” and “over-bureaucratic”.
Announcing a review of capital investment in Britain’s schools, Mr. Gove said work on 715 of the schools due to be rebuilt or refurbished through BSF would be halted.
He told the Commons that the programme, which represents one third of departmental capital spending, was characterised by overspend, delays and botched construction projects.
The 2011 Learning Conference will take place at the University of Mauritius, Mauritius from 5-8 July. For more information please visit www.LearningConference.com
Those who submit paper proposals should register following the acceptance of the proposal. Conference delegates who do not intend to present may register at any time. For registration options, or to register for the 2011 Learning Conference, see: http://thelearner.com/conference-2011/register/.
For those of you who are joining us in Hong Kong for the 2010 International Conference on Learning, please note that there is more detailed information available for download on the locations page of the conference website here.
We know that you will continue to have questions as the conference draws near. Please feel free to contact us at support@thelearner.com with any inquiries or concerns that you may have.
By Diane Ravitch, in Education Week’s Blog Bridging Differences
Dear Deborah,
The evidence continues to accumulate that our “accountability” policies are a great fraud and hoax, but our elected officials and policymakers remain completely oblivious to the harm caused by the policies they mandate.
Over the past several years, efforts to “hold teachers accountable” and “hold schools accountable” have produced perverse consequences. Instead of better education, we are getting cheating scandals, teaching to bad tests, a narrowed curriculum, lowered standards, and gaming of the system. Even if it produces higher test scores (of dubious validity), high-stakes accountability does not produce better education.
A review from Chris Dede of Ubiquitous Learning, a volume edited by Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis
Modern day conceptions of ubiquitous learning build on an influential vision of ubiquitous computing published two decades earlier by Mark Weiser (1991) of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. His article depicted a world of smart objects and intelligent contexts based on ubiquitous computing, a different way of conceptualizing the interface between computers, networks, and people. In Weiser’s vision, tiny computers are embedded into nearly every artifact and setting, networked so that they intercommunicate. For example, a tree could be tagged with information about its botanical characteristics; the tree might also offer to show an historic image of its context about the time it was planted or to describe the contribution it makes to reducing local pollution and greenhouse gases. People who wandered by could access this information on a wireless mobile device; based on a person’s response, the building adjacent to the tree might then offer some information. Current images of smart objects and intelligent contexts for learning include affordances not available twenty years earlier, such as Web 2.0 tools embedded in cyberinfrastructure (Dede, 2007) and augmented reality games (Klopfer, 2008).
The nation’s governors and state school chiefs released on Wednesday a new set of academic standards, their final recommendations for what students should master in English and math as they move from the primary grades through high school graduation.
The standards, which took a year to write, have been tweaked and refined in recent weeks in response to some of the 10,000 comments the public sent in after a draft was released in March.
The standards were made public at a news conference on Wednesday in Atlanta.
Leah Lechleiter-Luke, a Spanish teacher from Mauston, Wis., who is that state’s 2010 teacher of the year, said at the conference that the new standards were preferable to her home state’s. “It’s not that the standards in Wisconsin are so bad, it’s just that there are so many of them,” she said. “These are more user-friendly.”
Michael Mulgrew is an affable former Brooklyn vocational-high-school teacher who took over last year as head of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers when his predecessor, Randi Weingarten, moved to Washington to run the national American Federation of Teachers. Over breakfast in March, we talked about a movement spreading across the country to hold public-school teachers accountable by compensating, promoting or even removing them according to the results they produce in class, as measured in part by student test scores. Mulgrew’s 165-page union contract takes the opposite approach. It not only specifies everything that teachers will do and will not do during a six-hour-57 ½-minute workday but also requires that teachers be paid based on how long they have been on the job. Once they’ve been teaching for three years and judged satisfactory in a process that invariably judges all but a few of them satisfactory, they are ensured lifetime tenure.
Pelham, N.Y. — In the month since Pelham Memorial High School in Westchester County advertised seven teaching jobs, it has been flooded with 3,010 applications from candidates as far away as California. The Port Washington District on Long Island is sorting through 3,620 applications for eight positions — the largest pool the superintendent has seen in his 41-year career.
Even hard-to-fill specialties are no longer so hard to fill. Jericho, N.Y., has 963 people to choose from for five spots in special education, more than twice as many as in past years. In Connecticut, chemistry and physics jobs in Hartford that normally attract no more than 5 candidates have 110 and 51, respectively.
