7 things parents and teachers should know about teens — from edutopia.org by Maurice Elias; with a shout out to Brian Bailey for his Tweet on this

Excerpt:

What Teens Think About
Generally speaking, Rachael believed we give adolescents far too little credit. The passages in their lives are moments when they ask themselves important questions, such as these:

  • How does my life have meaning and purpose?
  • What gifts do I have that the world wants and needs?
  • To what or whom do I feel most deeply connected?
  • How can I rise above my fears and doubts?
  • What or who awakens or touches the spirit within me?

What Can Parents and Educators Do?
While parents and educators may have a hard time addressing issues of soul and spirit with their teens, it can help to be aware of some ways into the hearts and minds of young people that can make a difference. Here is what Rachael Kessler suggests in her landmark book, The Soul of Education.

  1. Positive Belonging
  2. Silence and Solitude
  3. Reflections on Life
  4. Joy and Play
  5. Creativity
  6. Linking to the Large
  7. Shape the Passages

 

 

From DSC:
Along these lines, please see:

 

whatiflearning.co.uk -- Examples of connecting Christian faith and teaching across various ages and subjects.

 

…and also:

 

VisionsOfVocation-2014

 

From DSC:
To set the stage for the following reflections…first, an excerpt from
Climate researcher claims CIA asked about weaponized weather: What could go wrong? — from computerworld.com (emphasis DSC)

We’re not talking about chemtrails, HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) or other weather warfare that has been featured in science fiction movies; the concerns were raised not a conspiracy theorist, but by climate scientist, geoengineering specialist and Rutgers University Professor Alan Robock. He “called on secretive government agencies to be open about their interest in radical work that explores how to alter the world’s climate.” If emerging climate-altering technologies can effectively alter the weather, Robock is “worried about who would control such climate-altering technologies.”

 

Exactly what I’ve been reflecting on recently.

***Who*** is designing, developing, and using the powerful technologies that are coming into play these days and ***for what purposes?***

Do these individuals care about other people?  Or are they much more motivated by profit or power?

Given the increasingly potent technologies available today, we need people who care about other people. 

Let me explain where I’m coming from here…

I see technologies as tools.  For example, a pencil is a technology. On the positive side of things, it can be used to write or draw something. On the negative side of things, it could be used as a weapon to stab someone.  It depends upon the user of the pencil and what their intentions are.

Let’s look at some far more powerful — and troublesome — examples.

 



DRONES

Drones could be useful…or they could be incredibly dangerous. Again, it depends on who is developing/programming them and for what purpose(s).  Consider the posting from B.J. Murphy below (BTW, nothing positive or negative is meant by linking to this item, per se).

DARPA’s Insect and Bird Drones Are On Their Way — from proactiontranshuman.wordpress.com by B.J. Murphy

.

Insect drone

From DSC:
I say this is an illustrative posting because if the inventor/programmer of this sort of drone wanted to poison someone, they surely could do so. I’m not even sure that this drone exists or not; it doesn’t matter, as we’re quickly heading that way anyway.  So potentially, this kind of thing is very scary stuff.

We need people who care about other people.

Or see:
Five useful ideas from the World Cup of Drones — from  dezeen.com
The article mentions some beneficial purposes of drones, such as for search and rescue missions or for assessing water quality.  Some positive intentions, to be sure.

But again, it doesn’t take too much thought to come up with some rather frightening counter-examples.
 

 

GENE-RELATED RESEARCH

Or another example re: gene research/applications; an excerpt from:

Turning On Genes, Systematically, with CRISPR/Cas9 — from by genengnews.com
Scientists based at MIT assert that they can reliably turn on any gene of their choosing in living cells.

Excerpt:

It was also suggested that large-scale screens such as the one demonstrated in the current study could help researchers discover new cancer drugs that prevent tumors from becoming resistant.

From DSC:
Sounds like there could be some excellent, useful, positive uses for this technology.  But who is to say which genes should be turned on and under what circumstances? In the wrong hands, there could be some dangerous uses involved in such concepts as well.  Again, it goes back to those involved with designing, developing, selling, using these technologies and services.

 

ROBOTICS

Will robots be used for positive or negative applications?

