Free Webinar Thursday July 9 - Using Popular Video Games to Improve Student Executive Functions, SEL Skills

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Using Popular Video Games to Improve Student Executive Functions, SEL Skills

Thursday, July 9, 10 a.m. PST, 1 p.m. EST

Video games can be used to improve a variety of cognitive skills such as attention, fluid reasoning and processing speed in students.  Recent studies have also demonstrated that playing games can directly improve executive functioning and social emotional learning skills, keys for problem solving, collaboration and self control.

This session will review the research connecting video game play and improvements seen in skills such as cognitive flexibility, working memory and social awareness.

The presenter will identify dozens of popular games including Minecraft, Portal 2, and Angry Birds where executive and SEL skills are practiced and identify methods for transforming game-based skills into real world competencies. Specific previewing, metacognitive and generalization strategies that optimize skill development from game play will be explored.

This presentation is a preview of the content for the Association’s annual Serious Play Conference, July 21-23, 2015 at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
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About Randy Kulman, Ph.D.

Photo: Randy Kulman

Dr. Kulman is a child, clinical psychologist who specializes in assessing children with attentional, learning, and executive functioning issues. Additionally, Dr. Kulman is the author of two books, numerous essays and book chapters on the use of digital technologies for improving executive functioning skills in children.

Webinars feature speakers from the annual Serious Play Conference, this year Tuesday-Thursday, July 21-23, 2015 at Carnegie Mellon University, hosted by the Entertainment Technology Center. 
For more info, check out www.seriousplayconference.com

 
Source: Serious Play Conference 

New Book - Power Up: Making the Shift to 1:1 Teaching and Learning

"The essential guide to going 1:1. 
Power Up is the book your teachers need to understand the changes in pedagogy, planning, classroom organization, time management, and collaboration that will help them be successful with tablets, notebooks, and BYOD. Includes a PD study guide and companion website filled with teaching resources." continues Stenhouse Publishers.

Wherever you are on the path to 1:1 teaching and learning, you need a guide that can help you make the best use of the powerful technology available in today's classrooms. In this inspiring and practical book, Diana Neebe and Jen Roberts draw on research and their extensive experience working with teachers across subject areas and grade levels to share the keys to success when teaching with a computer or tablet for every student.

This is the book secondary teachers need to understand the changes in pedagogy, planning, classroom organization, time management, and collaboration that will help them be successful in a 1:1 environment. Whether providing immediate and detailed feedback to student writers, giving voice to quiet learners, or creating more time for actual work in a jam-packed school day, Neebe and Roberts show teachers how communication, differentiation, and other effective practices can be powered up with personalized technology.
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Table of Contents

Foreword by Jaime Casap
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: We have 1:1; Now What?
Part I: Enrich
Chapter 2: Communication and Workflow
Chapter 3: Engagement
Chapter 4: Collaboration
Part II: Extend
Chapter 5: Audience
Chapter 6: Differentiation
Chapter 7: Feedback and Assessment
Part III: Transform
Chapter 8: Creativity and Innovation
Chapter 9: Rethinking Class Time
Chapter 10: Becoming a Connected Educator
Appendixes
References
Index

Preview the entire book online PDF

About the Authors 
Diana Neebe (@dneebe) teaches high school English with 1:1 tablets at an independent school in California's Silicon Valley. She was named the ISTE Outstanding Young Educator in 2014 and is a Google Certified Teacher. She is currently working on a doctoral degree in education.
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Jen Roberts (@JenRoberts1) teaches English at a large public high school in San Diego, California. She has more than twenty years of classroom experience and has been teaching with 1:1 laptops since 2008. She also teaches preservice teachers and is an active member in the Google Certified Teacher community.
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Additional resources 
Download the Study Guide (PDF) 
Visit the website for updated links to resources

Source: EdWeek Update and Stenhouse Publishers

Concern at low share of foreign students taking PhDs

"Applications from foreign students to US graduate programmes increased 2% to a record 676,484 this year, driven primarily by a 12% upswing in numbers from India but tempered by a 2% drop from China, a preliminary report says." writes University World News.
 