Picture Courtesy of Benjamin F. Carlson, in The Atlantic Wire
By Karoli, in Crooks and Liars
On May 19th, the Texas Board of Education will meet to approve the final Social Studies curriculum and textbook changes that caused such a stir back in March.
Since that meeting, even more changes have been proposed which, if adopted, promise to rewrite history for Texas schoolchildren to the conservative narrative. Uber-winger Don McLeroy’s proposals:
Undermine the doctrine of separation of church and state. McLeroy wants to substitute an unintelligible standard asking students to “contrast the Founders’ intent relative to the wording of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause, with the popular term ‘Separation of church and state.’”
Global Student Mobility in the Asia Pacific: Mobility, Migration, Security and Wellbeing of International Students, edited by Peter Kell and Gillian Vogl
Over 2.7m students study in a country other than their own. Most of those students come from the Asia-Pacific region and undertake study in universities in the developed world. This trend is predicted to grow exponentially but features many dilemmas. In the post-9/11 global environment, international students experience hostility and harassment as well as ambivalence about their value to the academy.
Some live an uncertain life of poverty and alienation. Many also struggle to come to terms with living and studying in a foreign land where there are concerns about international students eroding academic standards, having poor English language proficiency and being unable to “integrate” and contribute to their new communities. But some also seek to make new homes in their host countries.
About the Hong Kong Institute of Education, the host of our 2010 Learning Conference:
Established in 1994 and with a heritage of 70 years of teacher training dating to the former colleges of education, the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd) is the only University Grants Committee-funded institution dedicated solely to professional teacher education in Hong Kong. The HKIEd was formally established by statute in April 1994 - upon recommendation by the Education Commission in 1992 - by uniting the former Northcote College of Education, Grantham College of Education, Sir Robert Black College of Education, the Hong Kong Technical Teachers’ College and the Institute of Language in Education.
Tenure is under attack. The century-old system of protecting experienced teachers from arbitrary dismissal — long viewed as sacred — has triggered hot political debates in several states.
“Teacher effectiveness” has emerged as the biggest buzz phrase in education policy circles. Because teachers have such potential for affecting the quality of children’s education, some people are starting to argue that it must become easier to get bad teachers out of the classroom.
“There seems to be a lot of drive to do away with tenure,” says Sandy Kress, who helped write federal and state education laws as an adviser to George W. Bush and other policymakers. “Tenure has proved to be just a horrible barrier to getting rid of that small percentage of teachers who are just not effective.”
Milpitas, Calif. — When Kevin Jenkins wanted to teach his fourth-grade students at Spangler Elementary here how to use the Internet, he created a site where they could post photographs, drawings and surveys.
And they did. But to his dismay, some of his students posted surveys like “Who’s the most popular classmate?” and “Who’s the best-liked?”
Mr. Jenkins’s students “liked being able to express themselves in a place where they’re basically by themselves at a computer,” he said. “They’re not thinking that everyone’s going to see it.”
The ancient Egyptians thought so little of brain matter they made a practice of scooping it out through the nose of a dead leader before packing the skull with cloth before burial. They believed consciousness resided in the heart, a view shared by Aristotle and a legacy of medieval thinkers. Even when consensus for the locus of thought moved northward into the head, it was not the brain that was believed to be the sine qua non, but the empty spaces within it, called ventricles, where ephemeral spirits swirled about. As late as 1662, philosopher Henry More scoffed that the brain showed “no more capacity for thought than a cake of suet, or a bowl of curds.”
Around the same time, French philosopher René Descartes codified the separation of conscious thought from the physical flesh of the brain. Cartesian “dualism” exerted a powerful influence over Western science for centuries, and while dismissed by most neuroscientists today, still feeds the popular belief in mind as a magical, transcendent quality.
Elementary and middle school students in Indiana will have an online alternative beginning in the 2010-2011 school year.
Rural Community Academy, in partnership with Connections Academy, is launching a statewide virtual public school that will serve students in grades 1 through 8. Dubbed Indiana Connections Academy Virtual Pilot School (INCA-VPS), the online school will provide a tuition-free education to Indiana students, providing teachers, support staff, and learning coaches for students.
A few times each month, second graders at a charter school in Springfield, Mass., take time from math and reading to engage in philosophical debate. There is no mention of Hegel or Descartes, no study of syllogism or solipsism. Instead, Prof. Thomas E. Wartenberg and his undergraduate students from nearby Mount Holyoke College use classic children’s books to raise philosophical questions, which the young students then dissect with the vigor of the ancient Greeks.
