writing happens across long lengths of time, in little pockets of thinking, and that the little notes and ideas one may jot down at random times throughout a day are just as significant as those moments of longer, sustained writing. In a way, then, the iPad encouraged me as a writer to capture my thoughts in a succinct way and let them percolate for a while until I had time to expand, abandon, or adapt them later at my computer.
Denise Comer, Writing Program, with Kenneth Rogerson, Public Policy, and Rebecca Vidra, Environment, examined the pedagogies of integrating ereading technologies into writing intensive courses - preliminary findings are that scholarly reading is easier (notetaking easy) but extensive writing is not convenient... posits that we may be defining "writing" too rigidly
The studying that middle school and high school students do after the dismissal
bell rings is either an unreasonable burden or a crucial activity that needs
beefing up. Which is it? Do American students have too much homework or too
little? Neither, I’d say. We ought to be asking a different question altogether.
What should matter to parents and educators is this: How effectively do
children’s after-school assignments advance learning?
The quantity of students’ homework is a lot less important than its quality.
And evidence suggests that as of now, homework isn’t making the grade. Although
surveys show that the amount of time our children spend on homework has risen
over the last three decades, American students are mired in the middle of
international academic
rankings: 17th in reading, 23rd in science and 31st in math, according to
results from the Program for International Student Assessment released last
December.
“Spaced repetition” is one example of the kind of evidence-based techniques
that researchers have found have a positive impact on learning. Here’s how it
works: instead of concentrating the study of information in single blocks, as
many homework assignments currently do — reading about, say, the Civil War one
evening and Reconstruction the next — learners encounter the same material in
briefer sessions spread over a longer period of time. With this approach,
students are re-exposed to information about the Civil War and Reconstruction
throughout the semester.
Hi Kris, Did you submit this incident to Diigo support directly (I guess through an email to the Diigo "educator" email account? I think we'd all be curious if and how this gets resolved.
Given the growing momentum of these trends, what does it mean for students, teachers, schools, and the education community at large?
Collaborating and customizing. Educators are learning to work together, with their students, and with other experts in creating content, and are able to tailor it to exactly what they need.
Critical thinking. Students are learning how to effectively find content and to discern reliable sources.
Democratizing education. With Internet access becoming more ubiquitous, the children of the poorest people are able to get access to the same quality education as the wealthiest.
Changing the textbook industry. Textbook publishers are finding ways to make themselves relevant to their digital audience.
Emphasizing skills over facts. Curriculum incorporates skill-building.
Sorry forgot the three trends (the above are consequences of these trends)
1. Digital delivery "No longer shackled to books as their only source of content, educators and students are going online to find reliable, valuable, and up-to-the-minute information"
2. Interest driven curriculum "Though students typically have to wait until their third year of college to choose what they learn, the idea of K-12 education being tailored to students' own interests is becoming more commonplace"
3. Skills 2.0 " Instead of learning from others who have the credentials to 'teach' in this new networked world, we learn with others whom we seek (and who seek us) on our own and with whom we often share nothing more than a passion for knowing"
After four years at the charter school, eighth-graders showed average test score gains in math equal to an additional year and a half of school, compared with district students.
an extra half-year in science and almost an extra half-year in English
the charter has a lean administrative staff and slightly larger classes—31 students compared with an average of about 26 or 27 in district schools—so it can pour resources into teacher pay and training.
Teachers are observed by colleagues and get feedback weekly, and they have four weeks of full-day professional development each year.
Days are long, with teachers at work from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and students attending from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Many teachers don’t last. Of 43 hired during the four years studied, 47% didn’t return for a second year, in most cases because they weren’t asked back.
I wonder why - performance, or too much stress due to longer hours and out of work expectations? Regardless, this high turnover rate has got to impact the kids in the end.
Critics of charter schools say, among other complaints, that they drain money from regular public schools, skim talented students and nudge out disruptive ones.
Feed readers
are probably the most important digital tool for today's learner because they
make sifting through the amazing amount of content added to the Internet
easy. Also known as aggregators, feed readers are free tools that can
automatically check nearly any website for new content dozens of times a
day---saving ridiculous amounts of time and customizing learning experiences for
anyone.