The mechanized future of warfare — from theweek.com
OR
Atlas Unplugged: The six-foot-two humanoid robot that might just save your life — from zdnet.com
Summary:From the people who brought you the internet, the latest version of the Atlas robot will be used in its disaster-fighting robotic challenge.

 

atlasunpluggedtorso

 

AUTONOMOUS CARS

How Uber’s autonomous cars will destroy 10 million jobs and reshape the economy by 2025 — from sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com by

Excerpt:

Autonomous cars will be commonplace by 2025 and have a near monopoly by 2030, and the sweeping change they bring will eclipse every other innovation our society has experienced. They will cause unprecedented job loss and a fundamental restructuring of our economy, solve large portions of our environmental problems, prevent tens of thousands of deaths per year, save millions of hours with increased productivity, and create entire new industries that we cannot even imagine from our current vantage point.

One can see the potential for good and for bad from the above excerpt alone.

Or Ford developing cross country automotive remote control — from spectrum.ieee.org

 

Ford-RemoteCtrl-Feb-2015

Or Germany has approved the use of self driving cars on Autobahn A9 Route — from wtvox.com

While the above items list mostly positive elements, there are those who fear that autonomous cars could be used by terrorists. That is, could a terrorist organization make some adjustments to such self-driving cars and load them up with explosives, then remotely control them in order to drive them to a certain building or event and cause them to explode?

Again, it depends upon whether the designers and users of a system care about other people.

 

BIG DATA / AI / COGNITIVE COMPUTING

The rise of machines that learn — from infoworld.com by Eric Knorr; with thanks to Oliver Hansen for his tweet on this
A new big data analytics startup, Adatao, reminds us that we’re just at the beginning of a new phase of computing when systems become much, much smarter

Excerpt:

“Our warm and creepy future,” is how Miko refers to the first-order effect of applying machine learning to big data. In other words, through artificially intelligent analysis of whatever Internet data is available about us — including the much more detailed, personal stuff collected by mobile devices and wearables — websites and merchants of all kinds will become extraordinarily helpful. And it will give us the willies, because it will be the sort of personalized help that can come only from knowing us all too well.

 

Privacy is dead: How Twitter and Facebook are exposing you — from finance.yahoo.com

Excerpt:

They know who you are, what you like, and how you buy things. Researchers at MIT have matched up your Facebook (FB) likes, tweets, and social media activity with the products you buy. The results are a highly detailed and accurate profile of how much money you have, where you go to spend it and exactly who you are.

The study spanned three months and used the anonymous credit card data of 1.1 million people. After gathering the data, analysts would marry the findings to a person’s public online profile. By checking things like tweets and Facebook activity, researchers found out the anonymous person’s actual name 90% of the time.

 

iBeacon, video analysis top 2015 tech trends — from progressivegrocer.com

Excerpt:

Using digital to engage consumers will make the store a more interesting and – dare I say – fun place to shop. Such an enhanced in-store experience leads to more customer loyalty and a bigger basket at checkout. It also gives supermarkets a competitive edge over nearby stores not equipped with the latest technology.

Using video cameras in the ceilings of supermarkets to record shopper behavior is not new. But more retailers will analyze and use the resulting data this year. They will move displays around the store and perhaps deploy new traffic patterns that follow a shopper’s true path to purchase. The result will be increased sales.

Another interesting part of this video analysis that will become more important this year is facial recognition. The most sophisticated cameras are able to detect the approximate age and ethnicity of shoppers. Retailers will benefit from knowing, say, that their shopper base includes more Millennials and Hispanics than last year. Such valuable information will change product assortments.

Scientists join Elon Musk & Stephen Hawking, warn of dangerous AI — from rt.com

Excerpt:

Hundreds of leading scientists and technologists have joined Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk in warning of the potential dangers of sophisticated artificial intelligence, signing an open letter calling for research on how to avoid harming humanity.

The open letter, drafted by the Future of Life Institute and signed by hundreds of academics and technologists, calls on the artificial intelligence science community to not only invest in research into making good decisions and plans for the future, but to also thoroughly check how those advances might affect society.

 

 

SMART/ CONNECTED TVs

 



Though there are many other examples, I think you get the point.

That biblical idea of loving our neighbors as ourselves…well, as you can see,
that idea is as highly applicable, important, and relevant today as it ever was.



