Great graphic

USDA Report: Two-thirds of U.S. Farms Have Internet Access
Telecompetitor.com
By Joan Engebretson

Nearly two-thirds (62%) of U.S. farms now have Internet access, compared with 59% in 2009, according to a new report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture titled “Farm Computer Usage and Ownership.”

DSL was the most common method of accessing the Internet, with 38% of U.S. farms using it–up from 36% in 2009. The next most popular Internet access method was wireless (20%), followed by satellite (15%), dial-up (12%) and cable modem (11%). The 2009 numbers for those services were 13%, 13%, 23% and 11%, respectively.

http://www.telecompetitor.com/usda-report-two-thirds-of-u-s-farms-have-internet-access/
( but is it Broadband?)

http://blog.fedcan.ca/2011/05/20/equity-and-social-justice-from-the-inside-out-ten-commitments-of-a-multicultural-educ
Equity and social justice from the inside-out: Ten commitments of a multicultural educator

Paul C. Gorski, George Mason University
Guest Contributor
This blog entry is part of the Equity Issues Portfolio's series on 'interculturalism and pluralism'.
History teaches us that many progressive initiatives, if not nurtured carefully, risk growing to reflect the very ideologies against which they were formed. This is a risk faced by multicultural education. So certainly we need to organize ourselves against attempts to discredit the value of multicultural education by those who are most invested in maintaining the status quo. To dismiss multicultural education is, after all, to dismiss ideals of equity and social justice.
To be sure, discrediting voices always will exist. And they will crescendo as we make advances toward greater equity and justice in schools and society. As a long-time board member of the National Association for Multicultural Education, I found cause for celebration when I learned that conservative organizations were infiltrating our conferences. The threat of progress inspires organizations hostile to multicultural education to unleash the shouters and naysayers. We must be at the ready to respond.
Troubling the Multicultural Education Choir
There is, however, an even more insidious threat to multicultural education and the ideals of educational equity and justice. I often hear people who care about equity concerns say, "We're preaching to the choir." In my experience, when it comes to multicultural education and advancing equity and social justice, the most dangerous threat comes from within the so-called "choir."
Allow me to explain: Even those of us who fancy ourselves as 'progressives,' somewhere on a continuum between liberal and radical, are subject to the influence of dominant ideologies. How conscious we are of this influence, and how we respond to it, matters. There are, for example, a number of my multicultural education colleagues in the United States who criticize high-stakes testing regimens as "culturally biased" or "unjust" and then proceed to comply with the neoliberal thrust behind these regimens by obsessing in their scholarship or practice over a so-called "achievement gap." Paradoxically, they tend to describe this gap exclusively in terms of standardized test scores.
I have observed, as well, that, although many of us who would reject the notion that we can assume anything about a student's needs or aspirations or challenges or talents based on a single identity dimension, many buy into grossly simplified paradigms, like the "culture of poverty" myth or models that suggest there are "female" and "male" learning styles. The "culture of poverty" approach was dismissed in the social sciences forty years ago. Nonetheless, this form of deficit thinking still seems to drive conversations about class, poverty, and education in the United States and, increasingly, in Canada.
Celebrating Diversity Is Not Enough
So when I consider the future of multicultural education, my fear is hastened less byresistance from naysayers than by misdirection by multiculturalists. My worst fear is that a vast majority of the initiatives, practices, and policies enacted in the name of diversity or multiculturalism appear, at closer look, to resemble, at best, cultural fluffery and, at worst, cultural imperialism.
I've traveled around the world studying this phenomenon: a "multiculturalism" which has been whittled down so far that its equity and social justice roots no longer are evident in practice. Particularly in the colonized lands of the Americas, multiculturalism seems to be heavy, and getting heavier, on Taco Nights, intercultural dialogues, and multicultural festivals, and light, and getting lighter, on economic justice, racial equity, anti-sexism, and queer rights. And to whose benefit? Who or what are we protecting?
Don't get me wrong. Festivals and dialogues have their places in multicultural initiatives. But when efforts for racial harmony replace movements for racial justice; when we find ourselves learning about stereotyped class "cultures" rather than examining economic injustice (or at least inequities in access to quality schooling); when we come to believe that cross-group dialogue is transformative in and of itself rather than what prepares us to be transformative: this is when we, as multiculturalists, turn our backs on inequity and injustice and do the bidding of the powerful in the name of "multiculturalism."
Listen to Paul C. Gorski, "Celebrating Diversity in not Enough: Finding Authentic Pathways to Equity."
Read: Paul C. Gorski's "What we're teaching our teachers."
How, then, might we work to ensure that we are not undermining our own commitments to multicultural education? How might we ensure that we are working against oppressive ideologies rather than replicating them in the name of multiculturalism?
Ten Commitments of a Multicultural Educator
