education
evolvingthoughts | December 16, 2008The Bradley Report [Here] is proposing, among other things, that [Australian] students have vouchers to attend the university they want to, rather than making the university the funding recipient directly. Two things stand out to me. One is that this makes higher learning a marketable commodity, in which the desires of the consumers determines what is most important intellectually. So if everyone wants to be a business manager, accountant or surfing doctor, that is what we should fund? There's no important cultural legacy to be supported? If not, why does the government support art? Surely…
bioephemera | December 16, 2008FYI, to those in the DC area, tomorrow Dr. Bulent Atalay will be giving the monthly history of medicine talk at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda.
"Leonardo and the Unity of Art and Science"
Dr. Bulent Atalay, University of Mary Washington
The speaker examines science through art, and art through science, and approaches the larger goal of achieving a synthesis of the two fields. The qualities of timelessness and universality in Leonardo's miraculous works speak eloquently for themselves. With Leonardo's model providing the unifying thread, however, it becomes possible, first, to…
mikethemadbiologist | December 16, 2008I finally can get around to writing about Jan Kemp, the University of Georgia professor, who, even as Georgia was winning football championships, had the courage to point out that the football players were graduating utterly unprepared for post-collegiate life. Kemp herself put it best:
"All over the country, athletes are used to produce revenue," she told The New York Times a month after the trial. "I've seen what happens when the lights dim and the crowd fades. They're left with nothing. I want that stopped."
For her honesty, she was fired, but successfully sued for compensation. During…
ddobbs | December 16, 2008The Washington Post, in a story fairly typical of other coverage, says that Obama's pick for Secretary of Education will "reach out to unions, school reform gorups" and "bridge the divides among education advocates, teachers unions and civil rights groups over how to fix America's school." Or as another syndicated WaPo story put it, "Duncan is embraced by the teachers unions, which have been concerned about high-stakes testing and worry about merit pay being tied to test scores, as well as reformers, who favor charter schools and tougher standards."
Apparently at least some from the teachers…
ddobbs | December 16, 2008A teacher in West Virginia rallied her students to fight to keep the right to recycle -- presumably for the civic (and eco) learning experience. John Tierney argues she's missing a better teaching opportunity:
If we want our children to be scientifically literate and get good jobs in the future, why are we spending precious hours in school teaching them to be garbage collectors?
That’s the question that occurred to me after reading about the second-graders in West Virginia who fought for the right to keep recycling trash even after it became so uneconomical that public officials tried to stop…
gregladen | December 14, 2008Three videos:
Thanks to Stacy for the tip on the first of the three. The next two were sort of obvious after that...
evolvingthoughts | December 12, 2008I received a query from reader Jodi, of Nova Scotia (I so want to visit there one summer) about how to learn about a scientific subject as a layperson. Of course being a philosopher I was able to answer her quickly, but readers may wish to comment more authoritatively and knowledgeably, as we know philosophy is not bound by little things such as facts. This comes from a comment I made in my talk recently about getting one's theory of evolution from Dawkins or Gould... [Now there's a red rag to a certain curmudgeonly bull in Toronto]. Below the fold:
Jodi wrote:
Hi there,
My name is Jodi ...,…
clock | December 12, 2008Food for thought:
Bill Farren: Insulat-Ed:
Opening up the institution may seem like a counter-intuitive way of protecting it, but in an era where tremendous value is being created by informal and self-organized groups, sharing becomes the simplest and most powerful way of connecting with external learning opportunities. Why limit students to one teacher when a large number of them exist outside the institution? Why limit students to a truncated classroom conversation when a much larger one is taking place all over the world? Why not give students real-world opportunities to learn how to…
evolvingthoughts | December 11, 2008... shh, not so loud or everyone will want one.
Here's a piece by Darksyde at Daily Kos in which he reports the outgoing EPA chair (who has overseen all manner of bad science and decisions, although that may not be his own fault) as saying
"It's not a clean-cut division [between evolution and creation]. If you have studied at all creationism vs. evolution, there's theistic or God-controlled evolution and there's variations on all those themes."
It seems to me that theistic evolution is not exactly about God controlling evolution, although there may be plenty of biblical warrant for God…
rallain | December 10, 2008There is something that has been bothering me about students learning in college. The question is, how much do I treat students like adults and how much do I treat them like children? I have been leaning towards treating them like adults. For example: do I require them to come to class? Right now, no. I think they are adults and should choose whether they come to class or not. Do I require them to do homework? No. Again, I recommend homework (and I actually let them count it for part of their grade if they so choose). So, I give students the ability to choose what to do.