 

 

Addendum on 3/19/15 that gets at exactly the same thing here:

  • Teaching robots to be moral — from newyorker.com by Gary Marcus
    Excerpt:
    Robots and advanced A.I. could truly transform the world for the better—helping to cure cancer, reduce hunger, slow climate change, and give all of us more leisure time. But they could also make things vastly worse, starting with the displacement of jobs and then growing into something closer to what we see in dystopian films. When we think about our future, it is vital that we try to understand how to make robots a force for good rather than evil.

 

 

Addendum on 3/20/15:

 

Jennifer A. Doudna, an inventor of a new genome-editing technique, in her office at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Doudna is the lead author of an article calling for a worldwide moratorium on the use of the new method, to give scientists, ethicists and the public time to fully understand the issues surrounding the breakthrough.
Credit Elizabeth D. Herman for The New York Times

 

From DSC:
Many K-12 schools as well as colleges and universities have been implementing more collaborative learning spaces. Amongst other things, such spaces encourage communication and collaboration — which involve listening. So here are some resources re: listening — a skill that’s not only underrated, but one that we don’t often try to consciously develop and think about in school. Perhaps in our quest for designing more meta-cognitive approaches to learning, we should consider how each of us and our students are actually listening…or not.


 

Mackay: The power of listening — from startribune.com by Harvey Mackay

Excerpts:

We are born with two ears, but only one mouth. Some people say that’s because we should spend twice as much time listening. Others claim it’s because listening is twice as difficult as talking.

Whatever the reason, developing good listening skills is critical to success. There is a difference between hearing and listening.

These statistics, gathered from sources including the International Listening Association* website, really drive the point home. They also demonstrate how difficult listening can be:

  • 85 percent of our learning is derived from listening.
  • Listeners are distracted, forgetful and preoccupied 75 percent of the time.
  • Most listeners recall only 50 percent of what they have heard immediately after hearing someone say it.
  • People spend 45 percent of their waking time ­listening.
  • Most people remember only about 20 percent of what they hear over time.
  • People listen up to 450 words per minute, but think at about 1,000 to 3,000 words per minute.
  • There have been at least 35 business studies indicating listening as a top skill needed for success.

 

From the International Listening Association*
LISTENING AND EDUCATION

  • Even though most of us spend the majority of our day listening, it is the communication activity that receives the least instruction in school (Coakley & Wolvin, 1997). Listening training is not required at most universities (Wacker & Hawkins, 1995). Students who are required to take a basic communication course spend less than 7% of class and text time on listening (Janusik, 2002; Janusik & Wolvin, 2002). If students aren’t trained in listening, how do we expect them to improve their listening?
  • Listening is critical to academic success. An entire freshman class of over 400 students was given a listening test at the beginning of their first semester. After their first year of studies, 49% of students scoring low on the listening test were on academic probation, while only 4.42% of those scoring high on the listening test were on academic probation. Conversely, 68.5% of those scoring high on the listening test were considered Honors Students after the first year, while only 4.17% of those scoring low attained the same success (Conaway, 1982).
  • Students do not have a clear concept of listening as an active process that they can control. Students find it easier to criticize the speaker as opposed to the speaker’s message (Imhof, 1998).
  • Effective listening is associated with school success, but not with any major personality dimensions (Bommelje, Houston, & Smither, 2003).
  • Students report greater listening comprehension when they use the metacognitive strategies of asking pre-questions, interest management, and elaboration strategies (Imhof, 2001).
  • Students self-report less listening competencies after listening training than before. This could be because students realize how much more there is to listening after training (Ford, Wolvin, & Chung, 2000).
  • Listening and nonverbal communication training significantly influences multicultural sensitivity (Timm & Schroeder, 2000).

 

TimeSpentListeningCommunicating-2015

 

* The International Listening Association promotes the study, development,
and teaching of listening and the practice of effective listening skills  and
techniques. ILA promotes effective listening by establishing a network of
professionals exchanging information including teaching methods, training
experiences and materials, and pursuing research as listening affects
humanity in business, education, and intercultural/international relations.