I propose the following "Ten Commitments of a Multicultural Educator" as a place to start. I offer these commitments not in a spirit of judgment nor with any illusion that I have reached any appreciable level of proficiency with them. Rather, I offer them as somebody who struggles each day to embody them. I offer this challenge to my colleagues, but no more so than I offer it to myself.
(1) I commit to working at intersections. Too often, those of us doing equity and justice work become so focused on a single identity or oppression - I have been focused largely on class and economic justice lately - that we fail to consider how identities and oppressions are intersectional. I cannot do anti-racism if I am not doing anti-heterosexism, anti-sexism, and so on. I commit to understanding more fully how issue-specific organizations are forced, even if implicitly, to compete for whatever little piece of pie (e.g., financial resources, media attention) we are afforded, perhaps in order to ensure that we do not organize ourselves and insist, instead, on a bigger piece of pie.
(2) I commit to understanding the "sociopolitical context" of schooling. What Sonia Nieto calls the "sociopolitical context" of schooling requires me to see the bigger picture, to understand multicultural work in the context of neoliberalism, corporatization, consumer culture, the other conditions which inform dominant ideologies regarding social and educational access and opportunity.
(3) I commit to refusing the master's paradigms. I will not endorse neoliberal or corporate-centric principles by incorporating them, even if implicitly, into my multicultural work. I will not minimize educational inequity to test scores; refer to people as "at-risk" or families as "broken"; or discuss multicultural competencies as essential to "preparing us to compete in the global marketplace." I will not call something an achievement gap when it more precisely can be described as an opportunity gap.
(4) I commit to never reducing multiculturalism to cultural activities or celebrations. I will transcend the "4 Ds" (dress, dance, diet and dialect). Although multicultural festivals and food fairs can be part of a bigger initiative toward multiculturalism, they do not, in and of themselves, make any school or organization or community more equitable and just. In fact, they more likely will strengthen stereotypes than unravel them.
(5) I commit to never confusing multiculturalism with universal validation. Multiculturalism is not about valuing every perspective equally. For example, multiculturalism does not value heteronormativity or male supremacy even when one explains that these views are grounded in her or his religion. A multicultural space - a school or classroom, for instance - cannot be both multicultural and hegemonic.
(6) I commit to resisting simple solutions to complex problems. While simple and practical solutions may be tempting they are a distraction from what needs to be done to resolve complex social problems and conditions. I commit to resisting the temptation to buy into models and paradigms that over-simplify complexities, regardless of how popular they are. That the town or school district next door endorses a person or an approach to multiculturalism is not enough; in fact, it might be the best evidence that the person or approach fits snugly into the status quo.
(7) I commit to being informed. I will do the work to find strategies for bolstering equity and social justice which are based on evidence of what works. I will look at this evidence in light of what I know about my own community. Moreover, I will not limit "evidence" to quantitative studies; I will seek the voices of local communities and stakeholders in the sorts of deep and narrative ways that cannot be captured in a quantitative survey.
(8) I commit to working with and in service to disenfranchised communities. I must practice the ethic of 'working with' rather than working on disenfranchised communities or on their behalf, particularly when I am in a position of privilege relative to them. I will apply my commitment to equity and social justice, not just in the content of my multicultural work, but also in my processes for doing that work.
(9) I commit to rejecting deficit ideology. I will refuse to identify the source of social problems and conditions by looking down rather than up power hierarchies. I reject the notion that people are disenfranchised due to their own "deficiencies." I commit to challenging any suggestion that the way to fix an inequity is to fix the people most disenfranchised by it rather than by redressing the conditions which disenfranchise them.
(10) I commit to putting justice ahead of peace. Although conflict resolution and peer mediation programs can be useful in the face of some forms of conflict, they should not replace efforts to redress an injustice. Never, under any circumstance, should equity concerns be handled through processes which assume that parties occupy similar spaces along the privilege-oppression continuum. And in the end, peace without justice renders the privileged more privileged and the oppressed further oppressed; a condition which might be understood as the exact opposite of authentic multiculturalism.
At the heart of the 'Ten Commitments of a Multicultural Educator," is a commitment to self-reflexivity, and to asking myself - to never stop asking myself - how the work I do in the name of multicultural education is making a school or community or society more just. When I find that I am unable to answer that question, or that I have become so comfortable with what isthat I fail to consider, in as deep a way as possible, what could be, and then I commit to doing something else.
Paul C. Gorski is an assistant professor in Integrative Studies at George Mason University in Washington, DC, and the founder of EdChange and Multicultural Pavilion.
Tags: Interculturalism and pluralism, L'interculturalisme et le pluralisme
This entry was posted on Friday, May 20, 2011 at 08:14 pm and is filed