“A lot of people try to make philosophy into an elitist discipline,” says Professor Wartenberg, who has been visiting the school, the Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School of Excellence, since 2007. “But everyone is interested in basic philosophical ideas; they’re the most basic questions we have about the world.”
From Lesli A. Maxwell and Michele McNeil, in Education Week
By selecting just two states as first-round Race to the Top winners, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is leaving $3.4 billion on the table for the remaining states to vie for in round two.
Delaware and Tennessee beat out 14 other finalists last week to win the first grants awarded in the $4 billion Race to the Top Fund competition.
Mr. Duncan praised the two states, which edged out front-runners Florida and Louisiana, for mustering strong district and teachers’-union support for their plans, for having superior data systems, and for submitting comprehensive proposals that touched “every single child” statewide.
Are there evidence-based answers to the broad question “What explicit knowledge about language in teachers and/or students appears to enhance literacy development in some way”? Distinguished by its global perspective, its currency, and its comprehensiveness, Beyond the Grammar Wars:
provides an historical overview of the debates around grammar and English/literacy teaching in four settings: the US, England, Scotland and Australia
offers an up-to-date account of what the research is telling (and not telling) us about the effectiveness of certain kinds of grammar-based pedagogies in English/literacy classrooms
takes readers into English/literacy classrooms through a range of examples of language/grammar-based pedagogies which have proven to be successful
addresses metalinguistic issues related to changes in textual practices in a digital and multimodal age, and explores the challenges for educators who are committed to finding a “usable grammar” to contribute to teaching and learning in relation to these practices.
All of the contributors are acknowledged experts in their field. Activities designed for use in language and literacy education courses actively engage students in reflecting on and applying the content in their own teaching contexts.
From Three-Toed Sloth: Slow Takes from the Canopy (My Very Own Internet Tradition)
Anyone who wanders into the bleak and monotonous desert of IQ and the nature-vs-nurture dispute eventually gets trapped in the especially arid question of what, if anything, g, the supposed general factor of intelligence, tells us about these matters. By calling g a “statistical myth” before, I made clear my conclusion, but none of my reasoning. This topic being what it is, I hardly expect this will change anyone’s mind, but I feel a duty to explain myself.
To summarize what follows below (”shorter sloth”, as it were), the case for g rests on a statistical technique, factor analysis, which works solely on correlations between tests. Factor analysis is handy for summarizing data, but can’t tell us where the correlations came from; it always says that there is a general factor whenever there are only positive correlations. The appearance of g is a trivial reflection of that correlation structure. A clear example, known since 1916, shows that factor analysis can give the appearance of a general factor when there are actually many thousands of completely independent and equally strong causes at work. Heritability doesn’t distinguish these alternatives either. Exploratory factor analysis being no good at discovering causal structure, it provides no support for the reality of g.
You’ve probably heard it at one time or another: Most of us use only 10 percent of our brains. More factoid than fact, a claim of unknown provenance and dubious accuracy, the idea sticks around because of the enduring appeal of its underlying premise. We’d all love to think that we’re in possession of tremendous untapped potential, of latent mental powers just waiting to be activated. It seems so convenient, like falling in love with the person you’re already married to, or whipping up dinner from what’s already in your kitchen. You don’t have to leave home, or even change out of your pajamas.
The 2010 Learning Conference will take place at the Hong Kong Institute of Education in Hong Kong from July 6-9, 2010. For more information please visit www.LearningConference.com
Those who submit paper proposals should register following the acceptance of the proposal. Conference delegates who do not intend to present may register at any time. For registration options, or to register for the 2010 Learning Conference, see: http://thelearner.com/conference-2010/register/.
Inspiration, hunger: these are the qualities that drive good schools. The best we educational planners can do is to create the most likely conditions for them to flourish, and then get out of their way. - Ted Sizer
As individuals with decades of experience in improving public education at all levels, the Conveners of The Forum for Education and Democracy view the upcoming debates over the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) as offering the opportunity to finally get it right. After a decade of tinkering around the edges and avoiding the hard questions, the so-called No Child Left Behind version of ESEA has done little to improve schools. In fact, our schools look much like they did when the act was passed – and many think that NCLB hindered school improvement efforts that were going on prior to its passage.
