John Harvard Statue (@ Harvard Yard) Is Dressed in MIT Apparel

Source: Harvard website, Sep 2012

<Harvard President Drew Faust’s Speech at the Inauguration of MIT’s New President Rafael Reif>

Now, despite silently suffering torment and humiliation these many years as the victim of MIT’s creative hackers, John Harvard has dressed himself for today’s occasion. President Reif, on behalf of the “red brick school up the street,” I present a symbol of our lasting friendship.

The Neural Advantage of Speaking 2 Languages

Source: Scientific American, Jan 2012

… children who know two languages more easily solve problems that involve misleading cues.

Fascinating Read about How Google Uses Math for Gmail, Google Maps, etc

Source: Google Doc

The Crisis in Higher Education

Source: Technology Review, Sep 2012

<the source article is worth reading in its entirety>

Classroom lectures are in general “boring,” he says, and taped lectures are even less engaging: “You get the worst part without getting the best part.”

While MOOCs include videos of professors explaining concepts and scribbling on whiteboards, the talks are typically broken up into brief segments, punctuated by on-screen exercises and quizzes. Peppering students with questions keeps them involved with the lesson, Thrun argues, while providing the kind of reinforcement that has been shown to strengthen comprehension and retention.

… social networks like Facebook provide models for digital campuses where students can form study groups and answer each other’s questions.

To fulfill their grand promise—making college at once cheaper and better—MOOCs will need to exploit the latest breakthroughs in large-scale data processing and machine learning, which enable computers to adjust to the tasks at hand. 

Delivering a complex class to thousands of people simultaneously demands a high degree of automation. Many of the labor-intensive tasks traditionally performed by professors and teaching assistants—grading tests, tutoring, moderating discussions—have to be done by computers. 

Advanced analytical software is also required to parse the enormous amounts of information about student behavior collected during the classes. By using algorithms to spot patterns in the data, programmers hope to gain insights into learning styles and teaching strategies, which can then be used to refine the technology further. Such artificial-intelligence techniques will, the MOOC pioneers believe, bring higher education out of the industrial era and into the digital age.

… the potential of educational software. Through the intensive use of data analysis and machine learning techniques, he predicts, the programs will advance through several “tiers of adaptivity,” each offering greater personalization through more advanced automation. 

In the initial tier, which is already largely in place, the sequence of steps a student takes through a course depends on that student’s choices and responses. Answers to a set of questions may, for example, trigger further instruction in a concept that has yet to be mastered—or propel the student forward by introducing material on a new topic. “Each student,” explains Kuntz, “takes a different path.” 

In the next tier, which Knewton plans to reach soon, the mode in which material is presented adapts automatically to each student. Although the link between media and learning remains controversial, many educators believe that different students learn in different ways. Some learn best by reading text, others by watching a demonstration, others by playing a game, and still others by engaging in a dialogue. A student’s ideal mode may change, moreover, at each stage in a course—or even at different times during the day. A video lecture may be best for one lesson, while a written exercise may be best for the next. By monitoring how students interact with the teaching system itself—when they speed up, when they slow down, where they click—a computer can learn to anticipate their needs and deliver material in whatever medium promises to maximize their comprehension and retention.

The advances in tutoring programs promise to help many college, high-school, and even elementary students master basic concepts. One-on-one instruction has long been known to provide substantial educational benefits, but its high cost has constrained its use, particularly in public schools. 

It’s likely that if computers are used in place of teachers, many more students will be able to enjoy the benefits of tutoring. According to one recent study of undergraduates taking statistics courses at public universities, the latest of the online tutoring systems seem to produce roughly the same results as face-to-face instruction.

The benefits of machine learning in education remain largely theoretical. And even if AI techniques generate genuine advances in pedagogy, those breakthroughs may have limited application. 

It’s one thing for programmers to automate courses of instruction when a body of knowledge can be defined explicitly and a student’s progress measured precisely. It’s a very different thing to try to replicate on a computer screen the intricate and sometimes ineffable experiences of teaching and learning that take place on a college campus.

… the essence of a college education lies in the subtle interplay between students and teachers that cannot be simulated by machines, no matter how sophisticated the programming.

Flipping the Classroom

The designers and promoters of MOOCs don’t suggest that computers will make classrooms obsolete. But they do argue that online instruction will change the nature of teaching on campus, making it more engaging and efficient. 

The traditional model of instruction, where students go to class to listen to lectures and then head off on their own to complete assignments, will be inverted. Students will listen to lectures and review other explanatory material alone on their computers (as some middle-school and high-school students already do with Khan Academy videos), and then they’ll gather in classrooms to explore the subject matter more deeply—through discussions with professors, say, or through lab exercises. In theory, this “flipped classroom” will allocate teaching time more rationally, enriching the experience of both professor and student.