Imagine
never having to go hunting for new information from your favorite sources
again. Learning goes from a frustrating search through thousands of
marginal links written by questionable characters to quickly browsing the
thoughts of writers that you trust, respect and enjoy.
Feed readers can
quickly and easily support blogging in the classroom, allowing teachers to
provide students with ready access to age-appropriate sites of interest that are
connected to the curriculum. By collecting sites in advance and organizing
them with a feed reader, teachers can make accessing information manageable for
their students.
Here are several
examples of feed readers in action:
Used specifically as
a part of one classroom project, this feed list contains information related to
global warming that students can use as a starting point for individual
research.
While there are literally dozens of different feed reader
programs to choose from (Bloglines andGoogle Reader are two
biggies), Pageflakes is a favorite of
many educators because it has a visual layout that is easy to read and
interesting to look at. It is also free and web-based. That
means that users can check accounts from any computer with an Internet
connection. Finally, Pageflakes makes it quick and easy to add new
websites to a growing feed list—and to get rid of any websites that users are no
longer interested in.
What's even
better: Pageflakes has been developinga teacher version of their tooljust for us that includes an online grade tracker,
a task list and a built in writing tutor. As Pageflakes works to perfect
its teacher product, this might become one of the first kid-friendly feed
readers on the market. Teacher Pageflakes users can actually blog and create a
discussion forum directly in their feed reader---making an all-in-one digital
home for students.
For more
information about the teacher version of Pageflakes, check out this
review:
uture is not
out there to be "discovered": It has to be invented and designed.
Learning is a process of knowledge construction, not of knowledge
recording or absorption.
Learning is knowledge-dependent; people use their
existing knowledge to construct new knowledge.
Learning is highly tuned to the situation in which
it takes place.
Learning needs to account for distributed cognition
requiring knowledge in the head to combined with knowledge in the world.
Learning is affected as much by motivational issues
as by cognitive issues.
previous
notions of a divided lifetime-education followed by work-are no longer
tenable.
Professional activity has become so
knowledge-intensive and fluid in content that learning has become an integral
and inseparable part of "adult" work activities.
require educational tools
and environments whose primary aim is to help cultivate the desire to
learn and create, and not to simply communicate subject matter divorced
from meaningful and personalized activity.
current
uses of technology in education: it is used as an add-on to existing practices
rather than a catalyst for fundamentally rethinking what education should
be about in the next century
information technologies have been
used to mechanize old ways of doing business‹rather than fundamentally
rethinking the underlying work processes and promoting new ways to create
artifacts and knowledge.
important challenge
is that the ?ld basic skillsº such as reading, writing, and arithmetic,
once acquired, were relevant for the duration of a human life; modern
?asic skillsº (tied to rapidly changing technologies) will change over
time.
We need computational environments to support "new" frameworks
for education such as lifelong learning, integration of working and learning,
learning on demand, authentic problems, self-directed learning, information
contextualized to the task at hand, (intrinsic) motivation, collaborative
learning, and organizational learning.
Instructionist approaches are not changed by the fact that
information is disseminated by an intelligent tutoring system.
Lifelong learning is a continuous engagement in acquiring
and applying knowledge and skills in the context of authentic, self-directed
problems.
ubstantial empirical evidence that the chief impediments to learning
are not cognitive. It is not that students cannot learn; it is that
they are not well motivated to learn.
Most of what any individual "knows" today
is not in her or his head, but is out in the world (e.g., in other human
heads or embedded in media).
technology should provide ways to "say the 'right' thing at
the 'right' time in the 'right' way
challenge of whether
we can create learning environments in which learners work hard, not because
they have to, but because they want to. We need to alter the perception
that serious learning has to be unpleasant rather than personally meaningful,
empowering, engaging, and even fun.
making information relevant to the task at hand,
providing challenges matched to current skills, creating communities (among
peers, over the net), and providing access to real practitioners and experts.
What "basic skills" are required in a world in which
occupational knowledge and skills become obsolete in years rather than
decades?
reduce the gap between school
and workplace learning
How can schools (which currently rely on closed-book
exams, the solving of given problems, and so forth) be changed so that
learners are prepared to function in environments requiring collaboration,
creativity, problem framing, and distributed cognition?
problem solving in the real world
includes problem framing calls into question the practice of asking
students to solve mostly given problems.
teachers should see themselves not as truth-tellers
and oracles, but as coaches, facilitators, learners, and mentors
engaging with learners
I'm wondering how old this page might be. The wonderful Aviary suite of tools is no longer online and hasn't been for a while. Others are good suggestions, though!
the skills students need in the 21st century are not new.
