education
ddobbs | December 8, 2008
Malcolm Gladwell on how to spot great teachers (and why we should want to):
Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year%u2019s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half%u2019s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year%u2019s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a %u201Cbad%u201D school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad…
ddobbs | December 8, 2008At the New Republic, Seward Darby worries that Obama's choice for the head of his transition's education-policy team means he's not serious about shaking up the educational system:
In November, Barack Obama bewildered education reformers by tapping Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford professor who had advised his campaign, to oversee the transition's education policy team. Their verdict was swift and harsh. "Worst case scenario," wrote Mike Petrilli, vice president for national programs and policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think tank, the day after The Wall Street…
drorzel | December 7, 2008I spent most of yesterday helping out with an on-campus workshop for high school teachers and students. Seven high school physics teachers and seventeen high school students spent the day doing a half-dozen experiments to measure various physical constants.
I was in charge of having them measure Plack's constant using the photoelectric effect. The actual measurement (made using a PASCO apparatus) takes about fifteen minutes, so I gave each group a quick explanation of the history: Einstein proposed the particle model of light as an explanation for the photoelectric effect in 1905, and nobody…
evolvingthoughts | December 6, 2008I just love this:
Cambridge University's Space Flight club got local school children to make space suits for these teddy bears, which were attached to a helium balloon that rose to 30km, enough to see the curvature of the earth. All teds were recovered safely. I expect Prof. Steve Steve to take the next flight up...
bioephemera | December 5, 2008How much do I love this mashed up, remixed version of the standby "Did You Know"? So much that I couldn't help rocking out to it a little during the talk I gave today at work on Web 2.0. I heart fatboy slim.
I'm not getting into the question of how reliable these stats are - while many of them (especially the computing power ones) are obviously speculative, the demographic stats in the original presentation by Karl Fisch were sourced. Of course, it's been through several iterations since then. C'mon, just enjoy the music.
I really do never get tired of watching this.
PS. And it's way…
clock | December 5, 2008The Networked Student was inspired by CCK08, a Connectivism course offered by George Siemens and Stephen Downes during fall 2008. It depicts an actual project completed by Wendy Drexler's high school students. The Networked Student concept map was inspired by Alec Couros' Networked Teacher. I hope that teachers will use it to help their colleagues, parents, and students understand networked learning in the 21st century.
Related...
sheril | December 5, 2008The National Academies is working to identify topics in science, engineering, and medicine that matter most to the public. They developed this 2-minute survey and we encourage Intersection readers to participate:
What topics in science, engineering, and medicine matter most to you? The National Academies are interested in developing useful and engaging print and web-based educational materials on the topics that you'd like to learn more about. They invite you to participate in a brief survey. You can find that survey here.
In the 2-minute survey you'll be presented with a list of topics and…
clock | December 4, 2008
Nomination for 2008 Edublog Awards is now closed and you can now go and vote.
Go and check them all out - there are some great edublogs there I was not aware of from before. This is how I voted:
1. Best individual blog
Using Blogs in Science Education
2. Best group blog
360
3. Best new blog
Teaching in Second Life
4. Best resource sharing blog
Discovering Biology in a Digital World
5. Most influential blog post
THE MACGYVER PROJECT
6. Best teacher blog
Endless Forms Most Beautiful
7. Best librarian / library blog
Blue Skunk Blog
8. Best educational tech support blog
JoeWoodOnline
9. Best…
mikethemadbiologist | December 4, 2008While I'm waiting for our next What's New in Life Science Research topic, here's something about 'school reform' by Bob Somerby (who does great work on this topic):
When it comes to Obama's education secretary, the Post favors "reform"--it wants someone who's "willing to experiment." Meanwhile, everyone knows what these words mean when mainstream journalists discuss public schools. "Reform" means cracking down on teachers and teacher groups through ideas like merit pay and the ending of tenure. There may be some merit to these ideas--but few others seem to get mentioned.
...it's the type of…
evolvingthoughts | December 3, 2008
When my kids were in school, I noticed an interesting phenomenon that went something like this:
Headmaster: No, your kids can't be being bullied. We have a policy against bullying.
I came to call this the "Policy policy": so long as there's a Policy in place for some longstanding problem, action is unnecessary and complainants can be silenced by reference to the Policy.
