:: The 4th Era ::

Cognitive scientist and philosopher Daniel Dennett is one of America's foremost thinkers. In this extract from his new book, he reveals some of the lessons life has taught him

By Elisha Hartwig

"We found some of the best apps and websites to help simplify the meeting planning process. Read on to learn about some valuable, time-saving tools. Because your time is better spent preparing for the meeting than setting it all up, right?"

By Jamal Abdul-Alim

Summary by Carnegie Perspectives

"Usually when a call is made for more diversity on campus, it entails increasing the proportion of poor students and students of color at selective institutions that grant baccalaureate degrees. But at a press conference on Thursday, a group of thought leaders called for a different type of diversity at institutions that grant associate’s degrees. Specifically, they said more should be done to attract students from middle and upper class backgrounds to community colleges. The idea is to end the racial and economic isolation and stratification that exists at many community colleges and thereby bring about improved outcomes in terms of graduation and other measures. That’s according to Richard D. Kahlenberg, senior fellow at The Century Foundation and executive director of the foundation’s Task Force on Preventing Community Colleges from Becoming Separate and Unequal."

By Hannah Seligson

"How did she catapult from dropping out of college to landing a plum job? She became an apprentice to Hilary Mason, chief data scientist at Bitly, through a new two-year program called Enstitute. It teaches skills in fields like information technology, computer programming and app building via on-the-job experience. Enstitute seeks to challenge the conventional wisdom that top professional jobs always require a bachelor’s degree — at least for a small group of the young, digital elite.

“Our long-term vision is that this becomes an acceptable alternative to college,” says Kane Sarhan, one of Enstitute’s founders. “Our big recruitment effort is at high schools and universities. We are targeting people who are not interested in going to school, school is not the right fit for them, or they can’t afford school.”

By Jon Marcus

"Massachusetts universities and colleges that say they’re trying to hold down costs have increased their number of administrators three times faster than their number of students, according to federal data analyzed by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting.

"The pace with which administrators have been added at Massachusetts higher-education institutions has also outstripped the increase in the number of research and teaching faculty and other instructional employees, by a margin of two-to-one."

Posted by Katie Lepi

"I recently found this great interview that Mark Suster did with Clayton Christensen, who is without argument, the master of disruption. If you’re not familiar with disruption (or with Mr. Christensen, for that matter), hit up the wikipedia version to familiarize yourself with the concept and the man, and then hop to it and check out this video. They discuss quite a bit about online education and higher education, and it’s pretty interesting.

"If Mr. Christensen’s work interests you, then you might also want to take a gander at this TED Talkthat he did awhile back."

If high school students took charge of their education with limited supervision, would they learn? A Massachusetts school is finding out.

by Alexandra Sifferlin

"By taking ownership of their learning, the students at Monument are forced to think creatively and capitalize on their own talents in order to excel. The class framework is similar to what will be expected of them in college and in the workforce, when they have to make their own educated and independent decisions.

"Some faculty say the program is equally rejuvenating for teachers. “The project provides the setting for students both at risk and at the top academically to bring themselves further along. I have seen students who would never be successful in a normal schedule of the school thrive in the project,” says Lisa Baldwin, the science faculty adviser to the Independent Project. “As a teacher, I am pushed to think about diverse and challenging science topics depending on what the students are working on. I like how my work there stimulates my own love of science in a different way from my traditional classroom teaching.”

"Among the defining parts of the Independent Project are the Individual and Collective Endeavors. The Individual Endeavor is a personal project each student works on throughout the semester to present to the school and their families. Individual Endeavors have included creating a film, learning to cook for 80 people, and, in Whalan’s case, writing a novel. The only requirement is the student be passionate about their chosen subject.

"The Collective Endeavor is a group effort that must have a local or global impact. For one semester, students created a film about the program for other interested schools. You can watch it here

Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2013/03/27/a-high-school-where-the-students-are-the-teachers/#ixzz2U3KBTOxS

By Tim Holt

"Problems like the ones I’ve mentioned above are called “messy problem” by some educators and “ill-structured problems” by others. Messy problems have no single, certifiably correct answer. There is no “one right way” to solve a problem like “should I get married” or “what should I study in college?” The answer is the goal, but the answer can manifest itself in many correct ways and lead to a lot of unexpected learning along the way. Ambiguity envelopes us. It begins at birth and follows us through to the last days of our lives. Start to finish, life is messy.