Critical thinking and problem solving, for example, have been components of human progress throughout history
What's actually new is the extent to which changes in our economy and the world mean that collective and individual success depends on having such skills
Many reform efforts, from reducing class size to improving reading instruction, have devolved into fads or been implemented with weak fidelity to their core intent. The 21st century skills movement faces the same risk.
some of the rhetoric we have heard surrounding this movement suggests that with so much new knowledge being created, content no longer matters; that ways of knowing information are now much more important than information itself. Such notions contradict what we know about teaching and learning and raise concerns that the 21st century skills movement will end up being a weak intervention for the very students—low-income students and students of color—who most need powerful schools as a matter of social equity.
First, educators and policymakers must ensure that the instructional program is complete and that content is not shortchanged for an ephemeral pursuit of skills
Second, states, school districts, and schools need to revamp how they think about human capital in education—in particular how teachers are trained
inally, we need new assessments that can accurately measure richer learning and more complex tasks
Skills and knowledge are not separate, however, but intertwined.
In some cases, knowledge helps us recognize the underlying structure of a problem.
At other times, we know that we have a particular thinking skill, but domain knowledge is necessary if we are to use it.
if skills are independent of content, we could reasonably conclude that we can develop these skills through the use of any content. For example, if students can learn how to think critically about science in the context of any scientific material, a teacher should select content that will engage students (for instance, the chemistry of candy), even if that content is not central to the field. But all content is not equally important to mathematics, or to science, or to literature. To think critically, students need the knowledge that is central to the domain.
The importance of content in the development of thinking creates several challenges
first is the temptation to emphasize advanced, conceptual thinking too early in training
Another curricular challenge is that we don't yet know how to teach self-direction, collaboration, creativity, and innovation the way we know how to teach long division.
But experience is not the same thing as practice. Experience means only that you use a skill; practice means that you try to improve by noticing what you are doing wrong and formulating strategies to do better. Practice also requires feedback, usually from someone more skilled than you are.
We must plan to teach skills in the context of particular content knowledge and to treat both as equally important.
education leaders must be realistic about which skills are teachable. If we deem that such skills as collaboration and self-direction are essential, we should launch a concerted effort to study how they can be taught effectively rather than blithely assume that mandating their teaching will result in students learning them.
teachers don't use them.
Even when class sizes are reduced, teachers do not change their teaching strategies or use these student-centered method
these methods pose classroom management problems for teachers.
These methods also demand that teachers be knowledgeable about a broad range of topics and are prepared to make in-the-moment decisions as the lesson plan progresses.
constant juggling act
greater collaboration among teachers.
But where will schools find the release time for such collaboration?
professional development is a massive undertaking.
Unfortunately, there is a widespread belief that teachers already know how to do this if only we could unleash them from today's stifling standards and accountability metrics. This notion romanticizes student-centered methods, underestimates the challenge of implementing such methods, and ignores the lack of capacity in the field today.
The first challenge is the cost.
measures that encourage greater creativity, show how students arrived at answers, and even allow for collaboration.
When students first encounter new ideas, their knowledge is shallow and their understanding is bound to specific examples. They need exposure to varied examples before their understanding of a concept becomes more abstract and they can successfully apply that understanding to novel situations.
One approach is to assign watching the video and then a low-stakes assignment--such as a quiz over key points, or having them write a short response to a key question that will be discussed the next class, or to write about what was unclear, new, or useful from the material.
given an outline for each unit that includes all the resources they might need for each objective
With the heat in the last wee, it is time for business to start accepting this new reality and take the necessary steps to reduce emissions
Antarctica was melting at a steady rate — one-fifth of a millimeter per year — before 2012, when the rate suddenly tripled and stayed at that pace. The current melt rate is now faster than at any time over the past quarter century.
Polar Bear starved a few months ago because the the glaciers were no longer stocked with seals.
Their findings showed that the decisions we make over the next decade will determine whether or not Earth is locked into an additional 3 feet of sea level rise.
