Academic
« Previous EntriesAn Effective Tool to Help You Memorize Text
Thursday, August 28th, 2008My eighty year-old mother-in-law, Alice, can recite the lyrics to Gilbert and Sullivan light operas. She can also recite a large number of famous poems, including Shakespearean soliloquies. She likely has these skills because the memorization of long textual passages was a big part of her elementary schooling.
When I was in elementary school in the [...]
Epistemic Games Encourage Creative Problem Solving
Friday, June 20th, 2008Eighteen years ago, I bought the original SimCity game and subsequently went for two days without food or sleep. I obsessively worked away at creating the perfect city filled with happy citizens. The day my virtual city obtained a stadium remains one of the highlights of my technological life.
Games that encourage learners to think like [...]
Connexions: A Free Course Repository and LCMS
Wednesday, June 11th, 2008Last month, The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University announced its annual Berkman Awards for outstanding contributions to the Internet’s impact on society. One of the winners this year was Rice University’s Richard Baraniuk.
Professor Baraniuk won the award for launching Connexions, a public learning content management system (LCMS) that allows teachers [...]
In Praise of Unusual Courses
Thursday, April 10th, 2008I’ve taken a number of unusual courses in my academic life.
A college I attended offered a course titled “Introduction to Welding,” which sounded like a good way to get three credits. I really enjoyed it. Getting metal pieces to stick together was great fun, and the risk that the gas tanks might explode provided the [...]
School Board Proposes Limitations on Homework
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008If their legs were long enough to reach the pedals of their parents’ cars, young children would be emptying their piggy banks for gas money and immediately relocating to Toronto, Ontario.
Why the move? The Toronto District School Board, the largest public school board in Canada, is proposing to eliminate homework for kindergarten children and ban [...]
The Rubber Room
Thursday, March 13th, 2008National Public Radio recently aired an excellent This American Life episode called Human Resources. The first part of this documentary featured a story called “The Rubber Room,” which focused on a surreal situation in the NY City Public School System.
The rubber room is a place where hundreds of teachers facing disciplinary hearings for real, imagined, [...]
How One High School is Preparing Students for a Career in Science
Thursday, January 31st, 2008If the program at my daughter’s school is representative, high school education in 2008 is light years ahead of what it was back when I was a teenager. Nearing the end of grade eight, she needs to decide which of two science streams she’ll be entering next year. What’s most exciting is that one of [...]
OpenCourseware Consortium Provides Free Online Courses from Hundreds of Universities
Thursday, January 17th, 2008My last post was about MIT’s OpenCourseware Project, which contains more than 2,000 free online courses on a wide range of subjects, including architecture, urban studies, athletics, physics, and much much more.
Zooming out to get a broader view gives you a sense of just how big the universe of free courseware is. MIT is just [...]
Free MIT Online Courses Getting a Million Hits Per Month
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008It’s been seven years since the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) launched its OpenCourseware project. The goal of the initiative has been to:
“…advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship to best serve the world.”
Since then, this repository has grown to include more than 2,000 free online courses. The site [...]
The Positive Effects of Physical Activity on Learning
Monday, May 14th, 2007In my last post on brain plasticity, I mentioned that many people may soon embrace life-long learning to maintain mental health with the same fervor in which they attempt to maintain physical fitness through exercise.
It turns out physical fitness, brain health, and learning may be closely linked. According to an article in newsweek, people who [...]