Photo: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Half of all international applications were for programmes in the key STEM fields of engineering, mathematics and computer science, all of which enjoyed an increase in applications, says the report, released this week by the non-profit Council of Graduate Schools in Washington, DC.
 
But nearly two-thirds were for masters and certificate programmes, rather than PhDs, a surprising finding that "raises a lot more questions than we have answers for at this point", says council president Suzanne Ortega.
 
The survey, conducted annually since 2004 to give US graduate schools an early peek at autumn enrolment indicators, this year marked the 10th consecutive year of overall increases in applications – a sign, Ortega says, that the United States continues "to be the place that students see as having high quality and high value".
 
The survey this year for the first time tracks applications based on the level of the degree being pursued, a factor that provides insights into how students expect to pay for their degrees, what kinds of jobs their degrees will prepare them for and whether they intend to stay in the United States after earning their degree. 

Vulnerable to volatility  
Masters level students, for example, typically use personal funds to finance their education, which provides a lucrative revenue stream for US universities but also makes the applicant pool more vulnerable to economic volatility in their home countries.
 
Doctoral students are more likely to rely on universities and grants for funding, and also are more likely to go on to careers that fuel US innovation and economic growth.
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Source: University World News

World’s top 10 universities led by women

Follow on Twitter as @elliebothwell

Ellie Bothwell,  International and rankings reporter at Times Higher Education summarizes, "World University Rankings analysis reveals the best female-led institutions."

Photo: Times Higher Education

Just 14 per cent of the top 200 universities in the world are led by women.

It is a damning statistic and one that proves – if you needed any more evidence alongside the oft-reported gender pay gap and the dearth of women in senior positions – that gender inequality is still rife in the academy.

However, there are examples of top universities that are leading the way when it comes to promoting women to the upper echelons of their institution.

Ten universities which feature in the top 60 of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings are led by women – and three of these female leaders are the third woman to head up their institution.

Last month the University of Oxford also announced that it will have a female vice-chancellor for the first time in its 767-year history.

This list is based on research conducted by Miguel Antonio Lim, EU Marie Curie doctoral fellow at Aarhus University in Copenhagen, who used data from the 2014-15 World University Rankings.
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Additional resources 

The World’s Best Universities: Times Higher Education 2014-2015 results

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2014-2015 list the best global universities and are the only international university performance tables to judge world-class universities across all of their core missions - teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook.

 

Source: Times Higher Education and Times Higher Education Channel (YouTube)

Old school or new? Math teachers debate best methods as Canadian scores fall

"Canadian kids are falling behind their peers in other countries, and there’s no clear solution." according to The Globe and Mail.

Math teacher Paul Alves holds a visual learning aid as he sits below a traditional math equation on a classroom's chalk board at Fletcher's Meadow Secondary School in Brampton, Ont.

"Don’t get math teachers started on best teaching practices."

The discussions are emotional, heated and they don’t agree on much – except that Canadian kids are falling behind their peers in other countries, and there’s no clear solution.

There are generally two camps: those in favour of the old-school method to lecture kids with a “drill-and-kill” format that preaches practice, and another, ever-growing group that believes a more creative approach is needed to engage students.

At a recent event in Toronto, dozens of teachers waited in line to take selfies with math-teaching celebrity Dan Meyer, delaying his keynote talk at the Ontario Association for Mathematics Education conference. He is part of the new-school camp.

His approach is simple, Meyer says on the phone from California, where he’s a math education researcher at Stanford University.

He presents a problem at the start of class, and lets the students try to figure it out. Hopefully, he says, the students will struggle.

“That initial moment of struggle prepares them for what they’ll learn later,” he says.

Meyer cites several studies that back up his ideas, including one from Manu Kapur, a professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Kapur’s study shows students who are given a problem to solve on their own – before instruction from a teacher – outperform students who are given the traditional lecturing style.

The technique is in the early stages of implementation across Ontario, according to Sheena Agius, a math coach who helps teachers with the new method in the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board.

Just like all other boards in Ontario, it is moving away from rote learning to try to get students to understand math at a deeper, more conceptual level.

“Just because we’re doing it, doesn’t mean we’re doing it well yet,” she says. “But it’s a learning process for teachers and that will come.”

