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For Guantánamo detainees, the prison library offers a rare means of escape.
"If you’ve been looking for an internship and just can’t get one, here are some tips." - "Sharef cited a recent HireArt candidate who wanted to be a product manager: He was unemployed for more than six months after his company went under. During his layoff, said Sharef, 'he taught himself how to code by taking free online classes at Codecademy. He did a product management course at General Assembly, which was taught by product managers at two New York companies. He also spent a lot of time networking ... with product managers. He started a Web site with a friend just to get practice. For every job he applied for, he would create a product pitch, with wire frames and designs the company could use. Eventually, when he told his story to potential employers, he had a compelling professional narrative about making a career switch. Looking at his résumé, it’s actually hard to even tell that he was unemployed. He still got rejected a lot, but he finally got an amazing job as a product manager.'"
"Starting on June 7, about 9.2 million Chinese high-school students will take nine hours of tests that will determine where they go to university. Taxis have been ordered to be silent near testing centers and construction crews have been sent home. To prevent cheating via listening devices, schools in the northeast have installed metal detectors and warned female students that even bras with metal clips will be confiscated. China's national college entrance exam, or the gaokao, is criticized for how much stress it causes. Nervous breakdowns and suicides aren't uncommon -- students have been in cram classes, often for more than 10 hours straight, over the past year. But it's even more stressful for students from rural parts of the country who need to score especially high to get into one of the top universities. China's best schools like Peking University and Tsinghua in Beijing, or Fudan University in Shanghai, for example, give preference to students who have resident status in those cities and take the exam locally."
With collaborative consumption — the growing new economy based on access instead of ownership —you don’t have to buy a bike, car, prom dress, DVD, or chainsaw. You rent it or swap for it.
"'The results being released today show that we are indeed in a new world. And we as adults need to learn from kids in this instance. We need to learn from students about how they learn, where they learn, and how they seek information. I believe we must harness this information to give all students a 21st century skill set to prepare them for high-growth, high-demand jobs in the global economy.' —U.S. Rep. George Miller, the senior Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee. 'From Chalkboards to Tablets: The Emergence of the K-12 Digital Learner' is the second in a two part series to document the key national findings from Speak Up 2012. In 2003, The Speak Up National Research Project was born to give K-12 students a voice in critical conversations, and to hopefully provide their parents, teachers and administrators with new insights about the expectations and aspirations of these newly minted digital learners. Now in its tenth year, the annual Speak Up National Research Project and the resulting trends analysis provides a birds’ eye view of the changing environment for digital learning, both in and out of school. As the digital learner has emerged over the past ten years, we have noticed a significant shift in the student perspective on using technology for learning. To bring new insights and context to this digital learning metamorphosis, 'From Chalkboards to Tablets: The Emergence of the K-12 Digital Learner' examines the current views of students from Kindergarten through 12th grade with a special look at digital learners in third, sixth, ninth and twelfth grades. Where appropriate we compare the ideas of this year’s digital learners with their predecessors over the past ten years. Most importantly, in honor of the over 2.5 million K-12 students who have shared their hopes and dreams for digital learning through the Speak Up project over the past ten years, we address these critical questions with this new report: Read more here: http://goo.gl/L8meY
"It is time for a sea change. If we allow such opportunistic do-gooders to dominate the contemporary art world, if we allow galleries and art institutions to laugh all the way to the bank by exploiting social consciousness, and if we don't educate the public to be weary of their manipulative rhetoric of political correctness, we will have failed the grand legacy of generations of free-thinking artists who came before us. This time, I [Filip Noterdaeme] am not going to point my finger at cultural and commercial institutions. This is about the artists who will define our future. Call it a manifesto for making the art world bearable again. - We need more artists who are not concerned with doing the "right thing." - We need more artists who find ways to examine and express human misery or bliss without a political agenda. - We need more artists who don't play by the rules imposed by curators, gallerists, museums and art collectors. - We need more artists who are wary of "meaning" and embrace contradiction. - We need more artists who don't pretend to have the right answers. - We need more artists who don't give a damn about making you feel good or bad. - We need more artists who are not afraid of running into trouble. - We need more artists who are able to laugh at the absurdity of life and art. - We need more artists who don't resemble anybody's idea of what an artist ought to be and who nonetheless produce great art that takes us by surprise, makes us think and reflect, and leaves plenty of room for multiple interpretations.
Here are the best quotes and videos of the season, featuring celebrities from President Obama and the Dalai Lama to Joss Whedon and Stephen Colbert.
"We've [Edudemic] gone through hundreds of resources to assemble these guides which are meant to help you learn, teach, and share as much as possible." "Welcome to the official guide to technology and learning by Edudemic! This part of Edudemic is meant to offer you, the teacher, some of the best and most popular resources available today. We’ve combed through hundreds of resources in order to narrow down our guides into something easy to read, easy to use, and easy to share. Below are links to the guides we have made so far. They’re always a work in progress so be sure to let us know if we missed something or if you have more resources you want us to call out in the guides. We’re always looking for the best and most useful resources so don’t be shy, share!"
"Watch the New York band perform a 12-song set, featuring material from its new album, Modern Vampires of the City."
"The view that literary fiction educates and civilizes its readers is widespread, and unproven." "Everything depends in the end on whether we can find direct, causal evidence: we need to show that exposure to literature itself makes some sort of positive difference to the people we end up being. That will take a lot of careful and insightful psychological research (try designing an experiment to test the effects of reading “War and Peace,” for example). Meanwhile, most of us will probably soldier on with a positive view of the improving effects of literature, supported by nothing more than an airy bed of sentiment. I have never been persuaded by arguments purporting to show that literature is an arbitrary category that functions merely as a badge of membership in an elite. There is such a thing as aesthetic merit, or more likely, aesthetic merits, complicated as they may be to articulate or impute to any given work. But it’s hard to avoid the thought that there is something in the anti-elitist’s worry. Many who enjoy the hard-won pleasures of literature are not content to reap aesthetic rewards from their reading; they want to insist that the effort makes them more morally enlightened as well. And that’s just what we don’t know yet."