American maverick who insisted that the only way to tell a great story was to go out and report it.
journalism could offer the kinds of literary pleasure found in books.
Wolfe scorned the reluctance of American writers to confront social issues and warned that self-absorption and master’s programs would kill the novel. “So the doors close and the walls go up!” he wrote in his 1989 literary manifesto, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast.” He was astonished that no author of his generation had written a sweeping, 19th century style novel about contemporary New York City, and ended up writing one himself, “The Bonfire of the Vanities.”
“My contention is that status is on everybody’s mind all of the time, whether they’re conscious of it or not,”
“new journalism” combined the emotional impact of a novel, the analysis of the best essays, and the factual foundation of hard reporting. He mingled it all in an over-the-top style that made life itself seem like one spectacular headline.
pointed look at fund-raising for the Black Panther Party by Leonard Bernstein and other wealthy whites.
And no one more memorably captured the beauty-and-the-beast divide between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones: “The Beatles want to hold your hand,” he wrote, “but the Rolling Stones want to burn down your town!”
s a child, he did rewrites of the Authurian legends and penned biographies of his heroes.
unsuccessful pitching tryout with the New York Giants before
The Washington Post, where he won Washington Newspaper Guild awards in 1960 for his coverage of U.S.-Cuban affairs and a satiric account of that year’s Senate civil rights filibuster.
The next year, Wolfe was assigned to cover a “Hot Rod & Custom Car” show. He completed a story, the kind “any of the somnambulistic totem newspapers in America would have come up with.”
But he knew there was a much richer, and longer story to tell, one about a thriving subculture that captured the post-World War II economic boom and the new freedom to “build monuments” to one’s own style. No newspaper could contain what Wolfe had in mind, so he turned to Esquire magazine, wrote up 49 pages and helped give birth to a new kind of reporter.
“For the who-what-where-when-why of traditional journalism, he has substituted what he calls ‘the wowie!'” according to a 1965 Newsweek story.
“A Man in Full” turned Wolfe’s smirk to Atlanta society. His 2004 novel, “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” looked at life on a fictional elite college campus rife with drinking, status obsession and sex.
includes short VIDEO
"Wolfe scorned the reluctance of American writers to confront social issues and warned that self-absorption and master's programs would kill the novel."
If the new trend in textbooks is moving them to computer screens, the switch could have negative consequences as many suggest that people skim more, process more shallowly, and may retain less information when reading online, Daniel said.
he readers’ goals are different: Individuals reading an e-book for enjoyment aren’t required to pass a comprehension-based test afterward. While they found that learning is possible from both formats, learning from e-textbooks takes longer and requires more effort to reach the same level of understanding, even in a controlled lab environment. At home, students report taking even more time to read e-textbooks as well as higher rates of muti-tasking (e.g., Facebook, electronic chat, texting, email, etc.) than do their peers using printed textbooks.
In their preliminary findings, the scanning pattern produced when the student read a textbook showed consistent reading from line to line down the page. But the scanning pattern from reading on the screen was less intense.
Daniel and Jakobsen argue that the information dense textbooks characteristic of natural and social science subjects are not a good fit for current e-textbooks, but there are exceptions for subjects like chemistry and math that include doing formulas and other activities. The liability, Daniel emphasizes, comes when math and chemistry teachers hope their students will learn the explanations, not just the formulas, “Students tend to skip the text and go straight to the formulas, especially if they are graded.”
In a review of educational research published by SAGE Journals in July, Singer and University of Maryland professor Patricia Alexander discovered that readers may not comprehend complex or lengthy material as well when they view it digitally as when they read it on paper. While they concluded with a call for more research, the pair wrote, “It is fair to say that reading digitally is part and parcel of living and learning in the 21st century … No matter how complex the question of reading across mediums may be, teachers and students must understand how and when to employ a digital reading device.”
In an interview with “Inside Digital Learning,” Singer confirmed, “Digital devices aren’t going anywhere. This no longer is a question of, ‘Will the digital device be in your classroom?’ but ‘What do we know about the digital device, and how can we make this equal to print?’”
For example, she said instructors should take the time to show students how to annotate a PDF and make them aware that most people read more quickly on a screen than in print and therefore could lose some comprehension. She also suggested that teachers ask students to answer, in one sentence, what the overall point of the text was every time they read a chapter or an article online.