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From a letter to Thomas Jefferson written by John Adams, January 23, 1825:
“Books that cannot bear examination certainly ought not to be established as divine inspiration by penal laws…. The substance and essence of Christianity as I understand it is eternal and unchangeable and will bear examination forever but it has been mixed with extraneous ingredients, which I think will not bear examination and they ought to be separated.”
Perhaps the powers that be in Texas consider Thomas Jefferson an extraneous ingredient and will seek to extract our third president and other major figures in American history from their school’s textbooks. It seems that there will be a bit of revision in Texas, and I fear it will be big—as things often are in the Lone Star State.
The Obama administration on Saturday called for a broad overhaul of President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, proposing to reshape divisive provisions that encouraged instructors to teach to tests, narrowed the curriculum, and labeled one in three American schools as failing.
By announcing that he would send his education blueprint to Congress on Monday, President Obama returned to a campaign promise to repair the sprawling federal law, which affects each of the nation’s nearly 100,000 public schools. His plan strikes a careful balance, retaining some key features of the Bush-era law, including its requirement for annual reading and math tests, while proposing far-reaching changes.
When I was in primary school, my math teacher used to be very lenient on girls who struggled with their math assignments, because - as I realize in hindsight - he was of the impression that girls were simply not as capable of doing math as he thought boys to be. Likewise, my German teacher wouldn’t fuss as much about sloppy handwriting with the boys as she would for the girls, since boys - in her opinion - were naturally not as good at writing neatly between the lines. Neither of my primary school teachers, were “sexist” (as far as I was able to tell as a then 8 year-old), and most likely they were simply drawing on their past experiences as teachers, regarding the distribution of “natural inclinations” and “abilities” which they had observed.
I don’t think you can really blame them for making such inferences, although there is an obvious problem with such behavior: It is a problem of self-perpetuating stereotypes in which teachers think girls are worse at math, girls get away with lesser effort in their math classes, which reduces average math scores for girls, which makes teachers think that girls are worse in math, and so on…
Sometimes, poor science, or even pseudo-scientific data add to the anecdotal observations, such as when George Roman announced in 1887 “that mental abilities were secondary sex characteristics attributable to brain size” (not quite the statistician, he seemed to have neglected the fact that brain size correlates with women’s average smaller body size and lesser weight…), or when Eleanor Maccoby concluded in 1974 that “gender differences in mathematics performance were scientifically well established” when she showed data that “boys and girls acquire early number concelts similarly in the preschool years, [...] and that their performance throughout elementary school was similar, (thus apparently indicating similar early math socialization) but that then “boys’ skills in mathematics increased faster than girls’ beginning around 12 or 13 years of age, creating a significant gender gap in performance by high school”.
David Shenk’s new book, “The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong,” is 300 pages long, and more than half of those pages are endnotes. You need to offer up a lot of evidence when your goal is to overturn a concept as commonplace as the idea that genes are the “blueprints” for both our physical bodies and our personalities. Above all, what Shenk wants to communicate is that “the whole concept of genetic giftedness turns out to be wildly off the mark — tragically kept afloat for decades by a cascade of misunderstandings and misleading metaphors.” Instead of acquiescing to the belief that talent is a quality we’re either born with or not, he wants us to understand that anyone can aspire to superlative achievement. Hard, persistent and focused work is responsible for greatness, rather than innate ability.
Shenk does have a lot of evidence for this assertion, most of it coming from geneticists and other biological researchers who are perplexed at the way their disciplines get depicted in the media. “Today’s popular understanding of genes, heredity and evolution is not just crude, it’s profoundly misleading,” Shenk writes. While most scientists long ago rejected the idea that nature and nurture are two separate factors competing in a zero-sum game to dominate human behavior, laypeople still cling to the idea that whatever aspect of ourselves isn’t caused by our environment must be caused by our genes, and vice versa. In recent decades, heredity has gotten most of the credit; the host of the brainiest NPR talk show in my area inevitably prompts every expert to confirm that whatever they’re discussing — mathematical ability, wanderlust, ambition, mental illness — is genetically determined.
On a winter day five years ago, Doug Lemov realized he had a problem. After a successful career as a teacher, a principal and a charter-school founder, he was working as a consultant, hired by troubled schools eager — desperate, in some cases — for Lemov to tell them what to do to get better. There was no shortage of prescriptions at the time for how to cure the poor performance that plagued so many American schools. Proponents of No Child Left Behind saw standardized testing as a solution. President Bush also championed a billion-dollar program to encourage schools to adopt reading curriculums with an emphasis on phonics. Others argued for smaller classes or more parental involvement or more state financing.
