Are Statistics a True Measure of Learning in Schools?

"Let’s face it. School evaluations are ruled by statistics these days. Teachers are being evaluated by how well their students are doing on standardized tests. Student end of year grades are being influenced by their statistical performance on standardized tests because those measurements are now being averaged as a percentage of those grades." continues Clarksville Online.

 Photo: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Statistics is a branch of math that is involved with looking at numerical data and interpreting what those numbers mean.

Let’s put aside the statistical possibility that a child might have had a bad night the night before the test (like the police arriving to take a parent to jail, or a sibling who was sick and cried most of the night, or the child himself/herself being so nervous s/he was up all night throwing up!). 

Let’s eliminate the kids who have test phobias and just can’t concentrate well enough to focus on the test at hand.

Let’s forget about the classroom where a member of the class had a seizure during the test and all the other kids had their concentration eliminated for a period of time.

Let’s just assume that everything was perfect and every child did his best on the test.

Some unusual factors can still influence those all important statistics for results on the test. Educators know that groups of children from year to year just don’t perform the same way. Some years a high percentage of the children seem to have come into the world with higher capacities for learning; that’s called a “good year” by those teachers.

Other years a class will have a high percentage of children who are below average achievers; many times this is because those children are chronologically younger; in other words, more kids in this group have birthdays just before the deadline to be able to enter school. That’s called a “difficult year” by the teachers who are working with shorter attention spans and an increased number of children with a less successful background.

Sometimes changes in the curriculum can strongly affect achievement levels. For instance, if the total approach to teaching math changes that year, teachers may be struggling with the new techniques of teaching these concepts and children who have been taught using a different system may be just plain confused.

Another possibility that can influence statistics is a change in the testing procedures. Moving from taking the test on paper to taking it on the computer—especially for young students who are just getting accustomed to typing—can make significant dips in statistical results.
Read more...

Source: Clarksville Online

This Ph.D. Student's Dissertation Is The First Thesis Ever To Be Written Entirely In Comic Book Form

Follow on Twitter as @CPLHouse

"A Ph.D student wrote his thesis as a comic book." according to Crystal Paul.

Writing a dissertation doesn’t always have to be painful drudgery. In fact, you might even get away with using pictures! Columbia graduate student Nick Sousanis did when he wrote his entire dissertation as a comic book. But don’t expect to find caped superheroes and villains in this one. Sousanis’ dissertation, which was published by Harvard University Press with the title Unflattening in April this year, uses the combination of words and images to argue for the importance of using visual thinking in education. 

Photo: Bustle

As much as recent grads might be smacking their foreheads with a “why didn’t I think of that?”, Sousanis didn’t choose the comic book form just for fun. As Sousanis told Inside Higher Education, “this form was as meaningful and as complex and could handle as much academic discourse as anything else.” And the crazy detail and uniqueness of the images in the excerpted pages from the book on Boing Boing show just how hard Sousanis worked. But don’t worry, grads, there are other ways to quirk-ify your thesis, like removing all the punctuation.

Although the book just became available, Sousanis actually defended his thesis back in May 2014, and, eager to get the word out about it, he went old school and actually handed out printed, folded-up copies of his thesis to people wherever he went.
Read more...

Source: Bustle

This Ph.D. Student's Dissertation Is The First Thesis Ever To Be Written Entirely In Comic Book Form

Follow on Twitter as @CPLHouse

"A Ph.D student wrote his thesis as a comic book." according to Crystal Paul.

Writing a dissertation doesn’t always have to be painful drudgery. In fact, you might even get away with using pictures! Columbia graduate student Nick Sousanis did when he wrote his entire dissertation as a comic book. But don’t expect to find caped superheroes and villains in this one. Sousanis’ dissertation, which was published by Harvard University Press with the title Unflattening in April this year, uses the combination of words and images to argue for the importance of using visual thinking in education. 

Photo: Bustle

As much as recent grads might be smacking their foreheads with a “why didn’t I think of that?”, Sousanis didn’t choose the comic book form just for fun. As Sousanis told Inside Higher Education, “this form was as meaningful and as complex and could handle as much academic discourse as anything else.” And the crazy detail and uniqueness of the images in the excerpted pages from the book on Boing Boing show just how hard Sousanis worked. But don’t worry, grads, there are other ways to quirk-ify your thesis, like removing all the punctuation.

