Some things for science education

Here are some things that I might want to use in the future.

The scientific method.

 

And these 11 items - Rules of a Scientist's Life. I am not sure about the original source, just like this blogger.  The earliest reference I find is a pinterest page from December 2011.

The Internet and higher ed.

A couple of days ago, I listed to this February "On the Media" Podcast concerning the Internet.  It was good.

On another note... Philo A. Hutcheson, associate professor of educational-policy studies at Georgia State University, said

“As the breadth and volume of search engines’ results increase, providing a source of certainty for those building an argument,” he writes, “… the validity of academics’ knowledge, the fundamental assumption of academic freedom, becomes problematic.”

I don't buy it.  Professors and faculty can help their students learn how to filter out and synthesize the good stuff from the Internet.  There is a lot of crap out there.  Some people may think that all of knowledge is on the Internet, but it isn't.

Review of DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the etc., etc., etc.

Here is the whole title of the book.

DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education

Some of the book can also be found on Google Books.

If the higher education system changes as much as the author thinks it will, then it will have many implications for academic libraries. Lots of people and organizations are trying to predict the future of academic libraries.

The basic premise of the book is that the internet and alternative educational institutions are providing new and different ways for people to learn.

She (the author, Anya Kamenetz) noted that one of the problems with the higher ed system is that students are treated differently once they transition from high school to college. If high school students are having difficulty passing classes, the teacher or the school is held responsible. If one of those students is having difficulty passing college classes, then the student is blamed. In short, some/many colleges and higher ed institutions do not take [as] much responsibility for helping their students finish their studies. There is not as much accountability for high ed institutions. She also describes a system where colleges are incentivized to increase costs and services to students. If a college costs more money, then it must be a better institution.

Here is the part where I start talking about libraries.

I found the word library mentioned just once in the book, and it was about the Europeana project. The word library isn't even in the index. The free Internet is OK for learning some things, but it takes an institution to provide a well stocked library of resources so students don't have to shell out money (to buy or travel to find) books and journal articles and newspaper archives and conference materials and government documents and microfilms and lots of other stuff. She also doesn't seem to get there is a much bigger and deeper web of Internet materials that are not freely available to students, unless institutions subscribe of course. It also takes an institution to provide laboratory space for students in the sciences. Doing a chemistry experiment on the computer just isn't the same thing as dealing with real chemicals in the lab. It takes an institution to provide places for students to gather for clubs and other interest groups.

David Wiley of BYU (and Flat World Knowledge) shows up on page 83 and notes that "if universities can't find the will to innovate and adapt to changes in the world around them, universities will be irrelevant by 2020." (He is also a leader of the open-education movement.) People are thinking the same thing about libraries. They think we need to either innovate or we will be dead. Ummm, I don't think so. People have been saying for the last 15 years that the Internet is going to make libraries obsolete, but here we are. If anything, we are working harder than ever to help our students navigate the complex and evolving information sphere.

The book covers a lot of open education and open access resources. For example, they mention DOAJ on page 85. Libraries are certainly behind initiatives like this.

I did find some of her writing confusing. For example, she seemed to confuse credits with classes in some spots. This article at Inside Higher Ed does a great job of evaluating much of her logic and false assumptions.

On page 88, she provided the wrong title for this article, "Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0." The PDF is here. Instead of reading the book, this article provides a good overview of the open education movement.

I did learn about a lot of new and interesting initiatives that are going on.

• Open Learning Initiative at CMU
• I knew about MIT and their OpenCourseWare Project, but this is part of the OpenCourseWare Consortium
• I've known about the term "personal learning network" for a year or two. Here are some resources to get more information on that topic.
• The School of Everything
• "AcaWiki is like a 'Wikipedia for academic research' designed to increase the impact of scholars, students, and bloggers by enabling them to share summaries and discuss academic papers online."
• "Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) is an online community of open study groups for short university-level courses."
• "University of the People (UoPeople) is the world’s first tuition-free online university."
• Hacking Education event in NYC.

Overall, it was an interesting book. However, she seemed to miss the point that a lot of the education one receives at an institution is not just from taking course and reading the readings, it is from the socialization process. This is very important for younger undergraduate students, but graduate students also learn about their field by socializing with other graduate students, and from learning how their faculty mentors do research. The institution provides the "personal learning network" all in one place for the students, and they get an official certification (degree, or whatever you want to call it) of their learning. For edupunks, they might be able to build great personal learning networks and be able to learn about the topics they desire, but they may not have the same kind of certification. This may not matter as much in some fields of inquiry, but it matters quite a bit in other fields. I'd rather not go to a dentist who learned about dentistry on the open web. I'd rather not hire a lawyer who didn't have a law degree. I wouldn't trust a research article in biology, if the author didn't have a biology degree.

The Pedagogy of Innovation

This was the title of the "Symposium for Colorado Teachers and Faculty" that took place right before the Bridges to the Future event.

I learned a lot of stuff about:

• Scalable Game Design from the University of Colorado, Boulder
• Humane game development for students and teachers
• Scratch -- A programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art.
• Greenfoot -- Game development platform that is more appropriate for teenagers.
• David Thomson wrote the book, Law School 2.0: Legal Education for a Digital Age. This books is focused on how students are using social networking services. I really like how he used wordle at the beginning of each chapter.

I hope I can use some of these resources to help my son make his own video/computer games.

Science, Technology and Education: Mapping the Future

This isn't my title, but it is the title provided by the speaker, Steven B. Johnson for the Bridges to the Future quarterly conference at the University of Denver. He is the author of the book Everything Bad is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter.

On the evening of March 31st, he essentially provided an update to this 2005 book. This was fine with me, since I haven't read the book, yet. I was originally thinking that he was going to talk about his new book, The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America. I did get Air signed by him before the presentation.

Anyway, the session covered:

Computer and video games.
• How kids are playing more challenging games such as the Sims series of computer games.
• The Sleeper Curve serves to "undermine the belief that... pop culture is on a race to the bottom, where the cheapest thrill wins out every time", and is instead "getting more mentally challenging as the medium evolves."
• Complex games and shows are more interesting, such as:
• Civilization 4
• Spore -- This game gets kids interested in interdisciplinary scientific topics.
• Lost -- This is more like a game, than a tv show.

Participatory media. The phenomena surrounding the show, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" is interestings. There are Buffy Meetups and Vampire meetups. Way back in the 1990's, one vampire would have had a hard time meeting other vampires. As a kid, he created his own baseball game using dice and statistics from various baseball magazines and newspapers. What are students learning from the newer more interactive computer and video games? The games can be addictive, but they are also learing to adapt to more challenging games and situations.

Books. The Kindle is great, and he goes over the positives of the device.
Once can immediately decide on an impulse buy. He covers the iPhone and Google books such as Experiments and observations on Different kinds of Air by Joseph Priestley. How will people cite and link to specific pages and passages in ebooks, since the pagination is different depending upon the device one uses to read the book? Why write books in print at all? Because they can still influence people in a powerful way.

Then he took questions concerning Second Life, violence in video games, open access books, preschool kids' use of media, and journalists view of the world and the media.

Overall, it was a pretty cool session.