tony curzon price's Library tagged education →  View Popular

The odds of a
child who has been labeled “gifted” at 5 still testing as “gifted” even a
couple years later are surprisingly poor. Work by the two scholars here, Meyer
and Grob – along with their colleague, Dr. Priska Hagmann-von Arx, demonstrates
this problem perfectly.

The team wanted to evaluate several intelligence tests,
including their own. So they recruited 77 gifted children through the Parents’
Association for Gifted Children in Switzerland. A previous
intelligence test, taken about a year-and-a-half previously, had won them
entrance to gifted primary schools. So how many of the kids still classified as
gifted just eighteen months later? Only half, no matter what test was used.
(And that was using a relaxed cut-off line, to account for standard deviations
in testing.)

Education will be similarly transformed. Throughout the world, schools at all levels will go global, joining together in worldwide digital education networks. Children in the United States will learn about Africa, China, and India not only from books and videos, but also through direct links across classrooms in different parts of the world. Students will share ideas through live chats, shared curricula, joint projects, and videos, photos, and text sent over the digital network.

Universities, too, will have global classes, with students joining lectures, discussion groups, and research teams from a dozen or more universities at a time. This past year, my own university – Columbia University in New York City – teamed up with universities in Ecuador, Nigeria, the United Kingdom, France, Ethiopia, Malaysia, India, Canada, Singapore, and China in a “Global Classroom” that simultaneously connected hundreds of students on more than a dozen campuses in an exciting course on global sustainable development.