Although the book just became available, Sousanis actually defended his thesis back in May 2014, and, eager to get the word out about it, he went old school and actually handed out printed, folded-up copies of his thesis to people wherever he went.
Read more...

Source: Bustle

Queen Mary University of London considers making PhD students employees

Follow on Twitter as @HollyElse

"Importance of doctoral candidates in research makes it likely that many institutions will make the change, says principal." summarizes Holly Else.

 Photo: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

A research-intensive university is having preliminary discussions about changing the status of its PhD students.
 

Photo: Professor Simon Gaskell

Simon Gaskell, principal of Queen Mary University of London, said that the institution is considering whether PhD students might be counted as employees in the future.

He said that it was “extremely likely” that some universities may make changes of this type in the next decade or so.

But academics have raised concerns about the idea, which they say could “prolong the agony” for early career researchers who may still struggle to find future academic positions.

At the majority of universities in the UK, PhD candidates are treated as students, but in some institutions, usually those that are not research intensive, individuals may be taken on as research assistants and work towards a PhD. However, PhD candidates are considered employees in many other European countries.

Professor Gaskell said that at Queen Mary almost half the research outputs submitted to the research excellence framework in the areas of medicine and dentistry had PhD students as first authors.
Read more...

Source: Times Higher Education

NASA's vision for IT's future by Adam Rowe

What does NASA need for its next mission to Mars? And how will this impact IT? reports Adam Rowe, IDG Connect.  

NASA has recently unveiled its 2015-2035 technological roadmap, an outline of all the advancements it will need to push for to meet the next two decades’ worth of mission goals, including the big one: a manned trip to the surface of Mars.

Photo: IDG Connect

Some advancements won’t have an obvious application outside of NASA’s aerospace niche. I don’t see radiation-resistant hardware on Hewlett-Packard’s back-to-school slate, for instance. And it’s hard to imagine the application of space-mined rocket fuel when we still have the normal kind down on Earth.

But NASA-led research has still made incredible advances in a wide variety of fields. Last April, two briefcase-sized prototypes of a radar technology developed by NASA were able to locate heartbeats beneath ten feet of debris in earthquake-devastated Nepal, saving four lives. And now NASA has pointed out a shockingly in-depth array of fields that it expects will be leaping forward in the near future. The future is so bright, I gotta wear NASA-funded shades…

Here are the top IT fields that NASA has targeted for improvement.

Cloud-based supercomputers
Cloud-based supercomputing is taking off mostly because organizations can save money by renting their services. If you need complex computing for one task in particular, there’s no point in configuring an in-house computer when you can just use the cloud. ‘InfiniBand,’ a high-speed network communications link, has provided a valuable resource in supercomputers’ move to the cloud. The rate at which it processes data is the highest out of any competing interconnect, PC World reported last year...

Robotics
NASA is looking for more autonomous robotics. In other words, systems that can arrive at decisions by themselves. But the physical constraints of a Mars-located rover or lander can’t be ignored. They’ll also need to improve tactile sensors, activity recognizers, and extreme-terrain mobility...

Big Data Analytics
The future of big data is pretty simple: bigger data. And data analytics is probably the biggest field that we’ll see advancing over the next few decades, although this has deep ties to cloud and cognitive computing, which are the best ways to aggregate the data...

Cognitive Computing
Designed to deal with more complex input than typical computers, a cognitive-based system is able to reason, interpret language, and build upon past knowledge...

Nanotechnology
As data gets bigger, tech gets smaller: with nanotechnology, NASA will be getting results on an atomic level. And the results are awe-inspiring: for example, nanoscale textured surfaces can self-clean and self-heal. They’re biomimetic, drawing inspiration from the healing power within a gecko’s foot. Nanotech might also boost efficiency of power storage, propulsion, and sensors, all while reducing mass...

Artificial intelligence
The rise of cloud computing was like opening a Pandora’s box, and the biggest advancement to come out will be artificial intelligence. At least, according to Roman Stanek, founder and CEO of cloud analytics company GoodData...
Read more... 

