Group items tagged

"Diamandis believes that solar energy will soon satisfy the demands of the entire planet and replace the market for fossil fuels. This will mean fewer wars and cleaner air. Systems for converting atmospheric humidity into clean drinking water will become cheap and ubiquitous. The industrial meat industry will also vanish, replaced by tastier and healthier laboratory-grown products with no environmental downsides. He also predicts that exponential increases in the power of AI would soon render teachers and universities superfluous. The best education in the world will become freely available to anyone."

"an unfortunate and largely unintended consequence of the rise of social media is that instead of being better informed and exposed to ever-broadening viewpoints, research shows that Americans today are more polarized and draw from shrinking pools of news. Many people now operate in virtual gated communities as a result of their culled Facebook and Twitter feeds and the opaque corporate algorithms that organize people into invisible groups."

"Amid the various influences that massive open online courses have had on higher education in their short life so far -- the topic of a daylong conference here Monday -- this may be among the more unexpected: The courses may be prompting some faculty to pay more attention to their teaching styles than they ever have before."

"Open access to academic research has never been a hotter topic. But it's still held back by myths and misunderstandings repeated by people who should know better. The good news is that open access has been successful enough to attract comment from beyond its circle of pioneers and experts. The bad news is that a disappointing number of policy-makers, journalists and academics opine in public without doing their homework. Here, at the start of the sixth global Open Access Week, are the six most common and harmful misunderstandings about open access:"

"Dealing with all the complaints takes time and, as a PhD student, I had my own research to do. Evaluations, ironically, were not really my concern. Student evaluations are not that important in economics (unless you aspire to teach at a liberal arts college), or not nearly as important as publishing papers in a top journal. And despite pleas from the thwarted Goldman candidate, the future job prospects of students and the money they might some day donate to the university was furthest from my mind. I'd sooner worry about winning a research grant."

"One of Dr. Mayer's primary research interests is multimedia learning. In his work, he applies basic findings from cognitive psychology to practical questions in learning, teaching, and communication, most notably: How can individuals effectively design visual content (e.g., PowerPoint presentations) to accompany their verbal presentations and written text?"