What the Hacking Scandal Means for Regulation of Social Networking Services
http://www.cdt.org/blogs/287what-hacking-scandal-means-regulation-social-networking-services


ret
by Omer Tene
July 28, 2011
Filed under Consumer Privacy, More Issues in Consumer Privacy
Tags: News of the World


This post is part of "CDT Fellows Focus," a series that presents the views of notable experts on tech policy issues. This week, CDT Fellow Omer Tene is our guest contributor. Posts featured in "CDT Fellows Focus" don't necessarily reflect the views of CDT; the goal of the series is to present diverse, well-informed views on significant tech policy issues.

One of the most alarming lessons of the News of the World (NoW) phone hacking scandal applies to social networking services (SNS). Consider the fact that until a few weeks ago, one of the properties in Rupert Murdoch's media portfolio was MySpace, the most popular SNS in the United States until 2008. It is disconcerting to think that control over such a treasure trove of personal information rested with a corporate group harboring the ethics and practices of NoW.



To generate a flow of exclusive stories and maintain its edge in the fiercely competitive British tabloid market,NoW allegedly hacked the voicemail of Milly Dowler, a murdered school girl; of relatives of British soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan; and of victims of the 7 July 2005 London terrorist bombings. In the course of hackingDowler's voicemail, private investigators acting for NoW allegedly deleted some messages (to free up space for additional hacking), giving false hope to Dowler's family who thought she might have deleted the messages herself and therefore still be alive. In addition, the NoW allegedly bribed police officers and blackmailedindividuals into coughing up information about their acquaintances.



[An interesting side-issue concerns the data security flaw permitting much of the hacking. Mobile phones come equipped with a default four-digit PIN, which customers are expected to change, but very few do. This enabled private investigators to call the target's number and when unanswered, enter the default PIN to retrieve their messages. The lesson, well known to data security professionals, is that no matter how robust a data security system, it can always be infiltrated if users do not manage their passwords prudently. While it may take a super-computer billions of years to crack an encryption algorithm; it takes only a second or two to enter a password which is written on a Post-it note on the computer screen.]



The allegations against NoW led to the closing of the tabloid, ending the newspaper's 168 year history. They also caused Murdoch to drop his bid to take over broadcasting giant BSkyB, 39% of which were already owned by Murdoch's News Corporation. If the recent furor rendered Murdoch unfit to own a broadcasting outfit, how would you assess his ownership of a SNS?



SNS are stewards of a vast eco-system of personal data. They know more about us than anyone else except (perhaps) the government. Their knowledge extends far beyond information we post voluntarily, such as status updates, photos, videos and friend requests. It includes our interaction with the service; the profiles and posts we look at; whom we interact with, as well as the content of our messages. It now extends to where we aregeographically; and as the web increasingly becomes social, where we hang out online. It is augmented by ripening face recognition technologies and by tens of thousands of applications ("apps") which enhance the SNSand enrich it with additional layers of information.



It is disturbing to think of an organization such as NoW (allegedly hacking, bribing, and blackmailing its way to information) coexisting under one roof with one of the world's largest SNS. Data flow rather easily between corporate affiliates. Consider the Google Privacy Policy, governing the new SNS Google+, which states: "Information sharing: Google only shares personal information with other companies or individuals outside of Google in the following limited circumstances: (…) We provide such information to our subsidiaries, affiliated companies or other trusted businesses or persons for the purpose of processing personal information on our behalf". The erection of Chinese walls between SNS providers and any corporate affiliates thus becomes crucial.



We must keep a sharp eye on SNS providers to prevent personal data from falling into wrong hands. The threat of ex post liability may not suffice, given that the value of data is steadily rising while the criminal justice system remains slow and cumbersome. Indeed, in 2009, the London Metropolitan Police decided not to pursue an investigation into the NoW transgressions. (This month, Scotland Yard Assistant Commissioner John Yates expressed "massive regret" for that decision). Ex ante measures are necessary to reduce risk and keep businesses honest.