Related links
NASA Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

NASA's Vision: To reach for new heights and reveal the unknown so that what we do and learn will benefit all humankind.

Source: IDG Connect

Don't Miss This Free Webinar Tuesday June 30 - Identifying the “Learning” Elements in Games

I hope you will take advantage of this opportunities to improve your webinar skills and knowledge below.

Free Webinar - Identifying the “Learning” Elements in Games

When:

Tuesday, June 30, 10 a.m. PST, 1 p.m. EST

We know that under the right conditions, learning occurs in games…but learning doesn’t occur in all games­­­­−even ones intended to lead to learning.

Why? What makes a game effective from a learning perspective? What elements detract from learning?

This session will provide research-based recommendations and guidelines for creating a game that leads to positive learning outcomes. Learn the best method for including a game into a corporate or K-12 curriculum; discover the number one game feature that leads to impactful learning outcomes; and uncover game elements that have been directly linked to learning; find out how to use empirically-based guidelines to create the outcomes you want to achieve with your serious game.

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.
Register for the Webinar

Who:

Karl M. Kapp
Bloomsburg University

Karl M. Kapp, Ed.D., is a professor of Instructional Technology at Bloomsburg University, PA where he teaches game design and gamification classes.

He serves as the Director of Bloomsburg’s Institute for Interactive Technologies which works with organizations to create interactive instruction including games and simulations.

Karl is also co-founder of the educational games company 2KLearn, LLC, an author, and international speaker and consultant.

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

Enjoy this free webinar! 

Is e-learning green-learning?

"Let’s think about this for a minute. If you aren’t using online training, then how are you delivering it? If it’s not e-learning then there aren’t a great many options really. There’s face-to-face training of some sort or traditional distance learning." summarizes flick learning.

 Photo: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Classroom or face-to-face training, usually means either getting a trainer to come to you, or sending your people off to a training venue, and for many organisations, it will be both. Cue planes, trains and automobiles.
 
Consider for a moment the energy consumption that occurs whenever people travel between offices or to and from training facilities and venues. 
That’s more fuel and CO2 emissions. Not to mention electricity and/or gas to heat (or cool) the venue, run those lengthy PowerPoints on the big screen, and provide you with a stream of refreshments throughout the day and that all-important buffet lunch.
 
Then of course there’s all the paper. Ever been to a training event that didn’t have a flipchart, a supply of paper and a wad of handouts? Me neither. Oh, and the mandatory feedback form. The paper industry is the largest consumer of energy and uses more water to produce a ton of product than any other industry. It's also the third largest industrial polluter to air, water and land, and paper accounts for a staggering 40% of all waste. Goodbye trees, hello landfill.
 
It’s true that distance learning saves on the travel, but if you’ve ever done any, you’ll know that there’s a fair whack of paper involved, and a lot of to-ing and fro-ing as papers are posted out, written work submitted, more papers sent out, more work submitted and so on. Royal Mail do well out of it, the environment, not so much.
Read more...

Related link
Click here to see why e-learning is not only eco-friendly, but also how your organisation will benefit from it [infographic].

Source: TrainingZone.co.uk (blog)

The Company of Thought, a unique international think-tank, launches

"An event held at Australia House, in The Strand, London, to mark the start of ‘London Learning Week’ saw – among other things – the official launch of an international think-tank dedicated to analyzing issues and trends in the corporate online learning technologies industry." writes Training Press Releases.

The think-tank, called The Company of Thought (TCoT), aims to address unsatisfied customer needs and build new business models around them. In particular, it aims to report and comment on trends within the corporate online learning technologies industry worldwide, independent of any vested interests.

According to one of TCoT’s founding principals – Craig Weiss, the California-based internationally known market analyst specializing in learning management systems (LMSs) – “TCoT offers its clients the opportunity to acquire in-depth industry knowledge, to reduce risk - because TCoT provides knowledge about industry developments so that they can take decisions about their future based on the best possible market knowledge at the time - and to reduce cost. Basically, you won’t be able to access such high quality, accurate and comprehensive information more cost-effectively.”

TCoT’s founder principals are Craig Weiss (California, USA), David Patterson (UK) and Bob Little (UK). Other founder members of the think-tank are: An Coppens (UK/ Sweden/ Belgium), Iva Matasic (Croatia), and Graeme Coomber (UK/ Australia/ Singapore). From time to time, other online learning sector specialists are invited to join – and contribute to – TCoT.