 

 

10 important skills for active listening — from educatorstechnology.com

Excerpt:

 

 

Effective Listening — with Tatiana Kolovou and Brenda Bailey-Hughes — from lynda.com

Course description:
Listening is a critical competency, whether you are interviewing for your first job or leading a Fortune 500 company. Surprisingly, relatively few of us have ever had any formal training in how to listen effectively. In this course, communications experts Tatiana Kolovou and Brenda Bailey-Hughes show how to assess your current listening skills, understand the challenges to effective listening (such as distractions!), and develop behaviors that will allow you to become a better listener—and a better colleague, mentor, and friend.

Topics include:

  • Recalling details
  • Empathizing
  • Avoiding distractions and the feeling of being overwhelmed
  • Clarifying your role
  • Using attentive nonverbal cues
  • Paraphrasing what was said
  • Matching emotions and mirroring

 

 

How to stop talking and start listening to your employees — from inc.com by Will Yakowicz
As a leader, you’re bound to be talking a lot, but you can’t forget to give others a chance to speak their mind.

 

 

 

—————————

Addendum on 2/13/15:

  • Wake-up call: How to really listen — from irishtimes.com by Sarah Green
    Insights from the Harvard Business Review into the world of work
    Excerpt:

    “It can be stated, with practically no qualification,” Ralph Nichols and Leonard Stevens wrote in a 1957 article in Harvard Business Review, “that people in general do not know how to listen. They have ears that hear very well, but seldom have they acquired the necessary aural skills which would allow those ears to be used effectively for what is called listening. ”

    In a study of thousands of students and hundreds of business people, they found that most retained only half of what they heard – and this immediately after they had heard it. Six months later, most people only retained 25 per cent.

    It all starts with actually caring what other people have to say, argues Christine Riordan, provost and professor of management at the University of Kentucky.

    Listening with empathy consists of three specific sets of behaviours.

 

 

Bias: Why Higher Education is Mired in Inaction — from insidetrack.com by Marcel Dumestre

This contribution can be accessed from insidetrack.com’s Leadership Series, but the actual PDF is here.

Excerpts:

He identifies four biases that short-circuit this process, which he terms as generalized empirical method. All of these biases are not only at play in our individual lives, they also can determine how well organizations operate, even universities.

The first bias is dramatic bias—a flight from the drama of everyday living, an inability or unwillingness to pay attention to experience.

The second bias is individual bias—egoism. Making intelligent decisions requires moving beyond the worldview created by oneself for oneself.

The third bias is group bias. This predisposition is particularly rampant in organizational life.

The fourth bias is general bias—the bias of common sense. This bias views common sense uncritically.


The deleterious effect of bias explains why very smart people don’t understand what seems obvious in hindsight. The disappearance of entire industries gives testimony to the destructive power of institutional blindness.

There is no magic formula, no uniform model to follow. Universities must do the hard work of analyzing the needs of whom they serve and recreate themselves as viable, exciting institutions suited for a new age.

The universities left standing decades from now will have gone through this enlightening, but painful, process and look in hindsight at the insight they achieved.

 

 

 

Addendum on 1/13/15:

 

Transmedia Literacy: Expanding the Media Literacy Frontier — from div46amplifier.com by Pamela Rutledge, PhD, MBA; Director, Media Psychology Research Center Adjunct Faculty, Fielding Graduate University

Excerpt:

Media literacy is an increasingly pressing issue for media psychologists and educators who strive to prepare people of all ages to function well in a media-rich, globally connected world.   The ever-expanding integration of media technologies in our daily lives, from social media platforms to mobile apps, have challenged our understanding of just what it means to be literate in the 21st century (Hobbs & Jensen, 2009).  The emerging trend of transmedia storytelling will continue to push the envelope even farther.  Transmedia storytelling goes beyond the need to segment such skills as search and collaboration.  It demands the ability to recognize, understand, and interact with narrative threads across multiple modalities, not just within them.

Transmedia storytelling is the design and distribution of a story that is coordinated across multiple media channels.  Each channel offers unique content, using the strengths of each medium to its best advantage to build a larger, richer story.  Transmedia storytelling is intentionally designed for participation, drawing the audience in as co-creators to expand and develop the narratives.

