Learning
Education Technology and the Future of Academic Freedom
It was one of the most frequently repeated stories of the year: college students, particularly left-leaning college students, are intolerant… If it sounds like a caricature… well, it is. If nothing else, pundits and politicians seem to forget that the majority of college students do not attend private institutions like Columbia or Middlebury or even…
Read MoreIntegrative Learning in Higher Education
Integrative learning … which develops the ability to think broadly and connect ideas across disciplines and to the outside world, has become a buzzword among academic managers who see it as a way to make general education meaningful and useful, and to realize the aims of liberal education. Read the story in The Chronicle of…
Read MoreWhy Every Tech Worker Needs a Humanities Education
“Many of the builders of technology today haven’t spent enough time thinking about the implications for the world.”
Read MoreWhy Germany Is So Much Better at Training Its Workers
Excerpt from The Atlantic — October 2014 The U.S. has its own tradition of apprenticeship going back many years. But like most kinds of vocational education, it fell out of fashion in recent decades—a victim of our obsession with college and concern to avoid anything that resembles tracking. Today in America, fewer than 5 percent…
Read MoreHow to Kickstart Your Data Science Career
If you’re an aspiring data scientist but still processing your data in Excel, you might want to upgrade your toolset. Why? Firstly, while advanced features like Excel Pivot tables can do a lot, they don’t offer nearly the flexibility, control, and power of tools like SQL, or their functional equivalents in Python (Pandas) or R…
Read MoreThese Will Be The Top Jobs In 2025 (And The Skills You’ll Need To Get Them)
It’s no surprise that tech skills will be in demand. However, [Devin Fidler at the Institute of the Future] says that ‘computational thinking’—the ability to manage the massive amounts of data we process individually each day, spot patterns, and make sense out of all of it—will be valued. Related jobs: Software developer jobs will grow…
Read MoreHitchhiker’s Guide to Data Science and Machine Learning
Thousands of articles and tutorials have been written about data science and machine learning. Hundreds of books, courses and conferences are available. You could spend months just figuring out what to do to get started, even to understand what data science is about. In this short contribution, I share what I believe to be the…
Read MoreThe Minecraft Generation
Mastering [Minecraft] requires rigorously logical thinking, as well as a great deal of debugging: When your device isn’t working, you have to carefully go over its circuitry to figure out what’s wrong. One fifth grader I visited, Natalie, was assembling a redstone door on her iPad while I watched. But nothing happened when she flicked…
Read MoreSeven Things Higher Education Innovators Want You to Know
Excerpt from Campus Technology — March 2016 “If you think the great colleges and universities of the past will be the only great colleges and universities in the future, then you’ve forgotten everything you knew about evolution and you need to up your game,” asserted Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University. “Our society…
Read MoreHow Business and Technology Skills Are Merging to Create High Opportunity Hybrid Jobs
From General Assembly Over the last several years, new tools have made programming and data analysis accessible to users with far less training and technical expertise than ever before. This has had a democratizing effect on these fields, with technical and analytical functions no longer the exclusive domain of “experts” but rather undertaken within a…
Read MoreWhy Programming Is The Core Skill Of The 21st Century
Programming skills are becoming ever more important, quickly turning into the core competency for all kinds of 21st Century workers….
Read MoreVideo: We’ll grow up to blow you away
From TED on YouTube The goal is not to turn kids into your kind of adult, but rather better adults than you have been, which may be a little challenging considering your guys credentials. But the way progress happens is because new generations and new eras grow and develop and become better than the…
Read MoreVideo: Sparks – How Youth Thrive – Peter Benson
No one has ever said, oh this child of mine, my fondest wish is they will ace statewide benchmark math and science tests when they’re 16… When you actually listen to people’s statements about their dreams for our kids, you hear a very different language. Kids who experience joy. Kids who are connected and engaged.…
Read MoreVideo: Sugata Mitra – The child-driven education
From TED Talks Education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education — the best teachers and schools don’t exist where they’re needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize…
Read MoreDisruptive innovation in higher education
From Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn, Louis Caldera, and Louis Soares: Disruptive innovation is the process by which a sector that has previously served only a limited few, because its products and services were complicated, expensive, and inaccessible, is transformed into one whose products and services are simple, affordable, and convenient and serves many…
Read MoreCreative Destruction
Just as the cassette tape replaced the 8-track, only to be replaced in turn by the compact disc, itself being undercut by MP3 players, … online free newspaper sites such as The Huffington Post and the National Review Online are leading to creative destruction of the traditional paper newspaper…. In fact, successful innovation is normally…
Read MoreHow to Grow a Collaborative Learning Community
Imagine your workplace as an award-winning garden — a place where you nurture knowledge and success. A place where people grow and learn from one another by sharing best practices. A place where training content expands and improves through crowdsourcing. A place that’s self-sustaining, dynamic, and always fresh. That place is called collaborative learning. So…
Read MoreVideo: James Martin on the challenges of the 21st century
“At the start of the 21st century, humankind finds itself on a non-sustainable course – a course that, unless it is changed, will lead to catastrophes of awesome consequences. At the same time, we are unlocking formidable new capabilities that could lead to much more exciting lives and glorious civilizations. “This could be humanity’s last…
Read MoreForget what you know about good study habits
Instead of sticking to one study location, simply alternating the room where a person studies improves retention. So does studying distinct but related skills or concepts in one sitting, rather than focusing intensely on a single thing. … An hour of study tonight, an hour on the weekend, another session a week from now: such…
Read MoreOn Connectivist Learning
At its heart, connectivism is the thesis that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections, and therefore that learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks. … I once played a chess player who (surprisingly to me) turned out to be far my superior (it was a long time ago). I…
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