Learning from Our Students: Student Perspectives on Good Teaching — from everylearnereverywhere.org; with thanks to Beth McMurtrie for this resource

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

Twenty-two students trusted us with their stories and their reflections on good teaching. We honor that trust and hope that instructors who read this document gain as much insight about teaching from the students as we did. While we often write of students in the plural, each one of these students had an individual experience with learning and therefore a unique story to tell about good teaching. The key takeaways from their stories are:

  1. Students want to be recognized as individuals and appreciated in the classroom.
  2. Students want real life in the classroom.
  3. Students want to be treated with respect and trust.

We hope readers will likewise ask their own students, “What do your best instructors do?” and use that feedback to continuously improve their craft as teachers.

Out of 22 students:

active learning and a sense of belonging were the most frequently mentioned items from these 22 students

 

A $500 Million International Project Will Create the Most Detailed Map of the Brain Ever — from singularityhub.com by Edd Gent

Excerpt:

That’s why the National Institutes of Health’s BRAIN Initiative has just announced $500 million in funding over five years for an effort to characterize and map neuronal and other types of cells across the entire human brain. The project will be spearheaded by the Allen Institute in Seattle, but involves collaborations across 17 other institutions in the US, Europe, and Japan.

“These awards will enable researchers to explore the multifaceted characteristics of the more than 200 billion neurons and non-neuronal cells in the human brain at unprecedented detail and scale,” John Ngai, director of the NIH BRAIN Initiative, said in a statement.

From DSC:
The LORD does awesome work. I wonder how many of these scientists and researchers will become believers while doing this project.

Proverbs 27:1

I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.

 

Radar Trends to Watch: September 2022 Developments in AI, Privacy, Biology, and More — from oreilly.com by Mike Loukides

Excerpt:

It’s hardly news to talk about the AI developments of the last month. DALL-E is increasingly popular, and being used in production. Google has built a robot that incorporates a large language model so that it can respond to verbal requests. And we’ve seen a plausible argument that natural language models can be made to reflect human values, without raising the question of consciousness or sentience.

For the first time in a long time we’re talking about the Internet of Things. We’ve got a lot of robots, and Chicago is attempting to make a “smart city” that doesn’t facilitate surveillance. We’re also seeing a lot in biology. Can we make a real neural network from cultured neurons? The big question for biologists is how long it will take for any of their research to make it out of the lab.

 

 

Just Because You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should: What Genetic Engineers Can Learn From ‘Jurassic World’ — from singularityhub.com by Andrew Maynard

Excerpt:

Maybe this is the abiding message of Jurassic World: Dominion—that despite incredible advances in genetic design and engineering, things can and will go wrong if we don’t embrace the development and use of the technology in socially responsible ways.

The good news is that we still have time to close the gap between “could” and “should” in how scientists redesign and reengineer genetic code. But as Jurassic World: Dominion reminds moviegoers, the future is often closer than it might appear.

 

How an Escape Room Is Building Students’ Digital Skills at Northampton Community College — from campustechnology.com by Rhea Kelly

Excerpt of description of podcast:

We spoke with Beth Ritter-Guth, associate dean of online learning and educational technology at the college, to find out how the Learning Lab is engaging students, building digital literacy and providing valuable training in the job skills of the future.

Also see:

Breakout EDU gamifies learning to create an engaging and empowering experience for students of all grade levels.

Five Concepts You Can Teach Through Geocaching — from freetech4teachers.com by Richard Byrne

Excerpt:

Geocaching is one of the things that I spend a good bit of time talking about in both my workshop and in my webinar about blending technology into outdoor learning. Geocaching is a great activity to do to get kids outside for hands-on learning experiences. Here are five things that you can teach through geocaching activities.

From DSC:
This next one may be useful for educators and/or parents, but it’s useful for pretty much all of us

Tip of the week: A great group packing tool — from Jared newman

Excerpt:

As an alternative to clunky spreadsheets or endless email chains, WhoBrings is a brilliantly simple way to figure out who’s bringing what.