Transmedia storytelling may not seem particularly different or profound until you consider that all information is translated into narrative in our meaning-making brains.  We embody the stories we tell.  Stories are how we assign causality, consciously process sensory input and imagery, and create associations so we can commit experience to memory.  Stories are how we make sense of our selves, our lives, and our futures in the world around us (Polkinghorne, 1988).

 

Last week I attended the 20th Annual Online Learning Consortium International Conference.  While there, I was inspired by an excellent presentation entitled, A Disruptive Innovation: MSU’s Surviving the Coming Zombie Apocalypse – Are You Ready to Survive a New Way of Learning?   The four team members from Michigan State University included:

  • Glenn R. Stutzky | Course Instructor
  • Keesa V. Muhammad | Instructional Designer
  • Christopher Irvin | Instructional Designer
  • Hailey Mooney | Course Librarian

Check out the intro clip on the website about the course:

 

MSUZombie-Oct2014

 

From the description for the presentation:

This session highlights MSU’s award winning, groundbreaking online course that fuses social theory, filmmaking, social media, and viral marketing while students survive an apocalyptic event. http://zombie.msu.edu/

MSU created and used powerful digital storytelling and multimedia to overlay real, experiential, immersive learning. Important content was relayed, but in a way that drew upon your emotions, your ability to solve problems and navigate in a world where you didn’t have all of the information, your ability to work with others, and more.

“This innovative course integrates current research and science on catastrophes and human behavior together with the idea of a zombie apocalypse. In doing so, we actively engage with students as they think about the nature, scope, and impact of catastrophic events on individuals, families, societies, civilizations, and the Earth itself.”

“Our innovative approach to teaching and learning features: students as active participants, the instructor becomes the facilitator, storytelling replaces lectures, zombies become the catalyst of teaching, a “zombrarian” (librarian) drives research, and the students emerge as digital storytellers as a way of assessing their own learning.”

Others outside MUS have found out about the course and have requested access to it. As a result of this, they’ve opened it up to non-credit seeking participants and now various people from police forces, Centers for Disease Control, and others are able to take the course. To make this learning experience even more accessible, the cost has been greatly reduced: from $1600+ to just $500. (So this talented team is not only offering powerful pedagogies, but also significant monetary contributions to the university as well.)

For me, the key thing here is that this course represents what I believe is the direction that’s starting to really pull ahead of the pack and, if done well, will likely crush most of the other directions/approaches.  And that is the use of teams to create, deliver, teach, and assess content – i.e., team-based learning approaches.

So many of the sessions involved professional development for professors and teachers – and much of this is appropriate. However, in the majority of cases, individual efforts aren’t enough anymore.  Few people can bring to the table what a talented, experienced group of specialists are able to bring.  Individual efforts aren’t able to compete with team-based content creation and delivery anymore — and this is especially true online, whereby multiple disciplines are immediately invoked once content hits the digital realm.

In this case, the team was composed of:

  • The professor
  • Two Instructional Designers
  • and a librarian

The team:

  • Developed websites
  • Designed their own logo
  • Marketed the course w/ a zombie walking around campus w/ brochures and a walking billboard
  • Used a Twitter stream
  • Used a tool called Pensu for their students’ individual journals
  • Made extensive use of YouTube and digital storytelling
  • Coined a new acronym called MOLIE – multimedia online learning immersive experience
  • Used game-like features, such as the development of a code that was found which revealed key information (which was optional, but was very helpful to those who figured it out).  The team made it so that the course ended differently for each group, depending upon what the teams’ decisions were through the weeks
  • Used some 3D apps to make movies more realistic and to create new environments
  • Continually presented new clues for students to investigate.  Each team had a Team Leader that posted their team’s decisions on YouTube.

They encouraged us to:
THINK BIG!  Get as creative as you can, and only pull back if the “suits” make you!  Step outside the box!  Take risks!  “If an idea has life, water it. Others will check it out and get involved.”

In their case, the idea originated with an innovative, risk-taking professor willing to experiment – and who started the presentation with the following soliloquy:

Syllabi are EVIL

Syllabi are EVIL and they must die!
Listen to me closely and I’ll tell you why.
Just want students to know what is known?
See what’s been seen?
Go – where we’ve been going?
Then the Syllabus is your friend,
cuz you know exactly where you’ll end.
But if you want to go somewhere new,
see colors beyond Red, Green, and Blue.
Then take out your Syllabus and tear-it-in-half,
now uncertainty has become your path.
Be not afraid because you’ll find,
the most amazing things from Creative Minds,
who have been set free to FLY,
once untethered from the Syllabi.