“Sometimes students only need to get the main idea,” Singer said, “and then digital is just as good as print and a lot quicker … But if you want deep comprehension and synthesis of the material, have the students print it out and navigate the material that way. Think about what you want students to get out of a lesson” before assigning a printed or digital reading.
Donovan added, “I do agree that we’ve got to figure this out … because it isn’t going away, for sure, for lots of reasons: accessibility, cost, sustainability. We have to figure out how we can support students in comprehending from this format.”
But he said he believes “we can still get as much meaning out of digital text. We just haven’t found the right transitions to do what we actually do with a physical book, with digital text … We haven’t found the digital equivalent of interacting with text. We haven’t really trained people to do that.”
Studies have shown that taking notes by longhand will help you remember important meeting points better than tapping notes out on your laptop or smartphone. The reason for that could be that “writing stimulates an area of the brain called the RAS (reticular activating system), which filters and brings clarity to the fore the information we’re focusing on
says one explanation for the benefit of reading analog books may come down to something called metacomprehension deficit. “Metacomprehension refers to how well we are ‘in touch with,’ literally speaking, our own comprehension while reading,” says Mangen. “For instance, how much time do you spend reading a text in order to understand it well enough to solve a task afterwards?”
“Length does indeed seem to be a central issue, and closely related to length are a number of other dimensions of a text, e.g., structure and layout. Is the content presented in such a way that it is required that you keep in mind several occurrences/text places at the same time?” says Mangen. In other words, she says, complexity and information density may play a role in the importance of the medium providing the text.
“It is not–and should not be–a question of either/or, but of using the most appropriate medium in a given situation, and for a given material/content and purpose of reading,”
As the study cited above mentions, like other digital readers, you probably think you are absorbing the information better than you actually are, and thus move through the book faster.A simple solution to this is to simply slow down and take more time reading the material, and you might absorb the information just as well as those who naturally take longer to read a paper book.
there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.
“Creativity can be taught,”
it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children
Students are labeled as "creative" if they display a knack for art or music, and sometimes in writing, however, they are rarely recognized as creative in math or science where a lot of creativity is not only needed, but excellent for learning within those very two disciplines.
This is precisely why creativity education is important. It is needed everywhere, not just in the arts. Those teaching outside of arts education need to start recognizing the importance of creative thinking as well.
When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”
The argument that we can’t teach creativity because kids already have too much to learn is a false trade-off. Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process.
When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available to the left hemisphere, which searches for unseen patterns, alternative meanings, and high-level abstractions.
Having glimpsed such a connection, the left brain must quickly lock in on it before it escapes. The attention system must radically reverse gears, going from defocused attention to extremely focused attention. In a flash, the brain pulls together these disparate shreds of thought and binds them into a new single idea that enters consciousness. This is the “aha!” moment of insight, often followed by a spark of pleasure as the brain recognizes the novelty of what it’s come up with.
Now the brain must evaluate the idea it just generated. Is it worth pursuing? Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas. Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate.
those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better
Creativity has always been prized in American society, but it’s never really been understood. While our creativity scores decline unchecked, the current national strategy for creativity consists of little more than praying for a Greek muse to drop by our houses. The problems we face now, and in the future, simply demand that we do more than just hope for inspiration to strike. Fortunately, the science can help: we know the steps to lead that elusive muse right to our doors.
Likely because it was out of necessity and the hardships of life. Not that we don't have hardships and necessities, but innovation has solved a lot of problems and automation has made skills and tasks easy.
What’s common about successful programs is they alternate maximum divergent thinking with bouts of intense convergent thinking, through several stages. Real improvement doesn’t happen in a weekend workshop. But when applied to the everyday process of work or school, brain function improves.
Everyday process of work or school... over time, consistent and non-prescriptive.
kids demonstrated the very definition of creativity: alternating between divergent and convergent thinking, they arrived at original and useful ideas. And they’d unwittingly mastered Ohio’s required fifth-grade curriculum—from understanding sound waves to per-unit cost calculations to the art of persuasive writing. “You never see our kids saying, ‘I’ll never use this so I don’t need to learn it,’ ” says school administrator Maryann Wolowiec. “Instead, kids ask, ‘Do we have to leave school now?’ ” Two weeks ago, when the school received its results on the state’s achievement test, principal Traci Buckner was moved to tears. The raw scores indicate that, in its first year, the school has already become one of the top three schools in Akron, despite having open enrollment by lottery and 42 percent of its students living in poverty.
project-based learning
highly creative adults frequently grew up with hardship. Hardship by itself doesn’t lead to creativity, but it does force kids to become more flexible—and flexibility helps with creativity.
