Group items tagged

Many more students will be told that Wikipedia is not a reliable source. For some, this is a no-brainer while for others it is a travesty. The key question in this debate has nothing to do with Wikipedia or any other source. What we need to be asking ourselves is: What is the point of the research paper? Five, fifteen and fifty years from now, do we want students to know the information they learned from their research topics or is the real value in what future graduates will be able to do, namely seek out information, evaluate it for relevance and accuracy and, ultimately, analyze and synthesize it in order to make an informed argument?

Throw away all of your preconceived ideas about the behaviour and nature of teenagers. New research suggests that without our turbulent teen years the human race would be, as Dr. David Bainbridge puts it in Surviving:) The Teenage Brain, "short lived and stupid." In the past, when we put the words selfish, reckless, irrational, irritable and impossible together we could only be describing one thing: the teenager - that odd creature that invades our homes for what seems like an eternity and tests the limits of our reasoning skills and patience. But what if teenagers are doing exactly as nature intended? Surviving:) The Teenage Brain looks at this critical developmental stage from a scientific and evolutionary point of view. The film combines cutting edge scientific research with YouTube clips of outrageous teen behaviour and a graphic novel approach to challenge conventional thinking about the adolescent years. It illustrates that our teens are doing precisely what they should be doing to finesse the development of their brains and ensure the survival of the human species.

Research by the Institute for the Future released in a report entitled "Future Work Skills 2020″ shows that preparing for a specific career area based on content is difficult and, instead, people should be developing certain broad skills. These same skills are important for our students to learn. The report explains each of the skills in detail, and also goes into the implications for education and policies. 

"No news is better than Fox News" What the researchers found out may not surprise you: For example, people who watch Fox News, the most popular of the 24-hour cable news networks, are 18 points less likely to know that Egyptians overthrew their government than those who watch no news at all (after controlling for other news sources, partisanship, education and other demographic factors). Fox News watchers are also 6 points less likely to know that Syrians have not yet overthrown their government than those who watch no news.

Sociologist and Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd has written a lot about how younger users respond to privacy issues around Facebook, and it's a lot more nuanced than just saying "kids share everything now." In some cases, younger users are even more concerned about privacy than older users, and they come up with interesting ways of dealing with that

In our sometimes wholesale embracing of the new groupthink, we are reminded not to forget the immense value of solitude, privacy and independence... and we cannot forget the introvert, the introspective person, whom many believe are the trail blazers of innovation and creativity, like Apple's Wozniak, who's creativity thrived in solitude, but developed in his networks with Jobs and beyond. A great challenge to the prevailing wisdom that collaboration, teamwork and collective wisdom are the ultimate end. And a reminder for balance and flexibility in our model both inside and outside the classroom...