TCoT’s industry specialists are available to carry out such projects as assessing clients’ and/or clients’ competitors’ products. They can speak at clients’ webinars, conferences or give private consultations about industry trends. In addition, they can carry out specific research projects and write articles or blog posts for clients. TCoT members also contribute to a quarterly industry report, which is for subscribers only.

To mark the public launch of TCoT, its industry report for June 2015 is freely available, on request. The report covers the latest news, trends and analysis on:

• Innovation/ leading edge e-learning - notably, MOOCs
• Developments in learning management systems (LMS)
• Augmented reality, virtual reality and other potentially immersive learning tools
• Gamification
• Personalized e-learning and big data analytics
• UK and Continental European e-learning trends

“Establishing TCoT marks a new era in international collaboration with the online learning technologies industry,” commented TCoT principal and director of the UK-based market analyst, Learning Light, David Patterson. “Our network of online learning specialists are based around the world – so we can provide informed analysis of regional trends around the world as well as information on specific sectors within the online learning technologies industry.”

“At present, TCoT’s clients come from the corporate learning vendors and distributors’ sector,” said TCoT’s Bob Little. “However, there are already indications of interest in TCoT’s unique services from public sector bodies, including some national governments.”

About The Company of Thought (TCoT)
TCoT is an international Think Tank which aims to help identify, analyze and generally shed light on developments in the corporate online learning industry worldwide – and discuss their implications for business. Its Mission is ‘to report and comment on trends within the corporate online learning technologies industry worldwide, independent of any vested interests’. TCoT’s global headquarters is in St Albans in the UK. It has outposts around the world, notably in California, USA. Its founding principals are Craig Weiss (California, USA), David Patterson(Sheffield, UK) and Bob Little (St Albans, UK). Other current members of TCoT include:  Iva Matasic (Zagreb, Croatia), An Coppens (UK/ Sweden/ Belgium), and Graeme Coomber (Darlington, UK).

I've just seen the news about your new job. Congratulations, BoB.

Source: Training Press Releases (press release)

Female prof. calls for inflated course evaluations for female profs

Follow on Twitter as@gabriellahope_

Sarah Pritchard, an associate professor at Cornell University, says colleges should add bonus points to female faculty members’ teaching evaluations to combat students’ overwhelming gender bias.
The Ivy League professor describes female instructors as inherently disadvantaged and says schools should ensure a “level playing field.” according to Gabby Morrongiello, reporter for Campus Reform.

Should universities award ‘bonus points’ to female professors’ course evaluations to remedy gender bias?

 Photo: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

College students across America are typically required to complete evaluations at the end of each semester. These materials are often distributed to students in-class prior to final exams and used by administrators and professors to assess both curriculum and job performance.

Weeks after the evaluations are completed—once grades have been submitted and campuses have cleared out for summer—professors will undo the manilla envelopes in which they’ve been collected and survey the damage.

“And, like each year, what they’ll find has been pervasively slanted by gender bias,” says Sara Pritchard, an associate professor of science and technology at Cornell University in New York.

Pritchard has been a full-time college professor since 2004. Throughout her years in academia, she has become increasingly disturbed by what she claims is an ongoing dilemma for many female scholars.

“I’ve read some of the research on gender bias in course evaluations, heard shocking stories from female colleagues, and, unfortunately, seen the issue in my own evaluations,” Pritchard wrote in a recent column for The Conversation— an online blog written by, and intended for, individuals in the academic and research communities.

According to Pritchard, female professors are more likely to find personal attacks and “comments that have nothing to do with their teaching abilities or competencies” embedded in students’ feedback regardless of whether they teach at the undergraduate or post-baccalaureate level.

“For instance, it’s common for female faculty to read comments about their appearance and fashion choices,” she writes.

Echoing the sentiments of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Pritchard cites a recent “gendered language” study which claims that college students are more likely to describe female instructors as “bossy,” in addition to more flattering words like “nice,” “approachable,” or “helpful.” The same study indicates that male instructors are more often characterized as “funny,” “genius,” or “brilliant.”
Read more...