Glenn Stutzky
Premiered at the 2014
Online Learning Consortium International Conference
October 29, 2014

 

 

They started with something that wasn’t polished, but it’s been an iterative approach over the semesters…and they continue to build on it.

I congratulated the team there — and do so again here. Excellent, wonderful work!

 


By the way, what would a creative movie-like trailer look like for your course?


 

 

teachingmetacognition-briggs-10-6-14

 

 

Excerpt:

As it turns out, the difference between novices and experts in a wide variety of fields can be attributed to a single trait, the trait that prompts great writers to consider their readers: the ability to step outside of yourself.

Cognitive scientists called this new element of expert performance metacognition–the ability to think about thinking, to be consciously aware of oneself as a problem solver, and to monitor and control one’s mental processing.

Metacognitive practices help us become aware of their strengths and weaknesses as learners, writers, readers, test-takers, group members, etc. A key element is recognising the limit of one’s knowledge or ability and then figuring out how to expand that knowledge or extend the ability. Those who know their strengths and weaknesses in these areas will be more likely to “actively monitor their learning strategies and resources and assess their readiness for particular tasks and performances.”

Addendum on 10/15/14:
 

ImprovingStudentLearning2013

 

Excerpts:

In this monograph, we discuss 10 learning techniques in detail and offer recommendations about their relative utility. We selected techniques that were expected to be relatively easy to use and hence could be adopted by many students. Also, some techniques (e.g., highlighting and rereading) were selected because students report relying heavily on them, which makes it especially important to examine how well they work. The techniques include elaborative interrogation, self-explanation, summarization, highlighting (or underlining), the keyword mnemonic, imagery use for text learning, rereading, practice testing, distributed practice, and interleaved practice.

To offer recommendations about the relative utility of these techniques, we evaluated whether their benefits generalize across four categories of variables: learning conditions, student characteristics, materials, and criterion tasks. Learning conditions include aspects of the learning environment in which the technique is implemented, such as whether a student studies alone or with a group. Student characteristics include variables such as age, ability, and level of prior knowledge. Materials vary from simple concepts to mathematical problems to complicated science texts. Criterion tasks include different outcome measures that are relevant to student achievement, such as those tapping memory, problem solving, and comprehension.

Our hope is that this monograph will foster improvements in student learning, not only by showcasing which learning techniques are likely to have the most generalizable effects but also by encouraging researchers to continue investigating the most promising techniques. Accordingly, in our closing remarks, we discuss some issues for how these techniques could be implemented by teachers and students, and we highlight directions for future research.

 

Also see:

 

 

 

Does Studying Fine Art = Unemployment? Introducing LinkedIn’s Field of Study Explorer — from LinkedIn.com by Kathy Hwang

Excerpt:

[On July 28, 2014], we are pleased to announce a new product – Field of Study Explorer – designed to help students like Candice explore the wide range of careers LinkedIn members have pursued based on what they studied in school.

So let’s explore the validity of this assumption: studying fine art = unemployment by looking at the careers of members who studied Fine & Studio Arts at Universities around the world. Are they all starving artists who live in their parents’ basements?

 

 

LinkedInDotCom-July2014-FieldofStudyExplorer

 

 

Also see:

The New Rankings? — from insidehighered.com by Charlie Tyson

Excerpt:

Who majored in Slovak language and literature? At least 14 IBM employees, according to LinkedIn.

Late last month LinkedIn unveiled a “field of study explorer.” Enter a field of study – even one as obscure in the U.S. as Slovak – and you’ll see which companies Slovak majors on LinkedIn work for, which fields they work in and where they went to college. You can also search by college, by industry and by location. You can winnow down, if you desire, to find the employee who majored in Slovak at the Open University and worked in Britain after graduation.

 

 

Self-Directed Learning for All? — from modernlearners.com
What do we mean by “self-directed learning,” and who gets to pursue it? All students? Or only some? Do we select certain students for these opportunities based on what counts as “good behavior,” for example?