Lemov himself pushed for data-driven programs that would diagnose individual students’ strengths and weaknesses. But as he went from school to school that winter, he was getting the sinking feeling that there was something deeper he wasn’t reaching. On that particular day, he made a depressing visit to a school in Syracuse, N.Y., that was like so many he’d seen before: “a dispiriting exercise in good people failing,” as he described it to me recently. Sometimes Lemov could diagnose problems as soon as he walked in the door. But not here. Student test scores had dipped so low that administrators worried the state might close down the school. But the teachers seemed to care about their students. They sat down with them on the floor to read and picked activities that should have engaged them. The classes were small. The school had rigorous academic standards and state-of-the-art curriculums and used a software program to analyze test results for each student, pinpointing which skills she still needed to work on.
A 33-year-old math and science whiz kid — working out of his house in California’s Silicon Valley — may be revolutionizing how people all over the world will learn math. He is Salman Khan, and until a few months ago he made his living as a hedge fund analyst. But he’s become a kind of an unseen rock star in the online instruction field, posting 1200 lessons in math and science on YouTube, none of them lasting more than about 10 minutes. He quit his job at the hedge fund to devote full time to his Khan Academy teaching efforts, which he does essentially for free.
Khan explained how the U.S. unemployment rate is calculated in a NewsHour exclusive video.
The photo to the right is of our family dog, Treetree (we stupidly allowed a 2 year old to name her and Treetree is what we ended up with.) She’s a yellow Labrador Retriever, a breed notoriously easy to train. Dog motivation, and particularly Lab motivation is pretty simple: they want to please their owners and extra food is always welcome, and so a carrot and stick approach works very well. They do a good job, they get a treat, they do a bad job and they are scolded. Despite the fact that Treetree is definitely not the smartest dog in the world, and that we were not the most consistent and industrious dog trainers ever, she’s a well trained dog; the carrot and stick approach of “if-then” turns out to be a good way to train a dog, but is it how we should be educating our children?
Last month, a week before the Senate seat of the liberal icon Edward M. Kennedy fell into Republican hands, his legacy suffered another blow that was perhaps just as damaging, if less noticed. It happened during what has become an annual spectacle in the culture wars.
Over two days, more than a hundred people — Christians, Jews, housewives, naval officers, professors; people outfitted in everything from business suits to military fatigues to turbans to baseball caps — streamed through the halls of the William B. Travis Building in Austin, Tex., waiting for a chance to stand before the semicircle of 15 high-backed chairs whose occupants made up the Texas State Board of Education. Each petitioner had three minutes to say his or her piece.
In the education portion of the State of the Union speech, Obama emphasized incentivizing success and reaffirmed his committment to community colleges. He also outlined a number of financial aid reforms, including a $10,000 tax credit and limits on the percentage of a worker’s income that must go towards repaying students loans. He set a goal of renewing ESEA, but some experts are skeptical that it can be accomplished this year given the amount of discord NCLB has generated.
Always stunk at video games? Perhaps you’ve been cursed with a small striatum, a region of the brain involved in learning and memory. Researchers have found that college students with relatively large striatums learned how to play a challenging video game faster than their small-striatum peers. Large-striatum individuals were also better at shifting priorities from, say, shooting a target to outrunning an enemy–abilities that could translate to the real world.
The game isn’t exactly Halo or Assassin’s Creed. Instead, Space Fortress looks a lot like the very first arcade games, with geometric shapes subbing for spaceships and buildings. “The graphics stink,” admits Arthur Kramer, a psychologist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, who designed the game in the early 1980s. Gameplay is fairly complex, however: Players must shoot down a fortress with their ship while avoiding enemies, the bad guys look a lot like the good guys, and the ship has no brakes.
Over the years, researchers have used the game to study memory, motor control, and learning speed. The U.S. Air Force and the Israeli air force have even changed their training regimens based on how cadets fared as players. Recent studies have suggested that players appear to heavily utilize their striatum during gameplay. So Kramer and Kirk Erickson, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, decided to investigate whether the size of the striatum alone might be responsible for these abilities.
From Josh Karp in Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning
Digital media can extend the goals of National Lab Day and help the United States rebuild its lead in science and math.