Just type the name of your packing list into this free website, add some items, then share the link with the rest of the group. Anyone who has the link can then claim responsibility for an item or add new items to the list. You can also specify a number of units for any item—12 beach towels, for instance, or three packs of beer—and people can choose how many they’ll bring.


Also see:

Learning, doing, and teaching biology through multimedia — from MIT Open Learning
Producing multimedia for online courses involves lifelong learning


 

 

Radar trends to watch: May 2022 — from oreilly.com
Developments in Web3, Security, Biology, and More

Excerpt:

April was the month for large language models. There was one announcement after another; most new models were larger than the previous ones, several claimed to be significantly more energy efficient.

 
 

Also from Eva Keiffenheim (on Medium.com, on Twitter), see:

What Most People Get Dangerously Wrong About Building a Second Brain
And how to fix it.

Also relevant/see:

Analysis: 6 Brain-Based Learning Strategies and Study Skills That Help Teens Learn — from the74million.org by Hank Pellissier

Excerpt:

Teens zoning out during Euclidean geometry or citing TikTok influencers in an expository paper doesn’t always mean they are bored or lazy, argues neurologist and teacher Judy Willis, co-author of Research-Based Strategies to Ignite Student Learning: Insights from Neuroscience and the Classroom. “The demands on students are squishing their natural curiosity and joy of learning,” Willis says.

Brain scientists suggest that students absorb information best if they work in what’s known as the flow state. This mindset is reached when their consciousness is fully “in the zone,” entirely focused on activities they find so pleasurable that time flies and all distractions disappear. Try these brain-based learning strategies and study skills that can help teens enter this open state of more productive and enjoyable learning.

 

 

Largest-Ever Collection of Brain Maps Charts How the Brain Changes Over a Lifetime — from singularityhub.com by Shelly Fan

Excerpts:

Our brains are unique snowflakes that change shape throughout our lives. Yet buried underneath individual differences is a common throughline, with the brain growing rapidly during childhood then slowly declining with age.

But that’s just a crude sketch of an average brain’s lifetime. What are we missing?

A team of international scientists just gave us the first answers with a remarkable project called BrainChart. In a tour de force study published last week in Nature, they combined almost 125,000 brain scans covering the entire human lifespan, from before birth to death. The youngest sample was 15 weeks after conception; the oldest, a centenarian.

Even at this massive scale, the charts are just the first edition. The entire work is open sourced (you can check it out here), published with tools that allow other contributors to match up their brain scan data to the charts.

“You could imagine them being used to help evaluate patients screened for conditions such as Alzheimer’s, for example, allowing doctors to spot signs of neurodegeneration by comparing how rapidly a patient’s brain volume has changed compared to their peers,” said Bethlehem.

 
 

Radar trends to watch: April 2022 — from oreillky.com by Mike Loukides
Developments in Programming, Biology, Hardware, and More

5 Digital Transformation Themes for Higher Education — from
Explore key topics and event recordings from our latest deep dive into Digital Transformation in Higher Education.

The semiconductor decade: A trillion-dollar industry — from mckinsey.com by Ondrej Burkacky, Julia Dragon, and Nikolaus Lehmann

Drilling down into individual subsegments, about 70 percent of growth is predicted to be driven by just three industries: automotive, computation and data storage, and wireless.

Addendum later on 4/8/22:

 

2022 10 Breakthrough Technologies -- from the MIT Technology Review

2022 10 Breakthrough Technologies — from MIT Technology Review; with thanks to Mr. Paul Czarapata for posting this out on Twitter

About the list:

Our annual list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies highlights the technological advances that we think will have the biggest impact on the world in the years to come. Every year, our reporters and editors survey a wide range of topics, from medicine to energy to digital technologies, to select advances that will affect our lives in meaningful ways. Some have already started to change the way we live and work, while others are poised to do so soon. This is the 21st year we’ve published this list. We hope you enjoy this glimpse into the future.

Also relevant/see:

 
© 2024 | Daniel Christian