Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Instructor Bio and Contact Information

A Calendar

Learning Objectives and Expectations

Media

An Introductory Discussion

Other friends try to go on long walks every Sunday, or to “forget” their cellphones at home. A series of tests in recent years has shown, Mr. Carr points out, that after spending time in quiet rural settings, subjects “exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.”

I noticed that all their talk was of sailing — or riding or bridge: anything that would allow them to get out of radio contact for a few hours.

empathy, as well as deep thought, depends (as neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have found) on neural processes that are “inherently slow.” The very ones our high-speed lives have little time for.

I’ve yet to use a cellphone and I’ve never Tweeted or entered Facebook. I try not to go online till my day’s writing is finished, and I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot, and every trip to the movies would be an event.

Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, clearer and happier — than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music.

For more than 20 years, therefore, I’ve been going several times a year — often for no longer than three days — to a Benedictine hermitage, 40 minutes down the road, as it happens, from the Post Ranch Inn. I don’t attend services when I’m there, and I’ve never meditated, there or anywhere; I just take walks and read and lose myself in the stillness, recalling that it’s only by stepping briefly away from my wife and bosses and friends that I’ll have anything useful to bring to them.

Lowered Costs

Online education means that one teacher can instruct countless students

Improved Learning

Knowledge can be transferred over time and space endlessly

Not only can the internet provide education to more people at a lower cost, it can also offer better quality.

Interactive learning is more effective for retention that lectures.

Contact Us

It's unclear if the Education Department was aware of this issue until contacted by Inside Higher Ed on Friday. The department now says it will review the longstanding practice of sharing the FAFSA positions with every college.

The use of the list on the FAFSA is just another example of how colleges are using increasingly sophisticated data mining techniques to recruit and shape their classes.

WikiLeaks fascine la presse, qui voit en lui une partie de son avenir.

Une équipe mystérieuse

Menacé par les services secrets américains et par tous les acteurs qu'il bouscule, WikiLeaks se protège. Pas de bureau ou d'adresse physique : seule une boîte postale à l'université de Melbourne, ainsi que des adresses e-mail anonymisées permettent aux informateurs de contacter l'équipe.

L'infrastructure technique, parfois en peine par manque de financement, est basée en Suède, chez un hébergeur lié au très controversé The Pirate Bay. D'autres serveurs sont répartis dans le monde entier,

le budget annuel de 600.000 dollars n'en est pas pour autant bouclé.

Le porte-parole, Julian Assange, a toutefois mis en place un comité éditorial restreint, dont neuf noms sont dévoilés. Parmi eux, Wang Dan, l'un des 21 étudiants "les plus recherchés" par la Chine après les manifestations de Tiananmen en 1989, le Britannique Ben Laurie, génie mondialement reconnu de la cryptographie, ou encore le Brésilien Chico Whitaker, cofondateur du Forum social mondial.

WikiLeaks a travaillé avec des élus islandais sur l'Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI)

Son objectif dans la vie ? "Provoquer ou orienter des réformes politiques", en révélant des informations jusque-là cachées aux citoyens. Un peu comme ce qu'avait fait son modèle, Daniel Ellsberg, en 1971 : cet ancien analyste de la RAND Corporation (un très influent think tank américain) avait alors transmis à la presse les "Pentagon papers"

the computer, keeping detailed records on student performance and using these records in making decisions about what is next to be presented to the student.

In our traditional learning environments, some students learn and some do not. It is this second group of students that we want to help.

problem of almost all modern learning is the lecture, a noninteractive way of learning

, on a moment-to-moment basis, just what the student knows and just what learning problems are occurring

It begins immediately with a question, with no preceding text.

experience the joy of discovery.

tutorial approach to learning makes it possible for everyone to learn.

critical factor is that we can react to individual student problems

key concept for structuring highly interactive learning experiences is the Benjamin Bloom concept of mastery learning.

goal is for everyone to learn everything to the mastery level, grades will no longer be useful

A student who has not learned in one way probably needs a different approach, rather than another go-round with the material that was not previously successful in assisting learning.

