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How India Is Tackling Their Education Problem - Conversation Starter - HarvardBusiness.org
AIR Lighthouse
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Developed by the American Institutes for Research (AIR), AIR Lighthouse empowers
the users to ask their own questions of complex datasets without specialized
research or statistical skills. Users can create custom-run tables, graphs and
other statistics over the Internet. This product is designed to integrate
multiple complex surveys, assessments, or other data collections. It actually
captures the knowledge of expert statistical analysts and stores this knowledge
along with the data itself. To the user, the system seems to "know the data" and
to choose the right analytic procedures. This knowledge enables the system to
hide the technical details and sophisticated statistical procedures from the
user, who sees only perfectly tailored answers to his or her queries
Study Finds That Online Education Beats the Classroom - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com
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Over the 12-year span, the report found 99 studies in which there were
quantitative comparisons of online and classroom performance for the same
courses. The analysis for the Department of Education found that, on average,
students doing some or all of the course online would rank in the 59th
percentile in tested performance, compared with the average classroom student
scoring in the 50th percentile. That is a modest but statistically meaningful
difference. -
The real promise of online education, experts say, is providing learning
experiences that are more tailored to individual students than is possible in
classrooms. That enables more “learning by doing,” which many students find more
engaging and useful. - 1 more annotations...
How do you spark off an interest in maths when the curriculum seems dreary? | Education | The Guardian
ut then my mathematics teacher took me aside after one lesson and recommended a few books that he thought might interest me. He conspiratorially intimated that the maths we were doing in the classroom wasn't really what maths was about. It was something much more exciting, creative, imaginative. Those books provided me with a key to the secret garden of mathematics.\n\nIn that garden I discovered that mathematics also has great stories. Unsolved mysteries like the enigma of prime numbers. Magical mathematical machines that could help you see in four dimensions. Mathematicians who had journeyed to infinity and beyond, discovering that there are many sorts of infinity, some bigger than others. Like my son reading Shakespeare, I certainly didn't understand everything I read, but it inspired me to want to navigate this world, to put in the hard graft to master the language and grammar of maths so that I could read and one day create my own mathematical stories.\n\nOne of the books my teacher recommended was GH Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology. At the time, I was very interested in music, I was learning the trumpet, hanging out with the arty crowd, doing plays and singing in choirs. Science hadn't really captured my imagination. But I also had a desire for things that made logical sense, for solving puzzles, for a rational perspective on the world. A Mathematician's Apology suddenly opened up a bridge between these two competing desires, these two cultures.\n\nAs I read Hardy's book, there were sentences which revealed to me that mathematics shared a lot in common with the creative arts. It seemed to be compatible with things I loved doing: languages, music, literature. Here for example is Hardy writing about being a mathematician: "A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas." Later he writes: "The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or t
Forbes.com - Magazine Article
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It is no mystery that science and engineering encourage left-brain activity;
logical, rational, analytical, pattern-seeking, solution-solving, sorting,
organizing. Innovation, however, requires the attributes of the humanities found
in right-brain thinking; creativity, artistry, intuition, symbology, fantasy,
emotions. -
An educational system (infrastructure in today's parlance) that merges
humanities and sciences, creating whole-brain scientists and engineers, yields
more than just innovation but more flexible individuals who are able to adapt to
unanticipated changes in the economy and technology. They can take their
technical skills on tangents to innovate in new areas. - 3 more annotations...
Jeffrey D. Ullman
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What's New
Generalizing Map-Reduce
This Paper is an
attempt to develop a model in which one can compare algorithms for computing in
an environment similar to what map-reduce expects, yet that do not necessarily
follow the constraint of map processes feeding reduce processes. -
Gradiance
I'm a founder of Gradiance
Corporation, whose goal is to provide better, cheaper homework and
programming-lab support for college courses. You can get a Tour of Gradiance. We also have
developed automated tutorials in SQL, Java, and GUI Programming.Gradiance has recently entered into an agreement with Pearson Education
(Prentice-Hall and Addison-Wesley) to offer on-line homeworks in connection with
many of the Pearson books in Computer Science and Engineering. The material for
the Garcia-Ullman-Widom books is available now, but we are working on materials
for a number of books in Databases, CS1/Java Automata, Compilers, Operating
Systems, and Data Mining. In North America, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East,
you should contact your Prentice-Hall or Addison-Wesley representative. Outside
those areas, you can arrange for services directly from Gradiance (email to
support at gradiance dt com) or through Pearson.
PLAYPOWER | learning games for radically affordable computers
eople need affordable learning games. Worldwide, 4.1 billion people earn under $3,000 per year, meaning that even a $100 computer is often out of reach for the world's emerging middle class. Playpower is targeting a $10 platform that makes learning games affordable for "the other 90%."\nEffective\n\nWe're going beyond designing high quality learning games-we're also conducting field trials to confirm that they work. That's why Playpower is fostering collaborations between game designers, cognitive scientists and NGOs-and promoting this network as an international center for excellence in learning game design.\nFun\n\nWe don't just believe that fun aids learning-we believe fun is learning. If learning games aren't fun, they won't work. Valuing fun is part of how we are approaching our developer tools, design practices, and testing methodologies.