 

The Structure of Compulsory Schooling Promotes Cheating

 

Source: Psychology Today, Oct 2012

Our system of compulsory (forced) schooling is almost perfectly designed to promote cheating.

Students are required to spend way more time than they wish doing work that they did not choose, that bores them, that seems purposeless to them. They are constantly told about the value of high grades. Grades are used as essentially the sole motivator. Everything is done for grades. Advancement through the system, and eventual freedom from it, depends upon grades.

Students become convinced that high grades and advancement to the next level are the be-all and end-all of their school work. By the time they are 11 or 12 years old, most are realistically cynical about the idea that school is fundamentally a place for learning. 

On anonymous questionnaires, as many as 98% of students admit to some form of cheating and roughly 70% percent admit to repeated acts of the most blatant forms of cheating, such as copying whole tests from other students or plagiarizing whole papers. 

One of the tragedies of our system of schooling is that it deflects students from discovering what they truly love and find worth doing for its own sake. Instead, it teaches them that life is a series of hoops that one must get through, by one means or another, and that success lies in others’ judgments rather than in real, self-satisfying accomplishments.

 

Bad Math: MIT Miscounts Its New B-School Students

Source: WSJ, Sep 2012

Normally, schools offer scholarships to entice students to enroll. This year, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s business school handed them money to go away.

The Sloan School of Management’s full-time M.B.A. program, usually about 400 students, was oversubscribed by an unusually high number of students this year.

Tuition for the 2012-2013 academic year is $58,200, with total expenses—including books, housing and food—estimated at just under $89,000.

Creativity Surpasses Intelligence as a Predictor of Lifetime Achievement

Source: Psychology Today, Sep 2012

… the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking seems to be the best predictor of lifetime achievement that has yet been invented. It is a better predictor than IQ, high-school grades, or peer judgments of who will achieve the most.[6]

[6] See: Mark A. Runco, Garnet Millar, Selcuk Acar, & Bonnie Cramond (2010) Torrance tests of creative thinking as predictors of personal and public achievement: A fifty-year follow-up. Creativity Research Journal, 22, 361-368. Also: Kyung Hee Kim (2008). Meta-analysis of the relationship of creative achievement to both IQ and divergent thinking scores. Journal of Creative Behavior, 42, 106-130.

Take an online UPenn course to earn Course Credit with Uni. of Helsinki

Source: NPR, Sep 2012

Professor Michael Kearns teaches a popular class at the University of Pennsylvania called Networked Life. … once you’ve finished, you qualify for a certificate of completion that is already worth full course credit at the University of Helsinki in Finland.

Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help …

ander and Taylor have long admired affirmative action’s original goals, but after many years of studying racial preferences, they have reached a controversial but undeniable conclusion: that preferences hurt underrepresented minorities far more than they help them. At the heart of affirmative action’s failure is a simple phenomenon called mismatch. Using dramatic new data and numerous interviews with affected former students and university officials of color, the authors show how racial preferences often put students in competition with far better-prepared classmates, dooming many to fall so far behind that they can never catch up. Mismatch largely explains why, even though black applicants are more likely to enter college than whites with similar backgrounds, they are far less likely to finish; why there are so few black and Hispanic professionals with science and engineering degrees and doctorates; why black law graduates fail bar exams at four times the rate of whites; and why universities accept relatively affluent minorities over working class and poor people of all races.

The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

In THE ONE WORLD SCHOOLHOUSE, Khan presents his radical vision for the future of education, as well as his own remarkable story, for the first time. In these pages, you will discover, among other things:

• How both students and teachers are being bound by a broken top-down model invented in Prussia two centuries ago
• Why technology will make classrooms more human and teachers more important
• How and why we can afford to pay educators the same as other professionals
• How we can bring creativity and true human interactivity back to learning
• Why we should be very optimistic about the future of learning.

Parents and politicians routinely bemoan the state of our education system. Statistics suggest we’ve fallen behind the rest of the world in literacy, math, and sciences. With a shrewd reading of history, Khan explains how this crisis presented itself, and why a return to “mastery learning,” abandoned in the twentieth century and ingeniously revived by tools like the Khan Academy, could offer the best opportunity to level the playing field, and to give all of our children a world-class education now.

More than just a solution, THE ONE WORLD SCHOOLHOUSE serves as a call for free, universal, global education, and an explanation of how Khan’s simple yet revolutionary thinking can help achieve this inspiring goal.