The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that the present government (AKA the Clean Feed Censorship Party) wants to establish a Bill of Rights in Australia to protect citizens against laws that are unconstitutional and…
bioephemera | December 3, 2008In the December issue of Physicsworld, Rob Goldston reviews Richard Muller's Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines. The book's not addressed to Obama, exactly; it's based on Muller's extremely popular course for non-science students at Berkeley. But it seems that in the wake of the last administration, more and more people are asking how science-savvy a president needs to be - I even tried to answer that question myself at the Apple Bloggers' Panel back in October. My top request? That a science-savvy President be comfortable with the provisional nature of truth in…
evolvingthoughts | December 2, 2008
The only problem with Queensland, apart from the occasional severe storm, is that they filled it with Queenslanders. Here's a bunch of northern bigots protesting a Muslim school being built on the Gold Coast "because they won't integrate" with Australian society by being, I don't know, Christian or something.
Resident's spokesman Tony Doherty said Muslim schools did not encourage multiculturalism.
"It's segregation, not integration," he said.
"They're not trying to integrate into the rest of society.
"Since we have started protesting against this our churches have been covered in hate-…
ddobbs | December 1, 2008Last month I drew notice to an Atlantic story about (and an interview with) Michelle Rhee, the Washington, D.C., school chancellor who is aggressively pressing reforms in that district, most notably an effort to replace tenured teacher tracks with a system emphasizing higher salaries but more accountability and merit pay. She's been controversial, to say the least. She'll get only more so now that she's on the cover of this week's Time.
The U.S. spends more per pupil on elementary and high school education than most developed nations. Yet it is behind most of them in the math and science…
grrlscientist | December 1, 2008
I receive a fair number of books to review each week, so I thought I should do what several magazines and other publications do; list those books that have arrived in my mailbox so you know that this is the pool of books from which I will be reading and reviewing on my blog.
Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do by Andrew Gelman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton; 2008) Brief Comment: Gelman and a group of fellow political scientists crunch numbers and draw graphs, arriving at a picture that refutes the influential one drawn by Thomas Frank, in What's…
bioephemera | November 30, 2008
"Please Hug Me"
artist: J. Keeler, 1987
Today is the 20th annual World AIDS Day. I can still remember when I first learned about AIDS, in the late eighties - it was an extremely scary and mysterious thing that the media seemed very uncomfortable covering. No one I knew was talking about it openly - family, friends, or teachers. That's why posters like this were so important.
AIDS awareness advertisements represent a history of creative and controversial images - largely because of their sometimes explicit* sexual content, but also because of the stigmas attached to STDs, casual sex, and…
clock | November 30, 2008This is what you need to do:
2008 Nominations Contact Form
In order to nominate blogs for the 2008 Edublog Awards you have to link to them first!
So, follow these two simple steps to nominate (nominations made without links or without correct submission will not be counted)
1. Write a post on your blog linking to a. The 2008 Nomination page & b The blogs & sites that you want to nominate (must be linked to!)
You can nominate for as many categories as you like, but only one nomination per category, and not yourself :) You can nominate a blog (or site) for more than one category)
2. Use…
bioephemera | November 28, 2008
Botanique Sciences naturelles (1951)
Via Agence Eureka, some lovely illustrations from a French science textbook. They're perfectly vintage-schoolbook yet also crisply contemporary. See more here.
clock | November 26, 2008Hmmm, juxtaposing these three posts is thought-provoking....what is education all about? Is the 'coolness' factor overpowering the 'usefulness' factor? Thoughts?
Planning to Share versus Just Sharing:
But inevitably, with a very few exceptions, these projects spend an enormous amount of time defining what is to be shared, figuring out how to share it, setting up the mechanisms to share it, and then...not really sharing much. Or sharing once but costing so much time, effort or money that they do not get sustained. Does this sound familiar to anyone else? I don't feel like this phenomenon is…
sporte | November 25, 2008I just love this title! It's nerdy and cute, all at the same time.
I read about this in www.researchblogging.org and had to check out the paper and blog write up from The Beagle Project (BTW: some of you may be interested in knowing that The Beagle Project is not a blog about dogs.)
The paper describes a class where students from Marseilles University investigate the function of unidentified genes from a Global Ocean Sampling experiment. All the sequences are obtained from the environmental sequence division at the NCBI.
Students follow the procedure outlined below:
This is a great…
sporte | November 25, 2008It's funny but even though I work with data on a regular basis, I can't always predict the best way to manage data until I have my own data to manage.
My classroom wiki site is no exception.
Now, that I've been seriously using a wiki with my class, I've found that I should have set a few things up a bit differently.
Technorati Tags: teaching, teaching technology, wikis, wiki, science education"
The biggest challenge has been making sure that the right people can do the right things - or who gets to see what and upload what where.
Not knowing what methods would turn out to be useful, I…