Government entities around the world, including the European Commission, the Council of Europe, the OECD, and the United States government, are currently reviewing the legal framework for data protection and privacy. Hopefully, they can find ways to incentivize SNS providers to implement technological and organizational measures to integrate privacy into their backbone and culture, without resorting to prescriptive regulation. To sustain the enormous benefits of SNS to innovation and the Internet economy, regulation should be a last resort.

This will not be easy. Some of the concepts discussed during the review process, such as the "right to oblivion", seem unworkable or contradictory to important fundamental rights such as the freedom of speech. Others, like the principles of "accountability" and "privacy by design" remain murky, leaving much room for interpretation and (hopefully not open-ended) discussion. At the end of the day, it may turn out that apparently procedural issues, such as the rules for applicable law; the role and position of chief privacy officers (CPOs) (in the United States) - or data protection officers (DPOs) (in Europe); and the funding and powers of regulatory agencies; are the ones to effect the greatest change.



For tech policy updates, follow us on Twitter at @CenDemTech.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/how-many-testing-scandals-do-we-need-as-a-wake-up-call/2011/08/07/gIQAIvfZ0I_blog.html

By Valerie Strauss
--

This was written by Lisa Guisbond, a policy analyst for the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, or FairTest, a nonprofit organization that aims to improve standardized testing practices and evaluations of students, teachers and schools.

By Lisa Guisbond

It is not surprising that the recent Atlanta school cheating scandal earned so much attention. Its massive scope and details of corruption, including pizza parties for erasing students' incorrect answers, shocked the nation.

Focusing solely on Atlanta, or even other recent cheating cases around the nation, including our nation's capital, is a mistake. These are not isolated incidents. Rather, they are episodes in a series of unfortunate events spawned by the nation's government-mandated testing obsession. Considered in light of a recent National Research Council (NRC) report confirming other negative impacts of high-stakes testing, they should be a giant wake-up call for policymakers.

Continue reading this post »

http://www.edutopia.org/george-lucas-testimony

Access to high-speed Internet and other telecommunication tools is a "digital civil right" that the United States should guarantee to every student, George Lucas told members of Congress June 24.

Lucas, a filmmaker and chairman of The George Lucas Educational Foundation, testified before the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet that Congress should expand and modernize its twelve-year-old program of telecom discounts to schools and libraries.



To achieve his vision of Edutopia, in which students direct their own learning while teachers nurture their curiosity, he said, the ultimate goal should be to make these connections for every school and library not just more affordable, but free.

"Telecommunications provides the new learning platform of this century and is replacing the textbook as the medium through which a modern education is provided," Lucas said. "The world's knowledge is now available online, far beyond what books and materials can provide in schools and libraries themselves."

The E-rate, as the federal discount is called, ranges from 20 to 90 percent, depending on the school's need. Created through the federal Telecommunications Act of 1996, it covers telecom services, including phone and Internet, and internal school connections. The government pays for the discounts, up to $2.25 billion a year, with mandatory contributions from telecom companies and customers.

Congressman Edward Markey, who chairs the subcommittee, called today's hearing on the E-rate to help his group weigh potential changes to the law next year. Markey credited Lucas -- who testified before the same group about telecom access in 1994 -- as his inspiration for writing the E-rate program into the law. In one of many Star Wars metaphors subcommittee members made during the hearing, U.S. representative Lee Terry likened the defenders of the Universal Service Fund to "the Luke Skywalkers riding in to save the fund from those who want to destroy it, the Darth Vaders."

Lucas urged the lawmakers to extend the 1996 definition of "universal service" to include high-speed broadband Internet service, and to anticipate the advent of connective technologies to come. In supplemental written testimony, he pointed to examples of powerful learning -- students watching heart-bypass surgery by videoconference, or using online simulations to experience ancient civilizations -- made possible only by the kind of high-speed connections lawmakers in the 1990s couldn't foresee.

Although Internet access in public schools has ballooned in the past decade, Lucas noted that not all these connections are broadband. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), in Paris, he added, the United States trails fourteen other nations in broadband access.

"Americans were pioneers in creating the truly wondrous technology that we are talking about today," Lucas concluded in the written portion of his testimony. "Innovation is in our DNA. Now, we need to make sure it is also in our classrooms and that every American child grows up knowing how to use the Internet and benefit from its rich and powerful resources."

