The New York Times reports on the increasingly frequent–but still very controversial–practice of incorporating Twitter and other “backchannel” communication networks into the classroom. Do such conversations make classes more inclusive or more distracting?
Want to try a helping of edible landscape? Mosey over to LongGreenHouse this Friday and Wednesday for a permaculture field day.
Well, not exactly–but Steve “Woz” Wozniak did recently argue that American education should focus more on sustained long-term projects. The UMaine New Media department is doing its part by showcasing senior capstones at the Collins Center for the Arts on Tuesday 19 April from 7 to 9pm.
Press on this year’s capstones:
http://newmedia.umaine.edu/feature.php?id=957
A complete list:
http://nmdprojects.net/student_work/capstone_2011/
The word from Woz:
“At SNW in Santa Clara this past week, a diverse group of techies shared insights into their industries….Steve Wozniak attacked the American education system, saying students should be graded on a single, long-term project rather than a short learning/testing cycle. ‘In school, intelligence is a measurement,’ he said. ‘If you have the same answer as everyone else in math or science, you’re intelligent.’”
A prominent educator claims today’s college students are learning in silos, specializing too much to see the Big Picture. (Via NMD alumnus Will Seyffer)
Feb 032011
If you haven’t already bought this term’d textbooks, here are a dozen sites ready to sell them cheap.
http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=868bf541f0ff969aa049c14b9bdf7534 via Byline A look at the long list of Web sites that help college students find the cheapest textbooks available.
Job prospects dim? You’re not the only one depressed.
http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=f4a965f158ec7e3398ca9b2a1b604026
Freshmen are reporting record levels of stress in an annual survey involving more than 200,000 students.
You can still profit from your college experience by following these “tips for getting student discounts long after graduation.”
http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=4eaf5fe9306cce3c1f6d0345167c8719 via Byline
Jan 192011
If this research is to be believed, your professor’s ugly PowerPoint fonts make you more likely to remember his lectures, and you’re gonna forget that book you read on your Kindle or iPad because the screen is too crisp.
Is the takeaway that good graphic design leads to bad education? Or is it that anything that gets students to participate more actively–even if only to squint their eyes–stimulates learning more than passive edutainment?
http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/JYXsb_CnfUQ/ via Byline When students read books printed in hard-to-read fonts like Comic Sans, they retain information from them better than material printed in traditional fonts.
Meanwhile, on Slashdot:
http://idle.slashdot.org/story/11/01/14/1527207/Research-Suggests-E-Readers-Are-Too-Easy-To-Read?from=rss via Byline New research suggests that the clear screens and easily read fonts of e-readers makes your brain “lazy.” According to Neuroscience blogger Jonah Lehrer, using electronic books like the Kindle and Sony Reader makes you less likely to remember what you have read because the devices are so easy on the eyes. From the article: “Rather than making things clearer, e-readers and computers prevent us from absorbing information because their crisp screens and fonts tell our subconscious that the words they convey are not important, it is claimed. In contrast, handwriting and fonts that are more challenging to read signal to the brain that the content of the message is important and worth remembering, experts say.”
UMaine New Media graduate Chris Bagley stepped outside of the box in 2009 when he switched from a Web-based capstone to start a local business premised on building environmentally responsible skis. The do-it-yourselfer built his own ski press in his garage and began turning out prototypes–and turning heads on the slopes. As the Bangor Daily News reports, this will be the first season his skis will be available to the general public, custom-built for both East Coast skiing conditions and to customer specifications.
Sure, you can sign up for courses at the online Khan Academy like Bill Gates says you should. But Khan just teaches stuff you can already find at college–he’s not going to help you remix a song or write a great tweet. Enter Wired University’s “21st-century course catalog full of tools you need now.” Well, it’s more a curriculum in search of a forward-thinking provost to implement it.
http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/PeoDifR2X2I/
It’s the 21st century. Knowing how to read a novel, craft an essay, and derive the slope of a tangent isn’t enough anymore. You need to know how to swim through the data deluge, optimize your prose for Twitter, and expose statistics that lie. In the following pages, you’ll find our updated core curriculum, which fills in the gaps of your 20th-century education with the tools you need now. Call it the neoliberal arts: higher learning for highly evolved humans.
