Tag: future
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“So, what do you want to learn?”
How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses:
School had never been challenging for her. She sat in rows with the other students while teachers told the kids what they needed to know. It wasnât hard to repeat it back, and she got good grades without thinking too much. As she headed into fifth grade, she assumed she was in for more of the sameâlectures, memorization, and busy work.
One day JuĂĄrez Correa went to his whiteboard and wrote “1 = 1.00.” Normally, at this point, he would start explaining the concept of fractions and decimals. Instead he just wrote “1/2 = ?” and “1/4 = ?”
“Think about that for a second,” he said, and walked out of the room.
Via: @schinker
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More on libraries and their future
Surprise! It’s the Golden Age of Libraries
Zachary Loeb (who writes as the Luddbrarian on the blog librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com) notes that “although college students have a huge amount of information available to them, this does not automatically mean that they have acquired all of the information literacy necessary to really make sense of this mass amount of information. As a result the library staff becomes an increasingly important resource for students wading through the information glut, especially as library staff are often available to students in numerous ways (in person, e-mail, chat, by phone).” This is particularly true for adult learners who return to higher education after many years away from the classroom and who often find virtual research daunting.
Libraries aren’t going anywhere, but much like the saying “let’s videotape that” now meaning to digitally record video, “let’s go to the library” will mean something different.
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â Libraries are the future
Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming
I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons â a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth â how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn’t read. And certainly couldn’t read for pleasure.
It’s not one to one: you can’t say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations.
Interesting start, although the prison planning story appears to be an urban myth without any source.
But later Mr. Gaiman hits pay dirt:
I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children’s books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. I’ve seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was RL Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy.
It’s tosh. It’s snobbery and it’s foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isn’t hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the first time the child has encountered it. Do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is a route to other books you may prefer. And not everyone has the same taste as you.
And not just for the use of the word tosh. This needs to be shouted from the rooftops, posted in every school, said at every parent/teacher conference.
Via: Neil Gaiman On Why Libraries Are the Gates to the Future – Slashdot
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Replacing the library
The End Of The Library | TechCrunch
I know this sucks. Libraries have been an invaluable part of human history, propagating our culture and knowledge over centuries. But recognizing the changing times and pointing out the obvious shouldnât be considered blasphemy. It is what it is.
The internet has replaced the importance of libraries as a repository for knowledge. And digital distribution has replaced the role of a library as a central hub for obtaining the containers of such knowledge: books. And digital bits have replaced the need to cut down trees to make paper and waste ink to create those books. This is evolution, not devolution.
Interesting points on where we may be going with libraries. But is there a future without libraries? I don’t see them disappearing, but I do see them morphing into something else. Just like the shift over the last 30 with school libraries, I mean, library media centers. đ
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Jumping the curve in education
Education 3.0: Embracing Technology to ‘Jump the Curve’
…the education sector is focusing far too much about what existed yesterday, some about what exists today, and very little about what will exist tomorrow. He challenged the âChoice Architectsâ of today to stop creating employees for the jobs of yesterday and start focusing on careers of tomorrow.
When the available quantity of information in almost every field and with regard to almost every concept doubles every 4-5 years, it is impossible not to have significant change arise.
“Focus on the careers of tomorrow…”
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Another vision of education in the future
An Infographic on the future of education
The future is about access, anywhere learning and collaboration, both locally and globally. Teaching and learning is going to be social. Schools of the future could have a traditional cohort of students, as well as online only students who live across the country or even the world. Things are already starting to move this way with the emergence of massive open online courses (MOOCs).
For me, the future of technology in education is the cloud.
The infographic is much better than the article linked in the post to the Guardian.
In the near future, native apps are going to become more and more prevalent. That’s why Google is putting Native Client inside of Chrome. And the cloud will be less and less important until cellular companies loosen up the bandwidth.
P.S. And interactive whiteboards end in 2012…
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Looking at the classroom of tomorrow
Technology Transforming the Classroom of the future
Technology also allows ârunning before walkingâ â meaning kids can experiment with concepts way beyond their years, say using an application to design a roller coaster that could actually work. It makes learning subjects like math much more relevant.
And no mention of interactive whiteboards…