Ponderings of a Scientist

Check out this funny, yet poignant cartoon from the makers of South Park!

Recently published in Time Magazine by Claudia Wallis and Sonja Steptoe….

“There’s a dark little joke exchanged by educators with a dissident streak: Rip Van Winkle awakens in the 21st century after a hundred-year snooze and is, of course, utterly bewildered by what he sees. Men and women dash about, talking to small metal devices pinned to their ears. Young people sit at home on sofas, moving miniature athletes around on electronic screens. Older folk defy death and disability with metronomes in their chests and with hips made of metal and plastic. Airports, hospitals, shopping malls–every place Rip goes just baffles him. But when he finally walks into a schoolroom, the old man knows exactly where he is. “This is a school,” he declares. “We used to have these back in 1906. Only now the blackboards are green.”

American schools aren’t exactly frozen in time, but considering the pace of change in other areas of life, our public schools tend to feel like throwbacks. Kids spend much of the day as their great-grandparents once did: sitting in rows, listening to teachers lecture, scribbling notes by hand, reading from textbooks that are out of date by the time they are printed. A yawning chasm (with an emphasis on yawning) separates the world inside the schoolhouse from the world outside.” - Check out the whole article.

“The public school system is designed to produce a workforce for an economy that will not be there. And therefore, with all the best intentions in the world, we’re stealing the kids’ future.”  Check out the whole article; it really is worth the five minutes!

Highlights:  Individualism, teaching how to think - not how to use technologies that will soon be obsolete or how to memorize things you can find on the internet, incorporating schools better into business society, multidisplinary…

“The right answer would be to make math and science actually interesting, but with those awful tests as the ultimate arbiter of success this is very difficult to do.

No change in education will ever happen in the US until the testing mentality is done away with. No average high functioning adult could pass them so why make kids do it? This makes no sense. What also makes no sense is the idea that math and science are important subjects. You can live a happy life without ever having taken a physics course or knowing what a logarithm is.

On the other hand, being able to reason on the basis of evidence actually is important. Thinking rationally and logically is important. Knowing how to function in a world that includes new technology and all kinds of health issues is important. Knowing how things work and being able to fix them and perhaps design them is important.

Lets get serious. We don’t need more math and science. We need more people who can think.”

-Dr. Schank 

So what do you think about Second Life?

I just read an interesting artice in Wired about this virtual world, which I previous only had a novice understanding of.  I’m honestly torn as to whether it is a neat advance in our media driven, cyberinfrastructured culture (perhaps to be used for education among other things) or whether it is just a video game taking over people lives and allowing them to be more irresponsible with their money.  Thoughts?  Check out this blog for more info…

If the following sounds interesting to you, you should check out at least the executive summary of the below quoted paper titled “Confronting the Challenges
of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century”

“According to a recent study from the Pew Internet & American Life project (Lenhardt & Madden, 2005), more than one-half of all teens have created media content, and roughly onethird of teens who use the Internet have shared content they produced. In many cases, these teens are actively involved in what we are calling participatory cultures.A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices.A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created)….

A growing body of scholarship suggests potential benefits of these forms of participatory culture, including opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, a changed attitude toward intellectual property, the diversification of cultural expression, the development of skills valued in the modern workplace, and a more empowered conception of citizenship. Access to this participatory culture functions as a new form of the hidden curriculum, shaping which youth will succeed and which will be left behind as they enter school and the workplace. “