Meyer has many acolytes, such as Paul Alves, president of the Ontario Association for Mathematics Education and a high school math teacher at Fletcher’s Meadow Secondary School in Brampton, Ont., northwest of Toronto.

“Teachers are really engaged by the way (Meyer) teaches math because when they try it they see the same thing – the excitement students have to do the math – and it changes the classroom. It invigorates it and energizes it, which wasn’t the case before,” Alves says.

That engagement is priceless, Alves says.

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Source: The Globe and Mail

Visual analytics: Can machine learning ‘see’?

Photo: Gadi Lenz

Here's the piece Gadi Lenz, Chief Scientist at AGT International contributed to IDG Connect. "The human brain remains the best video analyser – but computers are starting to catch up." 

Photo: IDG Connect

Here is an interesting observation: Ask a child to describe what she sees around her and she will immediately tell you something like “I see a tall man talking to a woman in the driveway in front of a yellow house”.

The same task is beyond current computer technology – specifically, feeding a “raw” video clip to a machine and getting back (reasonably quickly) a short textual description of what happens in the clip, is currently pretty much impossible. Images and video are rich sources of information consisting of many different objects (with different shapes and colours) with some relationship to each other, in some environment, possibly moving (in the case of video), etc. – there is a reason that a picture is worth a thousand words.

Analysing images and video to facilitate automatic insights and associated decisions is still incredibly difficult (even offline; doing it in real time is much harder). A further complication is the fact that most of the visual content we view is actually a 2D projection of the real (3D) world. Remarkably, humans are really good at these types of tasks, so one approach could be “Hey, let’s just copy the human visual system (HVS)” – if only it was that simple.

So, what can we do in the area of video analytics or video content analysis? Actually, quite a bit, though not quite as much as you may have seen in some popular movies. Here are some examples:

• Driven by security and surveillance use cases, many “suspicious” behaviours can be recognised automatically (i.e., with no human in the loop) such as an object that has been left behind, someone crossing a virtual line, people counting, loitering and many others. Similarly, in the vehicular traffic area, behaviours such as stopped vehicle, or someone driving on the hard shoulder, can be identified.
• Some very specific objects can be recognised – faces, vehicles, license plates and probably a few more. Although some only under limited conditions – controlled lighting, controlled pose, minimal occlusions, etc.
• Tracking of specific objects in the camera’s field of view (tracking across multiple cameras, even when there is overlap in successive cameras, is very difficult)

If your interest is in some specific items on this limited list – no problem, you can buy them from numerous vendors. However, if you are looking for a different behaviour or a different object, you will need some computer vision people to develop a new analytic service. That generic object recogniser or the generic “tell me if anything unusual happens in this area” does not exist yet.

But don’t despair – machine learning approaches are starting to appear in some commercial products. Basically, the machine is trained, for example, on video that represents normal vehicular traffic flow and once the learning phase is over, the machine can indicate that something abnormal has happened such as traffic slowdown due to some sort of incident further down the road. By “machine”, by the way, we mean the computer that ingests the video stream and runs the anomaly detection algorithm, which could, in principle, run in the camera itself or very near to it.
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Source: IDG Connect

AI in Art: Can a computer be an art critic?

Follow on Twitter as @Ayes_Sal

Ayesha Salim, Staff Writer at IDG Connect reports, "New machine algorithm that constructs a network between paintings to infer their originality and influence."

New developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) are now challenging the age old assumption that computers cannot be creative. Computers are composing symphonies and IBM’s famous AI machine Watson, has recently created a cookbook. In the art world, now a machine algorithm can make connections between paintings and ‘study’ art. We catch up with Ahmed Elgammal at Rutgers University in New Jersey over email to discuss his work with partner Babak Saleh on this machine algorithm to find out more.

Photo: IDG Connect

How have you taught the machine to study art?
The interesting thing about our recent study on assessing creativity is that the machine did not know anything about art. The input to the algorithm are images of paintings, where we use off-the-shelf computer vision techniques to encode them. The algorithm then reasons about creativity based on similarities between paintings and their date of creation, using the definition of creativity that we used to design the algorithm. So we did not really teach the machine anything that is art-specific.

For earlier studies we did use annotations of paintings, such as style, genre, and their artists to teach the machine about art. However this is not used in this project.