In such an environment, learning and evaluation are no longer separate activities but are part of the same process, intimately blended. So the student is not conscious of taking tests, and we avoid the problems of cheating.

highly interactive learning is intrinsically motivating. Motivation is particularly important in a distance-learning environment, since none of the "threats" of the classroom, such as low grades, are available.

mastery-based computer segment could also offer human contact. Small groups could work together, either locally or remotely via electronic communication.

existing authoring systems. Since they were, and still are, mostly directed toward supplying information, these were inadequate for creating highly interactive software.

Bertrand Ibrahim at the University of Geneva,

omputer stores much of the information as the students progress through the material.

Teaching faculty, in the sense that we know them today, may cease to exist, except for in smaller, advanced courses. But their skills and experiences will be important in the design of learning modules.

High costs of development can lead to low costs per student, if many students use the material.

$30,000 per student-hour of high-quality learning material

highly effective highly interactive distance-learning courses would have a large potential market, making them much cheaper per student than current courses, and if well developed, they will be much superior for almost all students

The typical approach is to give some released time to faculty and to give limited support for programming and media production. It is unlikely, almost impossible, that good learning material will be developed this way.

Universities are too stuck in their current ways of doing things to be able to compete with well-developed material from "outside." Most university faculty and administrators do not appreciate the current problems of learning and so are not prepared for these future directions.

in the basic forms, as well as in the content of people's thinking.

The early 1930

had experienced the conditions necessary to alter radically the content and form of their thought.

we expected that they would display a predominance of those forms of thought that come from activity that is guided by the physical features of familiar objects.

Therefore we began, as most field work with people does, by emphasizing contact with the people who would serve as our subjects. We tried to establish friendly relations so that experimental sessions seemed natural and non-threatening. We were particularly careful not to conduct hasty or unprepared presentations of the test materials.

As a rule, our experimental sessions began with long conversations which were sometimes repeated with the subjects in the relaxed atmosphere of a tea house, where the villagers spent most of their free time, or in camps in the field and in mountain pastures around the evening campfire. These talks were frequently held in groups. Even when the interviews were held with one person, the experimenter and other subjects made up a group of two or three who listened attentively to the person being interviewed and who sometimes offered remarks or comments on what he said. The talk often took the form of a free-flowing exchange of opinion between participants, and a particular problem might be solved simultaneously by two or three subjects, each proposing an answer. Only gradually did the experimenters introduce the prepared tasks, which resembled the “riddles” familiar to the population and therefore seemed like a natural extension of the conversation.

He characterized primitive thinking as “prelogical” and “loosely organized.” Primitive people were said to be indifferent to logical contradiction and dominated by the idea that mystical forces control natural phenomena

We conceived the idea of carrying out the first far-reaching study of intellectual functions among adults from a non-technological non-literate, traditional society

hamlets

nomad

1. Women living in remote villages who were illiterate and who were not involved in any modern social activities. There were still a considerable number of such women at the time our study was made. Their interviews were conducted by women, since they alone had the right to enter the women's quarters. 2. Peasants living in remote villages who were in no way involved with socialized labor and who continued to maintain an individualistic economy. These peasants were not literate. 3. Women who attended short-term courses in the teaching of kindergarteners. As a rule, they had no formal schooling and almost no training in literacy. 4. Active kolhoz (collective farm) workers and young people who had taken short courses. They were involved as chairmen running collective farms, as holders of other offices on the, collective farm, or as brigade leaders. They had considerable experience in planning production, distributing labor, and taking stock of output. By dealing with other collective farm members, they had acquired a much broader outlook than isolated peasants. But they had attended school only briefly, and many were still barely literate. 5. Women students admitted to teachers school after two or three years of study. Their educational qualifications, however, were still fairly low.

Short-term psychological experiments would have been highly problematic under the field conditions we expected to encounter