When creative children have a supportive teacher—someone tolerant of unconventional answers, occasional disruptions, or detours of curiosity—they tend to excel. When they don’t, they tend to underperform and drop out of high school or don’t finish college at high rates.
They’re quitting because they’re discouraged and bored, not because they’re dark, depressed, anxious, or neurotic. It’s a myth that creative people have these traits. (Those traits actually shut down creativity; they make people less open to experience and less interested in novelty.) Rather, creative people, for the most part, exhibit active moods and positive affect. They’re not particularly happy—contentment is a kind of complacency creative people rarely have. But they’re engaged, motivated, and open to the world.
solutions emerge from a healthy marketplace of ideas, sustained by a populace constantly contributing original ideas and receptive to the ideas of others
The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded.
When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.
The lore of pop psychology is that creativity occurs on the right side of the brain. But we now know that if you tried to be creative using only the right side of your brain, it’d be like living with ideas perpetually at the tip of your tongue, just beyond reach
those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better. A lifetime of consistent habits gradually changes the neurological pattern.
The home-game version of this means no longer encouraging kids to spring straight ahead to the right answer
The new view is that creativity is part of normal brain function.
“As a child, I never had an identity as a ‘creative person,’ ” Schwarzrock recalls. “But now that I know, it helps explain a lot of what I felt and went through.”
In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach.
fact-finding
problem-finding
Next, idea-finding
there is one crucial difference between IQ
and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn
effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are
making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified
and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are
falling.
The matter is by no means settled. Before 1992 most studies concluded that people read slower, less accurately and less comprehensively on screens than on paper. Studies published since the early 1990s, however, have produced more inconsistent results: a slight majority has confirmed earlier conclusions, but almost as many have found few significant differences in reading speed or comprehension between paper and screens. And recent surveys suggest that although most people still prefer paper—especially when reading intensively—attitudes are changing as tablets and e-reading technology improve and reading digital books for facts and fun becomes more common.
Compared with paper, screens may also drain more of our mental resources while we are reading and make it a little harder to remember what we read when we are done. A parallel line of research focuses on people's attitudes toward different kinds of media. Whether they realize it or not, many people approach computers and tablets with a state of mind less conducive to learning than the one they bring to paper.
Both anecdotally and in published studies, people report that when trying to locate a particular piece of written information they often remember where in the text it appeared. We might recall that we passed the red farmhouse near the start of the trail before we started climbing uphill through the forest; in a similar way, we remember that we read about Mr. Darcy rebuffing Elizabeth Bennett on the bottom of the left-hand page in one of the earlier chapters.
At least a few studies suggest that by limiting the way people navigate texts, screens impair comprehension.
Because of their easy navigability, paper books and documents may be better suited to absorption in a text. "The ease with which you can find out the beginning, end and everything inbetween and the constant connection to your path, your progress in the text, might be some way of making it less taxing cognitively, so you have more free capacity for comprehension," Mangen says.
An e-reader always weighs the same, regardless of whether you are reading Proust's magnum opus or one of Hemingway's short stories. Some researchers have found that these discrepancies create enough "haptic dissonance" to dissuade some people from using e-readers. People expect books to look, feel and even smell a certain way; when they do not, reading sometimes becomes less enjoyable or even unpleasant. For others, the convenience of a slim portable e-reader outweighs any attachment they might have to the feel of paper books.
In one of his experiments 72 volunteers completed the Higher Education Entrance Examination READ test—a 30-minute, Swedish-language reading-comprehension exam consisting of multiple-choice questions about five texts averaging 1,000 words each. People who took the test on a computer scored lower and reported higher levels of stress and tiredness than people who completed it on paper.