What sort of tests have you done to see how the machine identifies “creativity”?
We proposed a validation methodology, which we call “time machine experiments”, where we change the date of an artwork to some point in the past or in the future, relative to its correct time of creation and recomputed their creativity scores.

We found that paintings from Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, Expressionist, and Cubism movements have significant gain in their creativity scores when moved back to around 1600 AD. In contrast, Neoclassicism paintings did not gain much when moved back to 1600. This makes sense, because Neoclassicism can be considered as revival to Renaissance. On the other hand, paintings from Renaissance and Baroque styles had losses in their creativity scores when moved forward to 1900 AD.

How does the algorithm decide between paintings that are creative and those that are not?
First, let’s go over the definition of creativity that we used. Historically there is an ongoing debate on how to define creativity. We can describe a person (e.g. artist, poet), a product (painting, poem), or the mental process as being creative.  In our work we focused on the creativity of products, and we used the most common definition of creativity of products, which emphasises the originality of the product and its influential value.

The algorithm is based on constructing a network between paintings and using it to infer the originality and influence of them. Think of it as a game: each painting has the same amount of creativity tokens. Then these creativity tokens are passed between paintings based on their similarity and their dates until equilibrium is reached.
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Source: IDG Connect

Liberal Arts Girl Living in a Tech World

Photo: Deborah Cronen

Deborah Cronen, Head of Customer Success, Enterprise East & Financial Services, Sales Product Consulting at LinkedIn summarizes, "STEM education (e.g. science, technology, engineering, math) is a smart way to set students up for success on the global stage.  Innovation (read: technology) is the creative-destructive force of the day, engineers command high entry level salaries, and computer programmers are the newest cultural phenomenon."

Photo: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

If I were to have children I’d want them to be well positioned too, and the most obvious choice is to steer them towards STEM.  But at what cost? Cultures are lauded by scientific advancement as well as artistic contribution: The Islamic Golden Age brought us algebra and the Alhambra. The Scientific Revolution coincided with the Age of Enlightenment. Early humans developed tools that put us on our modern path, while possessing a creative urge bequeathed in the form of cave paintings.

But forget this cultural critique for a moment and let’s get practical.  A liberal arts education (studies that develop general knowledge and capacities rather than specific functional skills) can be a pragmatic means to a professional ends.  Yes, I said it.  Disciplines such as literature, history and philosophy can contribute to career success.

I know from experience. I am a liberal arts girl living in a tech world. Before finding myself at LinkedIn where I am responsible for driving customer uptake of innovative products and solutions, I studied Asian & Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College.

While employees must generate results, distinction often boils down to intangible competencies rather than functional skills.  One can code like a beast, but can she predict market response to a new product? One can analyze data as effectively as wizards spin spells, but how effectively can she contextualize what it means?  One can develop an elegant competitive strategy, but can she galvanize others to share her vision?  Immersing oneself in liberal arts is an effective way to develop many essential business skills.
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Source: Pulse

Why We Need Philosophers Engaged In Public Life

Photo: Tania Lombrozo

Tania Lombrozo, psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley reports, "Say "philosopher" and most people imagine a bust of Socrates, obscure texts or intellectual tête-à-têtes in the so-called Ivory Tower, away from the muddle of real-life concerns."

But three issues this past week made something clear: We need philosophers engaged in public life — and a public willing to engage them.

Photo: NPR

Issue No. 1: Rachel Dolezal, a woman born to Caucasian parents, was "outed" as white though she identifies as black.

The case raises a variety of questions. What determines a person's race? Is race a biological category or a social construct? If the latter, in what is it grounded? These questions force us to confront issues in philosophy of language about what determines a word's meaning (such as "white" and "black"), issues in philosophy of biology about the status of race as a meaningful biological category (short answer: it's probably not), issues in social constructivism about what race might amount to as a social construct (something grounded in history and ancestry? in social identity?) and much, much more.

The list of philosophically charged questions goes on: Is there a morally or politically significant asymmetry between a black person "passing as white" and a white person "passing as black"? Is Dolezal "transracial" just as some people are "transsexual," or are there important differences between race and sex with implications for how to think about Dolezal's case?

