Big ideas from TED 2011: Letting students drive their education
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The implications of Khan’s work are nothing short of a total reevaluation of education. In a world in which the only constant is the increase in the pace of change, we simply can’t afford to give our kids anything less than an education system that actually gives them what they need to be successful.
@GOOD Asks: How can we lower high school drop out rates?
We’ve covered the drop out epidemic before. In the United States, a kid drops out of high school every 26 seconds. Over the course of a year, that adds up to 1.2 million students. How can we lower this number?
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From DSC:
This is unbelievable! Again, I’m reminded of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion — spilling out valuable resources that are going untapped. What a waste of God-given gifts!
Addendum 4/5/11:
Analysis includes a fuller spectrum of artistic genres and participation via electronic media and personal arts creation for a clearer, more accurate picture of arts engagement
Arts education is the leading factor in arts participation, according to report
NOTE: STEM is not mentioned here.
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“Every Prodigi ® lesson begins with Easy questions that review prerequisite concepts and get students warmed up. Based on student performance, questions increase in difficulty to Medium, and then to Hard (examination level), and finally Extreme (recreational). Not only that, but students have live access to hints and worked solutions to plug any gaps in their knowledge”
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Addendum on 1-20-11:
The future of the TV is online — from telegraph.co.uk
Your television’s going to get connected, says Matt Warman
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From DSC:
I post this here — with higher ed included in the tags/categories — because if the trend within K-12 continues (i.e. that of using such technologies as the iPad, digital textbooks, mobile learning devices, etc.), students’ expectations WILL be impacted. When they hit our doorsteps, they will come with their heightened sets of expectations. The question is, will we in higher ed be ready for them?
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…we are in the midst of one of the most profound cognitive shifts in our intellectual history, moving from a “deep attention” to a “hyper attention” society (emphasis DSC), to quote Duke University professor Katherine Hayles. She defines “deep attention” as the cognitive preference for input from only a single information stream, to be engaged for an extended period. “Hyper attention,” by contrast, is marked by a hunger for a high level of stimulation and a desire to shift rapidly among different information streams.
From DSC:
In the near future, we may long for the days of being able to dive deeply into an item — giving it our full attention (and then again, we may not!). But to me, this type of deep focus will take practice and a concerted effort to maintain this ability; because with the information overload coming at us, to give our attention to something is asking a lot. Often times, you have but a split second to get someone’s attention. I wonder…how many people never made it to this point in this posting for example…? Probably quite a few.
Some excerpts:
Though the technology is relatively new, preliminary studies at Harvard and Ohio State, among other institutions, suggest that engaging students in class through a device as familiar to them as a cellphone — there are even applications that convert iPads and BlackBerrys into class-ready clickers — increases their understanding of material that may otherwise be conveyed in traditional lectures.
The clickers are also gaining wide use in middle and high schools, as well as at corporate gatherings. Whatever the setting, audience responses are received on a computer at the front of the room and instantly translated into colorful bar graphs displayed on a giant monitor.
Professor White acknowledged, though, that the clickers were hardly a silver bullet for engaging students, and that they were just one of many tools he employed, including video clips, guest speakers and calling on individual students to share their thoughts.
“Everyone learns differently,” he said. “Some learn watching stuff. Some learn by listening. Some learn by reading. I try to mix it all into every class.”
Many of Professor White’s students said the highlight of his class was often the display of results of a survey-via-clicker, when they could see whether their classmates shared their opinions. They also said that they appreciated the anonymity, and that while the professor might know how they responded, their peers would not.
The Rise of the ‘Edupunk’ — from InsideHigherEd.com by Jack Stripling
NEW YORK — The “Edupunks” will inherit the Earth … or at least some attention.
Those in higher education who continue hand-wringing over the relative merits of online learning and other technology-driven platforms will soon find themselves left in the dust of an up-and-coming generation of students who are seeking knowledge outside academe. Such was an emerging consensus view here Monday, as college leaders gathered for the TIAA-CREF Institute’s 2010 Higher Education Leadership Conference.
“We’re still trying to fit the Web into our educational paradigm.… I just don’t think that’s going to work,” said Mary Spilde, president of Lane Community College, in Eugene, Ore.
Today’s students are “pretty bored with what we do,” she added.
In a notable acknowledgment of the tail wagging the dog, several panelists alluded here to the possibility that if colleges don’t change the way they do business, then students will change the way colleges do business.
College leaders don’t yet know how to credential the knowledge students are gaining on their own, but they may soon have to, said Mark David Milliron, deputy director for postsecondary improvement at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. We are not far from the day when a student, finding unsatisfactory reviews of a faculty member on ratemyprofessors.com, will choose to take a class through open courseware online and then ask his home institution to assess him, Milliron said. Colleges need to prepare for that reality, he said.
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