Perhaps, then, any discrepancies in reading comprehension between paper and screens will shrink as people's attitudes continue to change. The star of "A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Work" is three-and-a-half years old today and no longer interacts with paper magazines as though they were touchscreens, her father says. Perhaps she and her peers will grow up without the subtle bias against screens that seems to lurk in the minds of older generations. In current research for Microsoft, Sellen has learned that many people do not feel much ownership of e-books because of their impermanence and intangibility: "They think of using an e-book, not owning an e-book," she says. Participants in her studies say that when they really like an electronic book, they go out and get the paper version. This reminds Sellen of people's early opinions of digital music, which she has also studied. Despite initial resistance, people love curating, organizing and sharing digital music today. Attitudes toward e-books may transition in a similar way, especially if e-readers and tablets allow more sharing and social interaction than they currently do.
The term authenticity has been applied to music in various ways. It might be used to describe a piece of music (recorded, notated, performed); the process by which the music is taught and learned ( through recordings, live models, notation); or the manner in which it is performed (venue, dress, behaviors).
In other words, authenticity lies within the perceptions of the individual.
Anthony Palmer, who teaches music education at Boston University, has said that music with "absolute authenticity" is performed (a) by and for members of the culture; (b) in a typical setting, as determined by the members of the culture; (c) with instruments specified by the creator(s) of the music; and (d) in its original language.[ 8] Inarguably, and as Palmer recognizes, attaining this level of authenticity is impossible in a school music program (unless we consider "school music" residing within a unique culture of its own). In school, music is separated from its primary source many times over. Music is passed from its primary source (composer, grandmother) to an intermediary (arranger, performer, notation, recording) and channeled through a publisher or presenter to the teacher and finally to students. To confound matters, there are variants of melodies, lyrics, dances, games, and performance styles.
Ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl explains that "societies differ, however, in their attitude toward musical stability; to some it is important that a song remain stable and unchanged, while in others individual singers are encouraged to have their personal versions."
but he believes educators must determine at what point that musical experience is no longer acceptable as representative of that culture.
Having clear visions of educational goals and the broad curriculum is vital to making these determinations.
Bennett Reimer states, "Those inner workings are themselves the project of cultural systems, so they must be revealed in their contexts, historical, cultural, and political, in order to be grasped appropriately; that is, 'knowing about' becomes an essential ingredient of artistry and of listening."[ 15] For example, children might not fully understand the meaning of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" unless they understand what baseball is or realize that the song is traditionally sung at baseball games.
text in an unfamiliar language should include a translation so students understand the meaning of the words.
However, a culturally valid work is not necessarily bias free; and conversely, bias-free music is not necessarily culturally valid.
Selecting the best music to represent a culture in an unbiased manner is a process of discovery. You will first need to educate yourself before you can educate others.
We should be very careful in thinking about whether we’re working on the right problems. If we don’t, that ties into the problem that we don’t have experimental evidence that could move us forward. We're trying to develop theories that we use to find out which are good experiments to make, and these are the experiments that we build.
We build particle detectors and try to find dark matter; we build larger colliders in the hope of producing new particles; we shoot satellites into orbit and try to look back into the early universe, and we do that because we hope there’s something new to find there. We think there is because we have some idea from the theories that we’ve been working on that this would be something good to probe.
If we are working with the wrong theories, we are making the wrong extrapolations, we have the wrong expectations, we make the wrong experiments, and then we don’t get any new data. We have no guidance to develop these theories. So, it’s a chicken and egg problem. We have to break the cycle. I don’t have a miracle cure to these problems. These are hard problems. It’s not clear what a good theory is to develop. I’m not any wiser than all the other 20,000 people in the field.
I’m still asking myself the same question that I asked myself ten years ago: "What is going on in my community?" I work in the foundations of physics, and I see a lot of strange things happening there. When I look at the papers that are being published, many of them seem to be produced simply because papers have to be produced. They don’t move us forward in any significant way. I get the impression that people are working on them not so much because it’s what they’re interested in but because they have to produce outcomes in a short amount of time. They sit on short-term positions and have short-term contracts, and papers must be produced.
The field that I mostly work in is the foundations of physics, which is, roughly speaking, composed of cosmology, the foundations of quantum mechanics, high-energy particle physics, and quantum gravity. It’s a peculiar field because there hasn’t been new data for almost four decades, since we established the Standard Model of particle physics. There has been, of course, the Higgs particle that was discovered at the LHC in 2012, and there have been some additions to the Standard Model, but there has not been a great new paradigm change, as Kuhn would have put it. We’re still using the same techniques, and we’re still working with the same theories as we did in the 1970s.