Download a PDF of George Lucas's complete written testimony.

http://reformnclb.wikispaces.com/

The US Department of Education created a video (below) that details some of the challenges brought on by the No Child Left behind law and describes President Barack Obama's proposal to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and solve them. The video is intended to offer a vision that could strengthen teaching, narrow achievement gaps, raises standards, and help guide schools in preparing all students for colleges and careers in a global economy.

We have the opportunity to share our thoughts with Deputy Assistant Secretary for the US Department of Education, Massier Ritsch, about the possible impact the video and the conversations around the proposed reauthorization legislation.

Ways to contribute:
Please provide your feedback at this link where you will also see the responses of others.
We also encourage you to write a blog post and share it here.
Information about tweeting is here.

The US Dept of Education put out a video called "A Teacher's Guide to Fixing No Child Left Behind" and we have a chance to share our feedback about both NCLB reform and the video at the attached link via a survey, Twitter, and blogging.

This video was shared today by +Angela Maiers at EduBloggerCon at BLC11 and many educators were unhappy with what was laid out in this video. Check it out and respond at the link if you want your voice heard.

ReformNCLB - home

Don't show, don't tell?
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/teaching-children-0630.html
Cognitive scientists find that when teaching young children, there is a trade-off between direct instruction and independent exploration.
Emily Finn, MIT News Office
today's news
The too-smart-for-its-own-good grid

New technologies intended to boost reliance on renewable energy could destabilize the power grid if they're not matched with careful pricing policies.


Suppose someone showed you a novel gadget and told you, "Here's how it works," while demonstrating a single function, such as pushing a button. What would you do when they handed it to you?

You'd probably push the button. But what if the gadget had other functions? Would it occur to you to search for them, if your teacher hadn't alluded to their existence?

Maybe, maybe not. It turns out that there is a "double-edged sword" to pedagogy: Explicit instruction makes children less likely to engage in spontaneous exploration and discovery. A study by MIT researchers and colleagues compared the behavior of children given a novel toy under four different conditions, finding that children expressly taught one of its functions played with the toy for less time and discovered fewer things to do with it than children in the other three scenarios.


Gabriella, 5, plays with the researchers' toy in the PlayLab at Boston's Children's Museum.
Photos: Patrick Gillooly
According to Laura Schulz, the Class of 1943 Career Development Associate Professor of Cognitive Science at MIT, this is rational behavior, as teaching is meant to impart skills quickly and efficiently. The danger is leading children to believe that they've learned all there is to know, thereby discouraging independent discovery. "If I teach you this one thing and then I stop, then you may say, 'Well that's probably all there is,'" Schulz says.

Bop it, twist it, pull it, flick it!

To study this phenomenon, the researchers built an original toy, an appealing tangle of colored tubes with four different functions: pull on a yellow tube and it squeaks; press a button and a blue tube lights up; touch a pad to hear different music notes; and look through a black tube to see a reversed mirror image of your face.

They took the toy to Boston's Museum of Science, where they recruited 85 preschool-age children to interact with the toy under one of four conditions: pedagogical, interrupted, naïve and baseline.

In the pedagogical condition, the experimenter said, "Look at my toy! This is how my toy works," and demonstrated the squeak function twice (but made no mention of the other functions).

The interrupted condition was identical to the pedagogical condition, except that immediately after the squeak demonstration the experimenter interrupted herself, saying, "I just realized, I forgot to write something down over there. I have to go take care of it right now!"

In the naïve condition, the experimenter pulled out the toy and said, "I just found this toy! See this toy?" She then "discovered" the squeak function as if by accident, and said, "Huh! Did you see that?" while repeating the action, as if surprised.

In the baseline condition, the experimenter simply said, "Wow, see this toy? Look at this!" and put it on the table, without demonstrating any function.

In all four conditions, after the experimenter's dialogue, the child was left to play with the toy on his or her own, and researchers observed the ensuing behavior.

A double-edged sword

Many children in the pedagogical condition failed to discover even one function in addition to the squeak, while children in the other three conditions found, on average, one or two functions they had not been taught. What's more, children in the pedagogical condition spent less time playing with the toy - less than two minutes, on average - than children in the other conditions, whose times ranged from slightly more than two minutes in the naïve condition to longer than three minutes in the baseline condition.
Six-year-old Keenan participates in one of the researchers' experiments, conducted at Boston's Children's Museum.
Photo: Patrick Gillooly

These results suggest children are extremely sensitive to the subtleties of a teaching scenario, Schulz says: What matters is not if children are shown a function, but how they are shown that function. If they believe that an informed teacher has taught them everything, they will be less motivated to explore.