In…
ddobbs | December 10, 2008From The Great Beyond
Far East top in science subjects
Researchers in the US have released the latest figures comparing the maths and science abilities of 4th- and 8th-grade students in countries across the globe.
Far Eastern countries dominate the top tens, with Singapore top for science in both 4th and 8th grade. In maths, Hong Kong tops the 4th grade scores, with ‘Chinese Taipei’ leading the 8th. (Image right shows the percentage of fourth-grade students who reached the TIMSS advanced international benchmark in science in the top ten countries. See full graph.)
As the New York Times points…
bioephemera | December 10, 2008This coming June, the NIH Office of Medical Applications of Research is holding a three-day course entitled "Medicine in the Media: The Challenge of Reporting on Medical Research." The agenda is here. Amazingly, course registration is free, and meals and lodging are provided - all you have to do is get yourself to Bethesda, Maryland.
What's the catch? Well, the application process is competitive; only 50 spots are available, and in recent years, only 1/3 to 1/2 of applicants have gotten in. So if you're a science journalist whose "primary target audience is the general public" - and yes, that…
cmooney | December 10, 2008I have no idea why NSF hasn't issued a press release, but here are the data (PDF).
Since 2002, total science and engineering doctorates granted in the U.S. have increased from 24,608 to 31,801 (in 2007). That's five straight years of increases.
You can look at all the data yourself, but the life sciences and engineering are doing particularly well. And yes, there's a growth in non-U.S. citizen doctorate winners, but it's part of a trend of growth in all categories.
In short, we're training and producing more minted scientists than ever in this country. That's a very good thing--although it…
drorzel | December 10, 2008Will Wilkinson has some comments about an article by Malcolm Gladwell from The New Yorker. I basically agree with him about Gladwell, but I'm bothered by the last paragraph:
Now, there's no point in saying things that will make your readers think you are an evilcrazy person, so I can understand why Gladwell wastes words on quarterbacks instead of on the deeper mechanisms at work here. But why is it that "society devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?" The obvious answer is that care and patience are in greater…
mikethemadbiologist | December 10, 2008At the risk of channeling my inner Bob Somerby, I still don't get how many progressives (call me a liberal) approach education (granted, the phrase 'education reform' usually foreshadows bashing teachers unions).
Hendrik Hertzberg, in the New Yorker, makes a really important observation about assessing teacher performance (italics mine):
...measuring things like which teachers are good is extremely problematic. How do you measure which are the good teachers, short of placing a philosopher of education (or a senior fellow from the Heritage Foundation) in every schoolroom to take notes? Well,…
gregladen | December 9, 2008Draft 2 of the Minnesota Science Standards for K-12 is out, and once the current standards are approved, that's it until 2017. So now is your last chance for input for a very long time.
You could be childless, get pregnant over the next year, and have a child in school with these standards in effect. Even if you don't live in Minnesota, you may end up here. You never know!
HERE is where you go to comment.
pontiff | December 9, 2008In this era of the impending apocalypse, what the hell is a report about United States students actually showing gains in mathematics doing in the New York Times? Dude, media, get on message and send us some more doom and gloom! I especially need more gloom here in Seattle where the sun rises at 7:47 a.m. and sets at 4:18 p.m.
Update: Ah, science results are flat, so it's the end of the world as we know it, according to The Washington Post. Thank's WaPo for restoring pessimism into my world.
bioephemera | December 9, 2008Bravo to the Brits' Channel 4 for coming up with this series of videos, which addresses kids' inevitable questions about whether their bodies (breasts, acne, periods, sex, penises, etc.) are normal. The take-home message of these educational videos? Almost certainly you are normal, so don't be ashamed of your body. And don't let embarrassment stop you from being honest with your doctor or asking questions.
It's refreshing to see internet videos depicting genitalia that AREN'T porn. Who knew they even existed? I just hope enough people eventually link to them that they'll show up in a Google…
clock | December 9, 2008Tina writes - Kinesthetic Learners: Why Old Media Should Never Die:
.....Many classrooms, however, don't offer this type of kinesthetic learning. The hands-on learner is left to fend for themselves and more often than not the only physical interaction they get is with the learning material itself.
You've seen them before. Sometimes, it's a student whose fingers trace the words as they read them. Or the highlighter: the student who makes a colored mosaic of their text as they try to physically interact with the material. Even note-taking is a kinesthetic activity. In a variety of subtle ways,…