That makes this field of science rather peculiar and probably explains why there hasn’t been much progress. But it’s not like we don’t have any questions that need to be answered. There are a lot of questions that have been around for decades. For example, what is dark energy? What is dark matter? What are the masses of the Standard Model particles? And what’s up with the foundation of quantum mechanics? Is a theory that's fundamentally not deterministic, where we cannot predict outcomes, the last word that we have, or is there something more to it? Is there maybe another underlying structure to reality?
but we haven't reached the fundamental level. Maybe we will never reach it. Certainly, the theories that we have right now are not all there is. The question is, of course, if we don’t have any guidance by experiment, how do we make progress? And are we doing the right thing?
We’ve reached this point where we have to carefully rethink if the criteria that we’re using to select our theories are promising at all. If one looks at the history of this field in the foundations of physics, progress has usually been made by looking at questions that, at least in hindsight, were well posed, where there was an actual mathematical contradiction.
For example, special relativity is incompatible with Newtonian gravity. If you try to resolve this incompatibility, you get general relativity.
There are various similar examples where such breakthroughs have happened because there was a real problem. There was an inconsistency and people had to resolve it. It had nothing to do with beauty. Maybe beauty was, in some cases, the personal motivation of the people to work on it. There’s certainly some truth to this, but I don’t think it’s good to turn this story around and say that if we only pay attention to this motivation that comes from ideals of beauty it will lead to progress.
If we are working with the wrong theories, we are making the wrong extrapolations, we have the wrong expectations, we make the wrong experiments, and then we don’t get any new data. We have no guidance to develop these theories. So, it’s a chicken and egg problem. We have to break the cycle. I don’t have a miracle cure to these problems. These are hard problems. It’s not clear what a good theory is to develop. I’m not any wiser than all the other 20,000 people in the field.
The way that research is funded in foundations of physics and in many other fields just puts a lot of things at a disadvantage that are not pursued anymore. Typically, everything that takes longer than three years to complete, no one will start it because they can’t afford it. They can literally not afford it.
Who makes the decisions about the funding? Superficially, people say that it's a funding agency, so it’s the university who get to hire people. But that puts the blame on the wrong party. In the end it’s the community itself who makes the decisions. What do the funding agencies do if they get a proposal? They send it to reviewers. And who are the reviewers? They're people from the same community. If you look at how hiring decisions are being made, there’s some committee and they are people from the same community. They have some advisory boards or something, which contains people from the same community.
Even if that wasn’t so, what the people in these committees would be doing is looking at easy measures for scientific success. Presently, the most popular of these measures are the number of publications and the number of citations. And maybe also whether the person has published in high-impact journals. So, these are the typical measures that are presently being used. But what do they measure? They primarily measure popularity. They indicate whether somebody’s research is well received by a lot of people in the same community. And that’s why once a research area grows beyond a certain critical mass, you have sufficiently many people who tell each other that what they’re doing is the good thing to do. They review each other’s papers and say that that’s great and it's what we should continue to do. It’s a problem in all communities that grow beyond a certain size.
I later came to the United States and then Canada, and that gave me the opportunity to learn a lot about quantum gravity. I also figured out that much of what goes on in quantum gravity is very detached from reality. It’s pretty much only mathematics. Yes, the mathematics is there, but I still don’t know if it’s the mathematics that describes reality.
That’s the very reason why we don’t normally think of gravity as a weak force. It’s the only force that is left over on long distances, and the reason for this is that it adds up. It gets stronger the more mass you pile up. More precisely, we should say that the reason we find it so hard to measure quantum gravitational effects is that we either have a particle that has very pronounced quantum properties, like, say, a single electron or something like that, but then it’s so light that we cannot measure the gravitational field. Or we have some object that is so heavy that we can measure the gravitational field, but then it doesn’t have quantum properties. Okay, so that’s the actual problem.
Denise Comer, Writing Program, with Kenneth Rogerson, Public Policy, and Rebecca Vidra, Environment, examined the pedagogies of integrating ereading technologies into writing intensive courses - preliminary findings are that scholarly reading is easier (notetaking easy) but extensive writing is not convenient... posits that we may be defining "writing" too rigidly
