Group items tagged

The Social Computing Symposium 2012 focuses on the changing nature of "the public," and is held on the campus of New York University in the Interactive Telecommunication Program space on January 12-13. Since 2004, Microsoft Research (MSR) has sponsored an annual symposium on social computing that has brought together academic and industry researchers, social startups, writers, and influential commentators in order to open new lines of communication among previously disconnected groups.

This sixth volume of PISA 2009 results explores students' use of information technologies to learn. . In 2009, students in 19 countries and economies took a PISA test using computers which tested their ability to navigate and evaluate information on line. Students also filled in a background questionnaire providing information on their use of computers both in school and at home.

"The headquarters of what has rapidly become the largest school in the world, at 10 million students strong, is stuffed into a few large communal rooms in a decaying 1960s office building hard by the commuter rail tracks in Mountain View, Calif. Despite the cramped, dowdy circumstances, youthful optimism at the Khan Academy abounds. At the weekly organization-wide meeting, discussion about translating their offerings into dozens of languages is sandwiched between a video of staffers doing weird dances with their hands and plans for upcoming camping and ski trips."

"If there is one general rule about the limitations of the human mind, it is that we are terrible at multitasking. The old phrase "united we stand, divided we fall" applies equally well to the mechanisms of attention as it does to a patriotic cause. When devoted to a single task, the brain excels; when several goals splinter its focus, errors become unavoidable."

"In 1991 a Yale professor David Gelernter envisioned a lot of what we now do on the Internet. Future computing, he thinks, may be organized around a concept called 'lifestreams.'"

This paper examines undergraduate student use of laptop computers during a lecture-style class that includes substantial problem-solving activities and graphic-based content. The study includes both a self-reported use component collected from student surveys as well as a monitored use component collected via activity monitoring "spyware" installed on student laptops. We categorize multitasking activities into productive (course-related) versus distractive (non course-related) tasks. Quantifiable measures of software multitasking behavior are introduced to measure the frequency of student multitasking, the duration of student multitasking, and the extent to which students engage in distractive versus productive tasks.

Ask Seymour Papert, renowned expert on children and computing, why students are turned off by school, and he quickly offers an example: "We teach numbers, then algebra, then calculus, then physics. Wrong!" exclaims the Massachusetts Institute of Technology mathematician, a pioneer in artificial intelligence. "Start with engineering, and from that abstract out physics, and from that abstract out ideas of calculus, and eventually separate off pure mathematics. So much better to have the first-grade kid or kindergarten kid doing engineering and leave it to the older ones to do pure mathematics than to do it the other way around."

"Computers, electronic whiteboards and other interactive technologies are fundamentally changing American education . That's the view of the experts whom The Times spoke with about what the classroom will look like ten years from now. Listen to excerpts from their predictions below, and share your own thoughts in the comments section. "

Our interactive people's history of the internet brings together your stories, alongside our own research and video interviews with key figures