Similar to MIT's Scratch, Globaloria positions itself as helping students develop STEM knowledge, digital literacy skills, and college readiness through game design. The program markets itself as a blended learning model.
"This is our second Sputnik moment. At a time when women hold only 24 percent of STEM jobs and blacks and Hispanics also fare poorly in these fields, we better get this argument about diversity of talent right or else it's going to be a very expensive moment, indeed."
I like the ethic and attiude that this article promotes. I have seen this gap for a long time and I have heard the meritocracy argument as well. The fact is that people who benefit from a system want to believe that they inherently earned their spot due to superior intellect, personality, etc. It is difficult to believe that you are a member of an organization because others feel you belong there and your presence reinforces the establishd culture of power.
The STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math) saw a definite increase as of the year 2000, with 26% of those in the field now women. This is certainly not indicative of the amount of women in the work force as a whole, currently 47% of the nation.
Professor Chang says that rather than losing mainly students from
disadvantaged backgrounds or with lackluster records, the attrition rate can be
higher at the most selective schools, where he believes the competition
overwhelms even well-qualified students.
Eric Brunsell is Assistant Professor of Science Education @ UW-Oshkosh. He is the facilitator of Edutopia's STEM group, and a regular blogger for Edutopia. You can follow him on Twitter @brunsell. -- This post was co-authored with Elizabeth Alderton. Elizabeth is an Assistant Professor of Literacy Education at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh.
Alex Hernandez from the Charter Growth Fund highlights some key topics in blended learning, one of which is 'Can we increase the velocity of learning and create more space for such things as projects, the arts and deep thinking?'
While so much emphasis is placed in STEM education, the idea of also utilizing blended learning environments to foster creativity and engage students in artistic processes is one we should also consider.
A team of European and U.S. researchers found ads displayed along with violent scenes to be more memorable to players than those shown with nonviolent content, even though players spent less time looking at them. The results are contrary to expectations stemming from research on television, where violence has been shown to decrease attention to advertisements. Developing a better understanding of the way advertising works in games could help game companies enhance their advertising strategies.
Those who played a violent version of the game, where the goal was to run down pedestrians, resulting in a blood-splattered screen, demonstrated significantly better recall of advertised brands than those who played the regular version. The researchers presented their work at the International Conference on Entertainment Computing last year.
“each morning for over eight months I woke up and decided that the next morning would be the day to send the Stiglitz box.”
Academics, who work for long periods in a self-directed fashion, may be especially prone to putting things off: surveys suggest that the vast majority of college students procrastinate
dragging our heels is “as fundamental as the shape of time and could well be called the basic impulse.”
Most of the contributors to the new book agree that this peculiar irrationality stems from our relationship to time—in particular, from a tendency that economists call “hyperbolic discounting.”
Viewed this way, procrastination starts to look less like a question of mere ignorance than like a complex mixture of weakness, ambition, and inner conflict.
instead of trusting themselves, the students relied on an outside tool to make themselves do what they actually wanted to do.
an interesting article on procrastination. Perhaps worth reading to better understand our own behavior and the behavior of future students we attempt to engage.
There is a not a direct technology angle here, but it would be important to think about this topic when looking at technologies for the classroom.