COURSE LISTINGS 1. Statistical Literacy Making sense of today’s data-driven world. 2. Post-State Diplomacy Power and politics, sans government. 3. Remix Culture Samples, mashups, and mixes. 4. Applied Cognition The neuroscience you need. 5. Writing for New Forms Self-expression in 140 characters. 6. Waste Studies Understanding end-to-end economics. 7. Domestic Tech How to use the world as your lab.
And then there’s Sal Khan’s Academy. Good thing he doesn’t give grades or notice if you’re late to class–I’d hate to earn the Wrath of Khan.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/08/29/0456229/Bill-Gates-Enrolls-His-Kids-In-Khan-Academy?from=rss via Byline theodp writes “At some schools, a teaching load of five courses every academic year is considered excessive. But Sal Khan, as an earlier Slashdot post noted, manages to deliver his mini-lectures an average of 70,000 times a day. BusinessWeek reports that Khan Academy has a new fan in Bill Gates, who’s been singing and tweeting the praises of the free-as-in-beer website. ‘This guy is amazing,’ Gates wrote. ‘It is awesome how much he has done with very little in the way of resources.’ Gates and his 11-year-old son have been soaking up videos, from algebra to biology. And at the Aspen Ideas Festival in front of 2,000 people, Gates gave Khan a shout-out, touting the ‘unbelievable’ Khan Academy tutorials that ‘I’ve been using with my kids.’”
If cheating is the pedagogy of the Internet, this could be the textbook. In addition to the usual suspects like CSS and PHP, this compilation includes some popular frameworks like jQuery and Ruby on Rails. (via Amy Pierce)
Sep 192010
The new rules for technology that every kid should learn. They’re surprisingly cautionary (“Every new technology will bite back”), coming from former Wired editor Kevin Kelly. Could he be returning to his Whole Earth Catalog roots? (via Bill Kuykendall)
It’s a pen! It’s a voice recorder! It’s both–and Livescribe’s advocates claim it will revolutionize note-taking in class.
In an age when the Canadian government is muzzling scientists, religious groups are using special search engines like Jewogle to filter out unwanted results, and one in five Americans believes the earth is at the center of the solar system…you might just want to hear Randy Olson speak.
Season seven of this venerable intermedia festival finds newly minted U-Me MFAs mixing it up with the likes of Fluxus mainstay Dick Higgins and DJ paul j. bosse, the “junky but funky beat mechanic.”
Sep 132010
Most students just “rent” textbooks anyway, so why not rent them digitally?
http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/ifElS7LIESQ/ via Byline With the rise of tablets and e-readers, software developers and textbook publishers are making yet another effort to take textbooks digital. The latest entrant is Inkling, a textbook app for the iPad.
http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=21c0e6da1ab7be6b447910b9959a1abc via Byline
… psychologists have discovered that some of the most hallowed advice on study habits is flat wrong. For instance, many study skills courses insist that students find a specific place, a study room or a quiet corner of the library, to take their work. The research finds just the opposite. In one classic 1978 experiment, psychologists found that college students who studied a list of 40 vocabulary words in two different rooms — one windowless and cluttered, the other modern, with a view on a courtyard — did far better on a test than students who studied the words twice, in the same room. Later studies have confirmed the finding, for a variety of topics.
The brain makes subtle associations between what it is studying and the background sensations it has at the time, the authors say, regardless of whether those perceptions are conscious. It colors the terms of the Versailles Treaty with the wasted fluorescent glow of the dorm study room, say; or the elements of the Marshall Plan with the jade-curtain shade of the willow tree in the backyard. Forcing the brain to make multiple associations with the same material may, in effect, give that information more neural scaffolding.