In a related experiment, the researchers replicated their results among children who were indirect observers of others being taught: Those who were given the toy after merely watching an adult interact with another child, using the same paradigms as the first study, did less exploring when they'd witnessed the pedagogical scenario than any of the other three scenarios.

The results of both experiments are described in a recent paper published in the journal Cognition; in addition to Schulz and her graduate student, Hyowon Gweon, the paper's co-authors are Elizabeth Bonawitz, a former graduate student of Schulz's, now a postdoc at the University of California at Berkeley; Patrick Shafto, an assistant professor at the University of Louisville; and Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard University.

"The whole double-edged sword concept is really interesting," says Susan Gelman, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. "In almost any domain and across different cultures, we engage in spontaneous teaching. It doesn't have to be in the classroom, we just naturally do this with young children - we show them how things are done, point out what's important. This study shows how sensitive children are to the kind of cues that signal teaching." Further experiments may want to examine differences in children's behavior across cultures, she adds.

Urging humility

So what's a teacher or parent to do? Schulz is quick to point out that the study is not an argument against instruction. "Things that you're extremely unlikely to figure out on your own - how to read, how to do calculus, how to drive a car - it would make no sense to try to learn by exploration," she says.

Rather, the study underscores the real-world trade-offs between education and exploration, and the importance of acknowledging what is unknown even while imparting what is known. Teachers should, where possible, offer the caveat that there may be more to learn.

"Teachers can say things like, 'I'm showing you what we think is true, but there are a lot of other possibilities you should consider,'" Schulz says.

In short, she says, "a little humility can go a long way."

http://www.eschoolnews.com/2011/08/05/ten-common-myths-about-teaching/3/?

http://www.commerce.gov/blog/2011/08/03/women-stem-opportunity-and-imperative

Women in STEM: An Opportunity and An Imperative

Submitted on August 3, 2011 - 11:30am
Categories: Education Jobs Mark Doms STEM Economics and Statistics Administration
Printer-friendly version

Today Commerce's Economic and Statistics Administration released the second in a series of reports on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). This report, entitledWomen in STEM: A Gender Gap to Innovation(PDF), looked at women and STEM. The results offer an opportunity and an imperative for women and America. The results showed that women are vastly underrepresented in STEM jobs and among STEM degree holders despite making up nearly half of the U.S. workforce and half of the college-educated workforce. That leaves an untapped opportunity to expand STEM employment in the United States, even as there is wide agreement that the nation must do more to improve its competitiveness.

Other key findings are:

Although women fill close to half of all jobs in the U.S. economy, they hold less than 25 percent of STEM jobs. This has been the case throughout the past decade, even as college-educated women have increased their share of the overall workforce.
Women with STEM jobs earned 33 percent more than comparable women in non-STEM jobs-considerably higher than the STEM premium for men. As a result, the gender wage gap is smaller in STEM jobs than in non-STEM jobs.
Women hold a disproportionately low share of STEM undergraduate degrees, particularly in engineering.
Women with a STEM degree are less likely than their male counterparts to work in a STEM occupation; they are more likely to work in education or healthcare
For more information on this topic, read Chief Economist Mark Doms's blog post about the report and ESA's first report on STEM: Good Jobs Now and For the Future.

To improve U.S. education, it's time to treat teachers as professionals

http://ow.ly/5ONz0

Why Johnny can't program -- and how that can change
Today's schools are actually turning kids away from computer science, and it will take innovative programs to reverse the trend
By Neil McAllister, InfoWorld, 06/23/11
http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-06-2011/1106023-fatal-exception.html

When I was a kid, the first stop on the road to becoming a computer programmer was the local arcade. In the 1980s, as now, video games were a booming business. As a preteen enthralled by these glowing, interactive marvels, to be told that I could actually learn how to make video games was like being handed a scholarship to Hogwarts. The arrival of the home computer made it possible.

Today, video arcades have more or less vanished from the American landscape, but kids' interest in video games is stronger than ever. Game consoles and PCs have become staples of family life. But this new generation of gaming platforms doesn't seem to be encouraging kids to take up computer programming.


