Ideas & Quotes

Neil deGrasse Tyson, on Twitter.  (Via Interesting)

While it won’t be televised, a new component is getting added to the National Spelling Bee - a vocabulary test.  Here’s a sample question:

“Something described as refulgent is: a) tending to move toward one point, b) demanding immediate action, c) rising from an inferior state, d) giving out a bright light.”

I love this - it promotes fully learning the word, not just its spelling.  And really, in the age of spell-checkers, vocabulary should be the higher priority.  Kudos.

(Also, the answer was D)

Game-Learning?

At face value, it sounds like a great idea.  And it comes from Bill Gates!

Imagine if kids poured their time and passion into a video game that taught them math concepts while they barely noticed, because it was so enjoyable.

Kids are bored in the classroom—partially due to the growing technological culture—so we should make the classroom more fun.  Like video games!  Video games are fun!

This is a great vision, but it faces two major hurdles:

1. Regular video games are more fun than educational videogames.
2. It’s hard for video games to effectively educate.

Enter Pamela Paul, with a well-worded challenge to Gates’s vision:

Do we want children to “barely notice” when they develop valuable skills? Not to learn that hard work plays a role in that acquisition? It’s important to realize early on that mastery often requires persevering through tedious, repetitive tasks and hard-to-grasp subject matter.

How’s this for a radical alternative? Let children play games that are not educational in their free time…Then, once they’re in the classroom, they can challenge themselves. Deliberate practice of less-than-exhilarating rote work isn’t necessarily fun but they need to get used to it — and learn to derive from it meaningful reward, a pleasure far greater than the record high score.

If school is designed to prepare students for life as adults, it needs to go beyond “learning”.  It needs to add (at minimum) “work ethic” to its list of values.  I’m not sure how you can measure work ethic, but we need to figure out a way.

When I substitute, I find myself telling students this all the time:

It’s not important that you learn [this particular fact].  It’s important that you learn how to work hard at something.

Make Time for Play

If we’re going to recommit to students working hard, we need to balance that time too.  Kids need recess, and older kids need a break.  Robert Evans (in his #4 point in this Cracked article) lists a variety of studies showing the benefits to recess and down time:

• Children are better behaved in the classroom.
• Children pay better attention in the classroom.

Everyone needs a break, not just younger children.  It’s no coincidence that most high schools’ classes last only 45-50 minutes.  In my graduate courses (three hours straight), I found it easier to pay attention in classes that had built-in breaks.

If we value hard work and relaxation, we can challenge the short attention spans while still making school tolerable.

Endnote:  Gates doesn’t actually recommend computer-only learning, if you read through the link.  But the quote epitomizes the desire of learning technology.

jkottke:

From back in August, Atul Gawande visits a Cheesecake Factory and wonders if the combination of “quality control, cost control, and innovation” achieved by chain restaurants can offer lessons to hospitals and other health care organizations.

The company’s target last year was at least…

Henry Abbott, eat your heart out!

An excerpt:

Just to give you a sense of what these villages in Ethiopia are like, the kids (and most of the adults) there have never seen a word. No books, no newspapers, no street signs, no labels on packaged foods or goods. Nothing. And these villages aren’t unique in that respect; there are many of them in Africa where the literacy rate is close to zero. So you might think that if you’re going to give out fancy tablet computers, it would be helpful to have someone along to show these people how to use them, right?

But that’s not what OLPC did. They just left the boxes there, sealed up, containing one tablet for every kid in each of the villages (nearly a thousand tablets in total), pre-loaded with a custom English-language operating system and SD cards with tracking software on them to record how the tablets were used. Here’s how it went down, as related by OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference last week:

“We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.”

(via Ken Hiatt)

shialabeowulf:

Yes, these are amazing.

jkottke:

Izhar Gafni has designed a bike that weighs 20 pounds, costs between $9-12 to build, can hold up to a 485 pound person, and it made out of cardboard.

Engineers told Gafni that his idea was impossible. Yet he realized that paper could be strong if treated properly. As in crafting…

Whaddya think, Uncle Ken?

jkottke:

Leveraging the high number of specialized heat-transfer veins in the palm of the human hand, researchers at Stanford have developed a thermal exchange glove that is able to cool a person’s core temperature in a matter of minutes. Turns out this is helpful for athletes.

The glove’s effects on…

Pamela Andreatta, an educator at University of Michigan, has devised a clever and cheap way for medical students to get practice without accidentally tearing up someone’s body:

Andreatta set up an exercise using an opaque box with holes in the top through which you can insert a camera, scissors and grasper. She invited residents, medical students and faculty to dissect clementines.

They had to take off the peel in as few pieces as possible, remove the pith, separate the segments, then put everything back together and suture the peel closed. They had two hours to complete the task.

Andreatta designed a complex scoring system, which took into consideration the finished state of the fruit, each person’s planning and clinical judgment, plus some other factors.

In all, 41 people dissected clementines. The minimally invasive surgery specialists scored the highest, by far. Residents and nonsurgical faculty scored significantly lower. Medical students, with little or no surgical experience, fared worst.

My only question is, can you eat it afterward? :)

Peter Diamandis runs the X Prize Foundation, which (among other pursuits) offered $10 million for the first team to carry 3 people to 62 miles above earth TWICE within 2 weeks.  And it worked!

Peter believes the idea of prizes will advance Technology X to the point where it can become attractive to the private sector as a viable technology.  Based on his results from this project, it’s not so far-fetched; 26 teams from 7 countries worked on this prize.

We explore for three reasons, the weakest of which is curiosity.

This, then, is the answer to the second assumption to Paul Gilding’s doom-and-gloom.  We won’t be stuck on this rock; we can get off-planet resources, or just move the extra people away.  And after a few hundred years, Firefly.

Bonus Material

For more space dreams, see Burt Rutan on how we can expect the private sector to advance space travel much more quickly than government-funded research…space hotels, anyone?