"I love ill-structured problems. When offered in a classroom setting, they present students with real life situations and devilish dilemmas. Problem based learning, a methodology begun in the late 1960’s in medical schools in Canada (and expanded into K12 education in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s) was developed after medical experts in teaching hospitals could not understand why otherwise excellent interns froze up when real life humans were placed in front of them with real life problems (there might even be panic and bleeding).

"After long investigation, if became clear to instructors that while the students were “book smart” and could recite page after page of diagnostic information from memory, most patients did not present their symptoms in a way that matched the book: “You know Doc, my elbow hurts just like the description on page 354 of the Jensen Ortho text,” said no patient ever.

"We need to move away from the pedagogy of the single answer and move towards teaching the messy problems of Problem Based Learning. This is different than Project Based Learning (as I wrote about here), where the end goal is already known (and thus a single correct answer is reached in many cases). Life does not work so much like a project; human development is pretty much Problem Based Learning. The best outcome or solution is usually not known when the problem is presented. Sometimes it is, but not often."

By Mike Brown

"Some people are explosively creative. They don’t need creativity exercises or structure to sustain their voluminous creative output. Then there’s the rest of us. If pure creativity eludes you, then creativity eludes you, then having the right structures, exercises, and tools helps you get more from your natural creative thinking skills. For the rest of us trying to figure out how to be more creative, having a personal creative thinking skills formula can be an incredible help."

By Sindya N. Bhanoo

"Sylvia Todd, 11, has become an online celebrity with her video series, “Sylvia’s Super-Awesome Maker Show.”

"A maker, tinkerer and online celebrity, Sylvia has attracted more than 1.5 million YouTube views of the show she produces and hosts, the Web-based “Sylvia’s Super-Awesome Maker Show.” She is sought after for speaking engagements, visits maker fairs and even addresses TEDx conferences.

"Last week she won a silver medal at an international robotics competition. And on Monday she took part in the White House Science Fair, where President Obama tested her latest project, a robot that paints."

By Maria Popova

“When you step away from the prepackaged structure of traditional education, you’ll discover that there are many more ways to learn outside school than within.

“The present education system is the trampling of the herd,” legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright lamented in 1956. Half a century later, I started Brain Pickings in large part out of frustration and disappointment with my trampling experience of our culturally fetishized “Ivy League education.” I found myself intellectually and creatively unstimulated by the industrialized model of the large lecture hall, the PowerPoint presentations, the standardized tests assessing my rote memorization of facts rather than my ability to transmute that factual knowledge into a pattern-recognition mechanism that connects different disciplines to cultivate wisdom about how the world works and a moral lens on how it shouldwork."

Posted by Katie Lepi

"Millions of students have signed up for massive open online courses, and hundreds of universities are offering some form of Web-based curriculum. Most students aren’t paying much for these classes, if they’re paying anything at all. So where is all that knowledge—and all the cash—coming from? This handy infographic from the Chronicle of Higher Education takes a look at the major players in the MOOC world. Universities are not the only major players in this world – from non profits to venture capitalists, lots of groups are getting involved! In fact, this new (and quite detailed) chart shows how MOOCs are getting money and more."

by Michael A. Wilner

"...in what seems to be the first major effort by a university to tailor a massive open online course, or MOOC, specifically to high school students,Brown University is preparing to offer a free online engineering class with the aim of teaching high school students about the merits and challenges of the field.

"f the program is truly unprecedented, as Brown’s team has come to believe, it could start a trend of directly advising high school students and their teachers on specific curriculums, motivated in part by the hypercompetitive college admissions process.

“The real goal here is to get students interested in engineering to better understand engineering, so that they can make good decisions about what they do in the next step,” said Wendy Drexler, director of online development at Brown. “If they decide that they’re interested in engineering and they want to apply to different engineering schools, we want them to have all the information they need.”

"The course is based more on activities and research assignments than on video lectures, in an effort to challenge students to actually build something, Dr. Drexler said. Students will also receive guidance on what types of courses they should look for when applying to colleges.