I just read about this cool initiative in Maine called the Maine Learning Technology Initiative that provides use of laptops to 7th and 8th graders in public schools, and is now expanding to include high school students.
They just ordered 64,000 Macbooks for this reason!
I think it is awesome that they are so serious about helping young students keep up with new technology. They said in a report that having laptops has helped students with learning, especially with writing. Also, knowing how to use the Internet and providing support with computer use is probably huge for families. That makes sense to me.
It doesn’t seem like a program exactly like this would work everywhere, mostly because most other states are more populous, but it is a great example of what direction education can go in to support this up and coming generation.
Wolfram Alpha is a really cool “computational knowledge engine” that a friend (Nat) showed to me.
Here is the demo video:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html
Check it out and play around with it!
http://www.wolframalpha.com/
It is capable of pulling out information and analyzes it in different ways. It can produce graphs and make complex calculations, and a lot of other things if you watch the demo video. This brings me back to a post I wrote earlier about the impact that the Internet has had on knowledge, intelligence, and our minds, especially with the power and dominance of Google.
What is the role of such tools as the search engine or the “knowledge engine” that give us access to mounds of information that can be processed in an instant? It seems to be changing as new ways are invented to organize and find data.
The amount of stimulation the Internet can provide can be overwhelming at times, but I think that this characteristic may be surpassed by the benefits of having large amounts of information at your fingertips.
“Googling” has become almost a daily part of our lives, and only becomes more so as the power of the Google search engines increases its reach. There is, however, an ongoing debate about whether this type of accessibility through technology is making us smarter or dumber.
Though people may argue that having such tempting access to vast oceans of random things on the Internet, I do not think that people can blame the Internet for their own lack of focus, concentration, or contemplation.
We’ve been through similar experiences with the onset of cable television, but the Internet seems to be the new scapegoat for decreased productivity or intelligent thought.
I tend to agree with this author from Discover Magazine, who says that this type of access to information can be a natural extension of our minds that can allow us to learn more easily because we are able to go out and grab the bits of information that we need at any moment.
So I think that this means that, if our minds are jumbled and easily distracted, our online activity will represent that jumbled mess, often through distracted clicking. We can’t blame the tools we have for the ways that we are using them. That would be like chopping vegetables and getting angry at the knife because we cut ourselves from lack of concentration on finger location among the vegetables.
“Can you explain stem cell research to me?”
This is not what you would normally hear on the car ride back to campus, after a week of on Spring Break. You might think we’d be talking about the Ultimate Frisbee tournament we just played at, the nice beach that we stayed near, or anything on the crazy list of happenings.
So, as any good shotty should, I entertained my driver with a brief account of stem cell research. Considering how much stem cell research has been in the news lately, it may not be all that surprising that this conversation actually happened.
But if you didn’t have someone science-y handy, how many people would care enough to take the time to actually find out the details?
With issues like stem cell research frequently appearing in the headlines of most news outlets in the country, it is becoming more and more important for the average citizen to understand scientific concepts in order to form their own opinions on the subjects. Not unlike other areas of interest, level of education seems to play a large role in the depth at which they can understand a scientific concept.
My companion at the wheel, Joe, is a graduate student at Teacher’s College, hoping to get a gig teaching English in high school next year. Joe is a non-science major, but he finds value in understanding science-related current issues. So what is the current status of science and scientific literacy among young adults?
To get a general feel for the situation, I set out to make a rough study of my peers. I created an online survey to assess the level of interest in and understanding of science among current college students, as well as some people who have been out of school for a number of years. Respondents were mostly people that I reached through social networking sites and word of mouth. I also set up 8 interviews with current and recent Columbia University students to get a better sense of how Columbia’s Core Curriculum fares in all of this, specifically the course “Frontiers of Science” – FoS. Many of the respondents and interviewees were friends or acquaintances so this exercise is nowhere near rigorous enough to compare with full scientific study. However, I am confident that the responses are honest and can give some indication of the general situation.
Continue reading →
Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE): Peer-reviewed video journal articles
Remember that Large Hadron Rap that blew up on YouTube? A fellow classmate in my writing about science course wrote about “viral” videos like that one for his term paper. It’s a really cool idea, since he took the angle that education about science could benefit from more videos like these.
From another angle, scientists could educate other scientists through video as well.
The Journal of Visualized Experiments is unique in that all of their publications are in video format. There is an accompanying text article, but the video is the centerpiece. Many of the articles are about techniques in labs and procedures, but I would be interested to see what else can be done in this style.
From reading the “About JoVE” page, JoVE is all about “rapid knowledge transfer,” “addressing complexity,” “lifting the laboratory time sink,” “integrating time,” and “a new movement in science publishing.”
One thing I would think would be interesting to see in video format was a topic that Joe Thornton recently gave a talk about as part of the Darwin Speaker Series (the same one that Rosemary Grant came for).
His lab investigates evolutionary mechanisms through experiments with receptor proteins and gene function. He spoke to us about a series of experiments where they were attempting to reconstruct the evolutionary pathways of 2 receptors from a common ancestor.
Internet video is still new in terms of using it as a learning tool, but it has tons of appeal nowadays since it is so accessible. Every time I’ve given a presentation, I think about how I could use a video from YouTube to break up the monotony. Maybe there will come a day when most of my presentations will be made up of various videos!
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July 31, 2009
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Quotes:
Pg. 28
Pg. 29
Etsy.com is a great example of a place where people from all over can come together to create an ecosystem for growth. When you purchase handmade goods on the website, you are buying directly from the maker/seller, cutting most of the middlemen and transaction costs. I recently purchased a case for my camera on the site from a person in Dallas, TX. Without this marketplace for people to gather at, I may have gone to buy a product from a big name company.
There are tons of examples of how the Internet has spread knowledge, goods, and connected people to create value. It really is amazing how much can be accomplished nowadays! I’ll post more when I have read more of the book.