And it’s the love of that process that Hidary and the Obama administration are hoping to instill in school children with National Lab Day, a nationwide effort to provide support and opportunities for kids to learn science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) through “hands on” application, rather than in the world of Bunsen burners and books with titles like “Laboratory Procedures.” The underlying idea, according to Obama, is to encourage American kids to be “makers of things, not just consumers of things.”
“It was clear to me that the facts I’d accumulated weren’t what was important,” says Hidary, a successful finance and tech entrepreneur who established his own foundation in 2001 to promote sustainable development and apply market forces to social issues. Instead, he found, the more important factor was his experience with “the process of discovery.”
During a fellowship in neuroscience at the National Institute of Health, it struck Jack Hidary that the facts he’d learned during a lifetime of classroom science education mattered less than the basic lessons he’d learned tinkering around on his own as a kid.
It is one of the simplest ideas in American education—and one of the most confounding: Elected officials and educators have been talking about establishing national, or common, academic standards for at least a half-century.
On its face, the logic of that goal seems incontrovertible.
Why should students in one state be introduced to a topic such as fractions as 1st graders, to cite a common example, when their peers in other states won’t cover that mathematics topic until later? More broadly, why does the United States—a mobile society in a globally competitive era—maintain an education system that tests students, trains teachers, and churns out textbooks and classroom materials based on the myriad and often idiosyncratic demands of different states?
Outdated materials and obsolete techniques characterise Pakistan’s school system. The prescription is a complete overhaul.
In accordance with a traditional understanding that continues to be widely followed in our region by many educationists, the process of learning in Southasia today is still largely by rote. As such, there is little or no understanding on the part of most students of what exactly they are studying, nor why. It is critical to realise, however, that education in the 21st century is far more demanding and competitive than it was in the past, due to the vast and growing knowledge base, developments in technology and an increasingly globalised perspective. It is imperative, then, to make students into active rather than passive learners to deal with this changing context – but this is a lesson that many in Southasia, and particularly in Pakistan, have yet to appreciate.
Around the world, the idea of ‘quality’ education has itself been forced to evolve in recent years, in three particular ways. First, in terms of the education process itself, students must be taught how to relate their learning to their day-to-day lives, with a focus on how to learn rather than depending solely on teachers and textbooks. Second, the goal of quality education has also changed, with an eye to enabling students to perform well academically and socially, and to become thinking, caring and tolerant global citizens. The third aspect is facilitating learners not only to perform well academically, but also to groom them to think for themselves. In short, we hope that they will be adaptive, mature and tolerant; and to respect ideological, cultural and religious diversity. Indeed, such skills – quite removed from the central tenets of the traditional curricula in this region’s countries – have become important for a student’s very survival in the globalised world. Quality education assumes the pivotal role of trained teachers who have a solid knowledge base, and have control over what to teach and how to teach it. The teachers themselves, therefore, need to be allowed to develop the expertise and self-confidence to show students the path to independent thinking and learning – and without feeling threatened themselves.
At this very moment, you are actually moving your eyes over a white page dotted with black marks. Yet you feel that you are simply lost in the universe of The New York Times Book Review, alert to the seductive perfume of a promising new novel and the acrid bite of a vicious critical attack. That transformation from arbitrary marks to vivid experience is one of the great mysteries of the human mind. It’s especially mysterious because reading is a relatively recent invention, dating to some 5,000 to 10,000 years ago. Our brains didn’t evolve to read.
From Mac Montadon in Spotlight On Digital Media and Learning
Spotlight talks to Anne Collier of NetFamilyNews about the myths and realities of online safety.
Collier should know. She is the co-chair, along with MySpace Chief Security Officer Hemanshu Nigam, of the Online Safety and Technology Working Group, a taskforce formed in the wake of the Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act. The working group is charged with gathering information on both public and parental tools along with approaches to educating kids to be safe and responsible digital citizens. It will deliver its findings to Congress in June.
“What does that do?” Collier, a journalist and the executive director of NetFamilyNews, Inc., asks during a recent phone conversation. “It gives teachers the excuse not to use social networking in classrooms, and that’s a 21st century tool for learning.”
It was enough to make Anne Collier cringe. At last month’s Family Online Safety Institute conference in Washington, D.C., this statistic was bandied about: In a recent survey, 65 percent of teachers polled agreed with the idea that predators are out there, lurking in social networking sites to prey on unwitting children.