“What we think is happening here is that, when the outside context is varied, the information is enriched, and this slows down forgetting,” said Dr. Bjork, the senior author of the two-room experiment.
Varying the type of material studied in a single sitting — alternating, for example, among vocabulary, reading and speaking in a new language — seems to leave a deeper impression on the brain than does concentrating on just one skill at a time. Musicians have known this for years, and their practice sessions often include a mix of scales, musical pieces and rhythmic work. Many athletes, too, routinely mix their workouts with strength, speed and skill drills.
The Apertus is an open-source high-definition movie camera. New media programs (not to mention governments like Brazil and the state of California) have been looking to save cash by using open-source software like Open Office or Ubuntu. So why aren’t schools buying up open-source hardware as well?
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/08/30/1639248/Apertus-the-Open-Source-HD-Movie-Camera?from=rss via Byline osliving writes “This article takes a tour of the hardware and software behind the innovative Apertus, a real world open source project. Led by Oscar Spierenburg and a team of international developers, the project aims to produce ‘an affordable community driven free software and open hardware cinematic HD camera for a professional production environment’.”
While the Apertus may not have the most professional-quality lenses and sensor yet, its users may benefit from the lack of an implicit video format license, namely the h.264 codec. From a Slashdot commenter:
MPEG-LA [the organization that controls h.264] basically claims certain financial rights over your project in exchange for the right to use the h.264 codec. This means that if you shoot a scene in h.264, but switch to something else to release on the web, they still have rights over you. If a contractor shoots in h.264 but sends you the video in a different format, they still claim rights over you. As far as I know, pretty much all HD cameras shoot in h.264.Some of this is definitely winnable in court, some isn’t. But if you’re an independent filmmaker, you don’t have the money to go against one of the biggest legal groups in filmmaking.
So yes, this particular situation is a bit Orwellian.
Sep 032010
Do RFID tags in clothes for preschoolers make them more or less safe? Check out the ACLU’s timeline of cracked RFID schemes.
http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/dont-let-schools-chip-your-kids
“On Tuesday, preschoolers in Richmond, California showed up for school and were handed jerseys embedded with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. RFID tags are tiny computer chips that are frequently used to track everything from cattle to commercial products moving through warehouses. Now the school district is apparently hoping to use these chips to replace manual attendance records, track the children’s movements at school and during field trips, and collect other data like whether the child has eaten or not.
“While school officials and parents may have been sold on these tags as a “cost-saving measure,” we are concerned that the real price of insecure RFID technology is the privacy and safety of small children. RFID has been billed as a “proven technology,” but what’s actually been proven time and again (PDF) since the ACLU first looked at this issue in 2005 is just how insecure RFID chips can be:
“RFID chips in US passport cards were cracked and copied from a distance of 30-feet using $250 in parts bought from eBay (2009).
“RFID chips used in building access cards across the country were cracked and copied with a handheld device the size of a standard cell phone that was built using spare parts costing $20 (2007).
“California State Capitol RFID-based identification cards were cracked and copied and access was gained to member-only, secure entrances (2006).
“RFID chips implanted in humans were cracked and copied (PDF) (2006).
“The RFID chips used in the Dutch and British e-passport were cracked (PDF) (2006).
“Without real security, RFID chips could actually make preschoolers more vulnerable to tracking, stalking, and kidnapping….”
Blogs, wikis, videoconferencing? “No thanks,” say most professors; “PeopleSoft and PowerPoint will do.”
http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=dc5d41dd3901e39f763a0f16e9afa2c3 via Byline The Android App Inventor from Google is intended to help nontechnical types create their own apps. An intrepid explorer plunges into do-it-yourself territory….
Truth is, Android App Inventor is only the latest in a long line of “programming for the rest of us” kits: HyperCard, Automator, Scratch and so on. Each, at its debut, was hailed as a breakthrough. Each promised the dawn of a new era. And not a single one wound up delivering the idiot-proof, drag-and-drop software-creation process they promised. It may well be that “programming for nonprogrammers” is simply an oxymoron.