Playpower.org and the open-source educational software revolution - Digital Media and Learning Competition Winners Hub
Derek Lomas wants you to join his open-source educational software revolution. Lomas, along with two other partners, founded Playpower when they realized educators were lacking a rich, open-source developer community. He has fond memories of games like Lemonade Stand, Oregon Trail, and Math Munchers (and points out that some teachers are still using these game in their classrooms). These games were simple, effective, and totally engaging. Playpower would like to bring back the experience of trekking across the planes or building a neighborhood empire out of squeezed fruit. "Teens love these indie games. They get it. And not simply because they are 'retro'." It seems the field is ripe for educators to turn back to development: An audience that loves the style; A platform with restraints (limited graphics, RAM, etc.) that actually benefit the home developer. The only piece missing is a central place where geeky teachers can go to solicit help, learn the language, and share their goods. Playpower wants to develop that place.\n\nLomas' first project is to pull together/create a set of tools for a "$10 computer". That computer, a platform that includes a keyboard with a cartridge slot, a mouse, and two game controllers, runs on an old Nintendo/AppleII processor (which is now in the public domain) and is sold all over the developing world. With a little help from indie coders, Lomas and his partners hope to create an set of tools that would help educators, students, and programmers create new content that would be passed to distributors who would package the games in the computer kits. Sick, I know. So, with all the ingredients in the kitchen, it is just a matter of pulling them together to give new life to these simple machines.\n\nI asked Lomas how the ed tech community could help with Playpower's greater goal. "I think it is important to know the history of educational games." He would like to create an archive of sorts that would include a catalog of ed. games over the past 30 years. This resource would include sni
Revizr - Better Document Collaboration
Revizr is a new way to work collaboratively to improve the quality of your documents. Use it for editing, proofreading, and ongoing development when you need other people's input but remain responsible for the contents.\n\nWith Revizr, the people you invite to revise your document don't change it. They mark it up with color-coded edits and comments for you to evaluate. Your work remains entirely yours.\n\nYou're using a Revizr document right now. You can select any portion of this page then rewrite it or comment on it. We'll be informed by e-mail of your revisions, and if we like them we'll incorporate them with a click. To experiment or learn how it works, try our Self-Guided Tour.\n\nWhat Revizr does for you:\n\n *\n\n Keeps all your revisers working together on the same copy of the document, with updates shared live\n *\n\n Turns reviser edits into what looks like hand-drawn markup (but it's usable)\n *\n\n Gives you a complete history of your document including who suggested what, when\n *\n\n Lets you revise documents with rich text, images, and formatting
Engineering suddenly hot at universities | csmonitor.com
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Many students are bringing to engineering a heightened sense of social
responsibility and a desire "to go out and make a difference in the world," says
Joseph Helble, dean of the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College in
Hanover, N.H., where enrollment in introductory undergraduate courses is 30
percent above the five-year average.Nationally, enrollment in undergraduate engineering programs rose 3 percent
in 2007 and 4.5 percent 2008, according to the American Association of
Engineering Education. Meanwhile, enrollment in masters' degree programs rose 7
percent in 2007 and 2 percent in 2008. In the fall of 2008, 91,489 masters
degree students and 403,193 undergraduates were studying engineering at US
universities and colleges.Skeptics note that engineering remains a low priority for US students: Among
the 25 top engineer-producing countries, the United States ranks No. 22 on a per
capita basis. But here at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, applications have
rebounded 25 percent during the past two years – with enrollment rising from 550
to 732 – after falling early in the decade. At Worcester Polytechnic Institute
in Worcester, Mass., applications have risen 70 percent over the past five
years, and the 902 freshmen who enrolled last fall were 100 more than expected.
Nepal: Laptop School § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM
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At the start of the school year last April, the group began a test run of 200
computers, donated by the Danish IT Society, in two of Nepal’s rural schools,
for grades 2 and 6 (ages 6-7 and 11-12 respectively). This April, the project is
expanding to 15 more schools across five districts, distributing a total of
44,000 laptops funded by a consortium of European bankers. -
The OLPC’s XO laptop is bright green, encased in plastic, and is the size of a
small textbook. The screen opens and swivels fully into a reading pane. It has
two antennae that allow it to connect to other XOs in a 50-meter radius and also
to the Internet, WiFi-availability permitting - 1 more annotations...
Why don't we have enough doctors in the United States? - By Juliet Lapidos - Slate Magazine
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To make up for the physician shortfall, which several studies suggest could
reach 100,000 over the next 20 years, the Association of American Medical Colleges is recommending a 30
percent increase in med-school enrollment. Why don't we have enough doctors? -
Blame the baby boomers. Since 1965, the federal government has subsidized
medical residencies through Medicare. To grow the population of doctors in the
1970s, Congress approved funds for additional places. The boomers who flooded
into the profession back then, and who now represent one-third of the medical
establishment, are starting to retire. That hasn't stopped the ranks of doctors
from growing, even on a per capita basis. But the rate of that growth is
expected to shrink considerably over the next decade as the number of retirees
increases. - 1 more annotations...
Unesco Puts World's Major Works Online - NYTimes.com
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The project, called the World Digital Library, aims to “promote international
and intercultural understanding,” said James H. Billington, the U.S. librarian
of Congress, speaking as the Web site (www.wdl.org) was introduced at Unesco headquarters
in Paris -
The library, which draws material from more than 30 national libraries and other
institutions from around the world, joins a growing number of programs that have
set out to digitally archive cultural material.
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