I have spent a lot of time recently thinking about corporate innovation; how to define it, how to inspire ideation and how companies can move forward in their implementation of ideas. And the more I read and think about innovation, the more I realize that something far greater is at stake here than just the ability of US companies to create new product lines and services during a recession. I want to make the case that there is a fundamental, philosophical problem with the US education system, and that if the current educational trends for most of the children in the US aren’t addressed, then the ability for this country to generate innovative scientists, politicians and business leaders out of future generations will be drastically undermined. The extent to which this is a valid concern was highlighted in the recent Newsweek-Intel Global Innovation Survey and its companion article.
Some of my basic premises are drawn from Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind and Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, both of which I thoroughly recommend. My premises are as follows:
A combination of technological advances and globalization have increased outsourcing and automation of tasks to the point where soon, any rule-based, linear thinking business activity that can be outsourced to a computer process or to another country will be. Countries, like China and India, have highly educated populations who are increasingly able and willing to perform the white-collar jobs of Americans and Europeans at a fraction of the cost, and these are only the most recently successful recipients of outsourcing, other countries are quickly catching up. Technological advances have meant that the outsourcing of this work can often be seamless and transparent to the end-user. In addition, time-differences enable companies to have a 24-hour workforce without paying anyone overtime to work a night shift.
By Stephen Brill, in The New York Times
By Alan Greenblatt, on NPR
By Stephanie Clifford, in The New York Times
By James Shreeve in National Geographic
From Abby Goodnough, in The New York Times
The Obama administration on Saturday called for a broad overhaul of President 
When I was in primary school, my math teacher used to be very lenient on girls who struggled with their math assignments, because - as I realize in hindsight - he was of the impression that girls were simply not as capable of doing math as he thought boys to be. Likewise, my German teacher wouldn’t fuss as much about sloppy handwriting with the boys as she would for the girls, since boys - in her opinion - were naturally not as good at writing neatly between the lines. Neither of my primary school teachers, were “sexist” (as far as I was able to tell as a then 8 year-old), and most likely they were simply drawing on their past experiences as teachers, regarding the distribution of “natural inclinations” and “abilities” which they had observed.
David Shenk’s new book, “The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong,” is 300 pages long, and more than half of those pages are endnotes. You need to offer up a lot of evidence when your goal is to overturn a concept as commonplace as the idea that genes are the “blueprints” for both our physical bodies and our personalities. Above all, what Shenk wants to communicate is that “the whole concept of genetic giftedness turns out to be wildly off the mark — tragically kept afloat for decades by a cascade of misunderstandings and misleading metaphors.” Instead of acquiescing to the belief that talent is a quality we’re either born with or not, he wants us to understand that anyone can aspire to superlative achievement. Hard, persistent and focused work is responsible for greatness, rather than innate ability.
On a winter day
The photo to the right is of our family dog, Treetree (we stupidly allowed a 2 year old to name her and Treetree is what we ended up with.) She’s a yellow Labrador Retriever, a breed notoriously easy to train. Dog motivation, and particularly Lab motivation is pretty simple: they want to please their owners and extra food is always welcome, and so a carrot and stick approach works very well. They do a good job, they get a treat, they do a bad job and they are scolded. Despite the fact that Treetree is definitely not the smartest dog in the world, and that we were not the most consistent and industrious dog trainers ever, she’s a well trained dog; the carrot and stick approach of “if-then” turns out to be a good way to train a dog, but is it how we should be educating our children?
Last month, a week 
Always stunk at video games? Perhaps you’ve been cursed with a small striatum, a region of the brain involved in learning and memory. Researchers have found that college students with relatively large striatums learned how to play a challenging video game faster than their small-striatum peers. Large-striatum individuals were also better at shifting priorities from, say, shooting a target to outrunning an enemy–abilities that could translate to the real world.
Outdated materials and obsolete techniques characterise Pakistan’s school system.
At this very moment, you are actually moving your eyes over a white page dotted with black marks. Yet you feel that you are simply lost in the universe of The New York Times Book Review, alert to the seductive perfume of a promising new novel and the acrid bite of a vicious critical attack. That transformation from arbitrary marks to vivid experience is one of the great mysteries of the human mind. It’s especially mysterious because reading is a relatively recent invention, dating to some 5,000 to 10,000 years ago. Our brains didn’t evolve to read.
Spotlight talks to Anne Collier of NetFamilyNews about the myths and realities of online safety.