"There are more and more [computer science] jobs," says Alexander Repenning, a computer science professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, "but the interest is actually going down, and the interest of women in these kinds of jobs is going down even faster."

Although video games have changed a lot since the 1980s, Repenning and other instructors at Colorado are betting that what worked to inspire kids then can work now. Currently in its third year, the university's Scalable Game Design curriculum aims to reinvent computer science education beginning at the middle school level, using games as the spark to ignite students' interest in computing.

How computing classes turn kids off
"The middle school years are critical for students in reaching conclusions regarding their own skills and aptitudes," writes Repenning in a paper published in 2010. "This is the age at which children prematurely and often falsely conclude that math and science is not for them, or that computer science is all about programming, or is a field that is hard as well as boring."

For those of us who taught ourselves programming, it's easy to see how young students could be turned off. Traditional computer science classes at the high school level and earlier teach programming as if it was an end unto itself. Students labor for an entire semester or longer, and by the end of it, they've done little more than write programs that sort sets of numbers, plot simple graphs, or ask the user questions. It's hard for young students to see the purpose of these kinds of exercises, particularly when there is already plenty of software available to accomplish the same tasks, with no programming required.

By the time students reach the college level, they're taught to see programming as a rigorous discipline. They're introduced to the concepts of object orientation, data structures, design patterns, functional programming, code optimization, and compiler design. To graduate with a computer science degree, they'll probably need to slog through a full course of calculus, differential equations, linear algebra, and discrete mathematics. And while this may be all well and good to a goal-oriented undergrad who anticipates a lucrative career maintaining enterprise JavaBeans for Wall Street firms, to a wide-eyed middle school student who is new to programming, the road ahead must look pretty bleak. What is the point of it all?

Unique tools to engage students
According to Repenning, the typical middle schooler's response to a programming lesson is predictable: "I know what is going to happen: The teacher writes a program onto the blackboard, we type it into the computer, and it never works."

Repenning's program avoids this disheartening cycle in three important ways. First, it deemphasizes programming while still encouraging students to develop the logical thinking skills they'll need for more advanced studies. Second, it engages students by encouraging them to be creative and solve their own problems, rather than just repeating exercises dictated by their instructor. Third, and perhaps most important, students are rewarded for their efforts with an actual, concrete result they can relate to: a game.

The key to the program is AgentSheets, a unique software authoring environment developed at Colorado. AgentSheets combines a graphical, drag-and-drop user interface with a rule-based programming language to allow students to develop games and interactive applications of surprising sophistication. Projects built with AgentSheets incorporate not just code but images, sounds, and other multimedia.

The Scalable Game Design curriculum isn't just about enticing kids with entertaining exercises, either. Students start the program by building a look-alike of the classic arcade game Frogger, in which a player guides a cartoon frog across a street of busy traffic. By the end of the program, however, they've seen how the same tools can be used to build simulations that model forest fires or the spread of contagions. The idea is to show how computer tools can be built to address a variety of real-world needs, with results that are both functional and engaging.

Is there hope for tomorrow's programmers?
A key part of the program, the Scalable Game Design Summer Institute, invites middle school teachers from around the country to come to the university to gain firsthand experience with AgentSheets and the associated lesson plans. The hope is that they will then be able to return to their respective school districts and start the process with their own students. In the three years it's been in operation, the Summer Institute has attracted teachers from as far away as Georgia, Mississippi, Ohio, and Alaska.

There's just one problem. The Scalable Game Design curriculum was developed as part of the university's iDreams program -- a broader effort to teach computing to Colorado students -- which was funded by a $1.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation. That grant has now been expended, and this third year of the iDreams program will be its last. The AgentSheets tools will continue on, supplied by a for-profit company (of which Repenning is CTO), but for now there will be no more public funding to help schools take up the offer.

Meanwhile, as education budgets tighten around the country, schools and universities are being forced to reexamine their programs. Everywhere the specter of program cuts looms large, and mathematics and sciences are no exceptions. Recently, Western Washington University came under fire for suggesting that it may scupper its computer science program.

Confronted with such pressures, it's hard to imagine how innovative programs such as Dr. Repenning's can continue to flourish. But they should. Because if we don't encourage them to learn computing skills now, the next generation of graduates may find themselves left doing exactly what they're doing today: just playing video games.

This article, "Why Johnny can't program -- and how that can change," originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Neil McAllister's Fatal Exception blog and follow the latest news in programming at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.