"The BBC's Hugh Schofield is in admiration of his daughter's enthusiasm for philosophy ahead of an exam." "But in the Bac Litteraire, philosophy is king. It means eight hours a week of classes, and in the exams it has the top coefficient of seven. In other words, in the calculation of your overall mark at the Bac, it is philosophy which counts the most. It also means having to master a host of what they call notions - notions, or themes. Here are some of them from Ruby's books - consciousness, the other, art, existence and time, matter and spirit, society, law, duty, happiness. And among the writers you need to refer to are Plato, William of Ockham, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Sartre. Why this emphasis on philosophy in France? Other countries have school-leaving exams which cover the history of ideas and religion and so on. But the French are very clear that that is not what theirs is. The purpose of the philosophy Bac is not to understand the history of human thought but to leap into the stream that is the actuality of human thought."
Historypin is a digital time machine that creates a new way for the world to see and share history. It was created by We Are What We Do, in partnership with Google.
"Want to teach your class about different places on the globe and teach research and arguing skills? Take the students on a virtual field trip with GeoGuessr."
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"Here is a competition which is aimed at secondary school students. I quite like the idea of this: both the topic and the nature of what has to be submitted by entrants: a video of not more than 90 seconds answering the question: In the future, how will technology help an ageing population?" "Peter Fouquet, President of Bosch in the UK said: “Bosch is committed to developing technologies that improve the quality of people’s lives and an ageing population is not only a big issue for the UK, but many countries around the world. 'Our challenge to entrants of this year’s Bosch Technology Horizons Award is to think about how engineering and technologies, such as those pioneered by Bosch, will help to address such a major societal issue. We believe that inspiring young people to consider careers in engineering is vital to a sustainable future and for targeting the UK’s skills gap.' "For more information on the Bosch Technology Horizons Award, including a video guide on how to enter, visit https://www.facebook.com/BoschUK."
"Because we have the chance to reinvent the learning model as we know it—with far fewer constituencies standing in the way of protecting the “status quo” in online learning—there is currently a window in which to put in place policies that create the proper incentives. Paying providers for student outcomes; not regulating and paying for inputs so as to free up educators on the ground to make smart decisions for their students; moving to a competency-based learning system, in which students progress once they have mastered a concept, not when the calendar says it is time to move on; and having appropriate on-demand systems of assessments that allow for a bottoms-up accountability that rewards growth instead of today’s top-down accountability system together appear to be critical pieces." - "We education transformers—those who do not want to just reform education but to transform it into a student-centric design—don’t have all the answers for how to do this well. We should admit that. But Cuban and others could help. Rather than simply act as naysayers who say why everything is doomed to fail, they could be part of “the solution.” Asking how we might make this unique opportunity different—or pointing out where we are erring in shaping it in a constructive fashion—would go a long way. The past is instructive, but it should help guide us forward, not hold us back."
"A nearly complete skeleton of a creature that weighed less than an ounce dials back the primate fossil record by eight million years, paleontologists report."
Wells Elementary School's STEM teacher, Mr. I, explains the exciting work the 4th graders have been doing with "Vital Signs." —Wells, ME
"Thirty years later, we’re still “a nation at risk." "Teaching requires a professional model, like we have in medicine, law, engineering, accounting, architecture and many other fields. In these professions, consistency of quality is created less by holding individual practitioners accountable and more by building a body of knowledge, carefully training people in that knowledge, requiring them to show expertise before they become licensed, and then using their professions’ standards to guide their work. By these criteria, American education is a failed profession. There is no widely agreed-upon knowledge base, training is brief or nonexistent, the criteria for passing licensing exams are much lower than in other fields, and there is little continuous professional guidance. It is not surprising, then, that researchers find wide variation in teaching skills across classrooms; in the absence of a system devoted to developing consistent expertise, we have teachers essentially winging it as they go along, with predictably uneven results."
"Adapting existing programs to enhance a digital learning environment. See more Bloom's Digital Web Tool resources at: http://bit.ly/10UYptv."
"We needed to figure out the best possible way to move NPR Music's Tiny Desk from our old headquarters to our new facility just north of the U.S. Capitol."
"Scientists say the rounded pebbles seen by the Curiosity Mars rover are proof that many of the landscapes on the Red Planet were cut by flowing water."
In a wide-ranging consideration of 21st century education, Noam Chomsky argues that much of what passes for education reform is 'a way of turning the population into a bunch of imbeciles.' "Actually, just today, I had lunch with a faculty member here I've known for many years who works on designing educational programs for high schools, science programs. He's describing the programs, and they are programs like one of the programs that they're trying to get high schools to use around the world, incidentally - not just here. So he described one in which it starts by asking the question, "How can mosquitoes fly in the rain?" And then, but why is there a problem? Well, you study the force of the raindrop hitting a mosquito - it's like a person being hit by a locomotive. So how come they don't get smashed to pieces? And what makes them stay up? And then a million other questions come. You start looking into these questions. You start learning physics, biology, all kinds of things. And there are things that the students can do so that they can ask questions, and pursue them, and do experiments and so on. I mean, that's education. It's not just you learned how a mosquito flies in the rain, but you learn how to be creative and why it's exciting to learn things and create things and make up new things. And that can be done from kindergarten on."
Via Nik Peachey
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