In a thoughtful discussion at the philosophy blog Daily Nous, over half a dozen philosophers weigh in on these issues. The discussion is surprisingly accessible, and a heck of a lot more sophisticated than anything I've seen in mainstream venues.
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Source: NPR

Einstein vs Bergson, science vs philosophy and the meaning of time

Photo: Joe Gelonesi

Joe Gelonesi, key member of ABC RN’s executive editorial team for the past decade writes, "When Henri met Albert the stars didn’t quite align; nor did their clocks. Jimena Canales, historian of science, tells Joe Gelonesi about her discovery of an explosive 20th century debate that changed our view of time and destroyed a reputation."

Physicists and philosophers have a curious relationship. They both need each other for the cosmic dance, but one partner sometimes refuses to join in. Star physicist Stephen Hawking even declared the end of philosophy in 2011.

In some ways the pronouncement was to be expected; physics triumphalism dictates that at some point philosophy will exhaust itself and be unable to solve the mysteries that science seems to conquer in leaps. It’s been coming for a while; at least since the word science replaced natural philosophy a few centuries ago.

Photo: Portrait of physicist Albert Einstein sitting in an armchair with a pipe, circa 1934. (Lucien Aigner/Three Lions/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Along this narrative are high points of confrontation, played out by grand actors on the intellectual stage. Jimena Canales has rediscovered one such moment, which pitted a grandee of philosophy against a rising star of physics.

Canales is an award winning historian of science with a penchant for cosmological themes. She has also authored an ambitious history of the idea of a tenth of a second. As part of her research she came across rare documents which chronicled an extraordinary standoff. She immediately understood her luck.

‘It is the dream a historian could have—I bumped into very interesting material that hadn’t been told before. It’s one of those incredible untold stories.’

Canales had uncovered the transcript of a meeting that took place on April 6, 1922 at the esteemed Societe  Francaise de philosophie in Paris. The protagonists were none other than Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson. In dispute was the very nature of time.

Taking on Einstein might seem foolhardy now, but the world of ideas was a different place a century ago. Bergson was already someone; Einstein was on the make.

Bergson’s Creative Evolution, published in 1907, had put him on the map, and introduced perhaps his most enduring idea—elan vital. Through it Bergson attempted to explain the march of the universe in a non-Darwinian sense, the vital energy that drives all forward. Bergson understood this as a concept that science could grasp only imperfectly, and one that lies at the heart of the creative impulse.

Photo: French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) pictured circa 1905. (Photo by Apic/Getty Images)

The book also develops a theory of time. Rather than a physical account, Bergson explores the subjective nature of time—what it means to us as living beings, rather than as an abstract concept external to our concerns. This is the notion of lived time.

Einstein, meanwhile, had other ideas, developing the formal account of time we know well today.

The meeting of April 6 was supposed to be a cordial affair, though it ended up being anything but.

‘I have to say that day exploded and it was referenced over and over again in the 20th century,’ says Canales. ‘The key sentence was something that Einstein said: “The time of the philosophers did not exist.”’

It’s hard to know whether Bergson was expecting such a sharp jab. In just one sentence, Bergson’s notion of duration—a major part of his thesis on time—was dealt a mortal blow.

As Canales reads it, the line was carefully crafted for maximum impact.

‘What he meant was that philosophers frequently based their stories on a psychological approach and [new] physical knowledge showed that these philosophical approaches were nothing more than errors of the mind.’

The night would only get worse.

‘This was extremely scandalous,’ says Canales. ‘Einstein had been invited by philosophers to speak at their society, and you had this physicist say very clearly that their time did not exist.’

Bergson was outraged, but the philosopher did not take it lying down. A few months later 

Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the law of photoelectric effect, an area of science that Canales noted, ‘hardly jolted the public’s imagination’. In truth, Einstein coveted recognition for his work on relativity.

Bergson inflicted some return humiliation of his own. By casting doubt on Einstein’s theoretical trajectory, Bergson dissuaded the committee from awarding the prize for relativity. In 1922, the jury was still out on the correct interpretation of time.

So began a dispute that festered for years and played into the larger rift between physics and philosophy, science and the humanities.
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Source: ABC Online