Source: Campus Reform

Could artificial intelligence kill us off? by Bella Bathurst

Follow on Twitter as @BellaBathurst

Bella Bathurst, contributing editor at Newsweek reports, "Stephen Hawking last year warned that AI could lead to the end of the human race. Was he right?"

Of course you are. You're awake, you're sentient, you might even be upright. You're not comatose or dead, and it's reasonable to assume that if you were on some kind of powerful mind-altering drug then you wouldn't be reading this. The point is, you're here, and you're alive, so therefore you're conscious. You know you are."

OK then, since you're conscious and I'm conscious and everyone else is conscious, go ahead. Define it. What is consciousness? Where does it reside? Does it belong to the mind or the body, or does it exist outside both? Is consciousness part of our souls, or does it live in the things we create – our art, our music, our cities and wars? Could it be mechanical or electronic, and, if so, what makes it operate? Most pressingly of all, is it possible we have now made for ourselves a new kind of consciousness, one which exists independently? If so, then what the hell have we got ourselves into?

The search for a definition of consciousness must lay claim to be the world's longest-running detective story. We've had our best minds on it ever since we developed brains big enough to ask questions and, still, we seem to be stumped. Plato and Aristotle couldn't fix it; Kant, Hume and Locke tried different angles; Schroedinger, Heisenberg and Einstein remained in awe before it. None of them came up with the final formula, the definitive, nailed-it for ever, silences-all-critics answer.

Lately though, the hunt seems to have changed gear. Despite big differences about how best to conduct the search and where to look, several of the most persistent sleuths have found themselves disconcertingly close to agreement. No-one is yet at the stage when they are ready to call a press conference and announce to the world they have finally apprehended the suspect, but they have at least begun to converge on these two leads: the Omega Point and the Singularity.

The tipping point
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is an improbable prophet, partly because he's dead, and partly because he's still associated with a famous palaeontological fraud. Born the fourth of 11 children near Clermont-Ferrand in France in 1881, de Chardin developed two interests when young: God and fossils. Aged 18, he entered the Jesuit Order as a novice before completing his studies in philosophy and maths.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin foresaw a disembodied intelligence very like the internet. 
Photo: Newsweek

In 1912, he became part of the team working on Piltdown Man, the "discovery" of bones in East Sussex which were claimed to belong to an early hominid and thus to provide the missing evolutionary link between apes and humans. Nearly 40 years later, the find was exposed as a hoax. Team leader Charles Dawson had combined the skull of a modern human with the jaw of an orang-utan. Whether or not de Chardin had actually participated in the fraud – his contribution of a missing molar to the skull was a major supporting piece of evidence – his archaeological work was interrupted by the outbreak of war.

When he resumed in 1918, he moved the focus of his studies sideways into geology and began teaching in China. For the rest of his life, he combined writing, spiritual practice, teaching and adventure. By the time of his death in 1955 he'd driven a car across the whole of Eurasia and had a long but supposedly unconsummated relationship with an American sculptor called Lucille Swan...

The Turing test
Last summer, all of those future possibilities got one symbolic step closer. The Enigma code-breaker Alan Turing's famous test – can a machine demonstrate intelligence indistinguishable from that of a human? – was declared to have been passed by the Royal Society in London. A computer had managed to fool a third of the judges into believing it was "Eugene", a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy.

Eugene's supposed age and nationality provided a cover-story for the typos and the gaucheness in the conversation, and anything the programme couldn't understand, it countered with a question. Easy enough to pick holes in Eugene's performance after the event: in an age of trolls and cyber-spooks aren't we all used to the idea that print distorts identity, five minutes is too short? – but still.

The British Turing Bombe machine was the brainchild of mathematical genius' Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman, and enabled Bletchley Park's Cryptographers to decode over 3000 enemy messages a day breaking the codes created by German military Enigma machine during the Second World War. 
Photo: Newsweek

Turing's original conditions were only that the computer should be able to hold a brief conversation with each judge, and that 30% or more of those judges should be unable to distinguish between the artificial human and the real. "I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain,'" Turing once said at a meeting of telegraphy executives. "All I'm after is just a mediocre brain, something like the president of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company."
Read more...

Source: Newsweek