How do we make sure that self-directed learning opportunities benefit all students? How do we balance students’ need for support with their need for freedom?

Author and speaker Sylvia Martinez writes in What a Girl Wants about the ways in which gender plays a role in education and explores how we can help support girls in self-directed learning opportunities.

 

 

An excerpt/quote from Sylvia’s article:

The teacher’s role is to help students move past what they know school usually asks of them and take a chance on something that they really want to do.

Some people assume that self-directed learning means solitary learning. This is far from the truth. Mardziah Hayati Abdullah of the US Department of Education writes that self-directed learning is both collaborative and social, where the learner collaborates with both teachers and peers. Students must learn how to navigate new ways of getting and sharing information with others, both in real life and online. Creating opportunities for self-directed learning means more collaboration and communication, not less, an area in which girls excel.

 

PewResearchIoTThriveBy2025

 

Also see:

Where the Internet of Things could take society by 2025 — from centerdigitaled.com by Tanya Roscorla

Excerpt:

The Pew Research Center Internet Project and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center released the report on Wednesday, May 14, as part of an ongoing future of the Internet series inspired by the Web’s 25th anniversary. Eighty-three percent of these experts, which included education leaders, agreed that the Internet of Things would have “widespread and beneficial effects on the everyday lives of the public by 2025.” The remaining 17 percent said it would not, and both camps elaborated on their answers in paragraph form.

Their explanations fall under six major points:
  1. The Internet of Things and wearable computing will take major steps forward in the next 11 years.
  2. Increased data from connected things will cause privacy concerns to come to the forefront and encourage the growth of profiling and targeting people, which will greatly inflame conflicts in various arenas.
  3. Despite advancement in information interfaces, most people won’t be connecting their brains to the network.
  4. Complicated, unintended consequences will arise.
  5. A digital divide could deepen and disenfranchise people who don’t choose to connect to the network.
  6. Relationships will change depending on people’s response to the Internet of Things.

 

 

From DSC:
As with most technologies, there will be positives and negatives about the Internet of Things.  To me, the technologies are tools — neutral, not value-laden — and it’s how we use them that adds moral, political, legal, ethical, or social perspectives/elements to them.  With that said, I’m quite sure that the IoT will have unintended consequences (#4 above).  Also, item #5 — “A digital divide could deepen and disenfranchise people who don’t choose to connect to the network” — is especially troublesome to me, along with the topic of privacy concerns as mentioned in #2.

 

 
 

In defense of a liberal arts degree — from fastcompany.com by Andrew Benett
They might be getting overshadowed by STEM degrees in the news, but liberal arts degrees have a lot to offer their students.

Excerpt:

I know a lot of liberal arts graduates. I have hired a bunch of them. And I am one myself, having studied both psychology and art history. What I have found is that people with degrees in subjects such as history and literature–and, yes, even philosophy–tend to possess many of the qualities, skill sets, and aptitudes that are in highest demand in my own industry (marketing communications) and in others that rely on creative thinking and foresight.

In my experience, these are the areas in which liberal arts graduates really stand apart:

— Agility and adaptability
— Storytelling and persuasion
— Historical consciousness

 

Immigrants from the future — from The Economist
Robots offer a unique insight into what people want from technology. That makes their progress peculiarly fascinating, says Oliver Morton

 

UsualSuspects-RoboticsSpecialReportEconomist-April2014

 

The pieces in the Special Report include:

 

 

Research Application for the 21st Century: A Video for Every Scientific Article — from jove.com on January 20, 2014

Excerpt:

Last week, JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments, introduced a web application allowing scientists to view their text-based scientific articles in a 21st century format.

Named the Ask JoVE button, this new web application, or bookmarklet, generates a collection of peer-reviewed videos demonstrating the techniques used in a given scientific paper. It offers researchers the opportunity to watch the crucial components of a procedure, thereby reducing experimental error and the time it takes to learn the experiment.

“We created this new feature because we want to visualize all the science literature in the world,” said JoVE’s CEO, Dr. Moshe Pritsker, “For every science article you read, click on the Ask JoVE button and immediately see videos of experiments related to this article, filmed at the best university labs.”

 

JOVE

 

 

JOVESections

 
© 2025 | Daniel Christian