But seldom has this level of attention from students and employees been so focused on the finances of their own campuses. It coincides with what polls disclose is falling public confidence in higher education. And given the results, it seems likely to create more, not less, mistrust.
Higher education has become a popular public target. Fifty-eight percent of people polled by the think tank New Americasaid colleges and universities put their own interests ahead of those of students. About the same proportion in a Public Agenda survey said colleges care mostly about the bottom line, and 44 percent said they’re wasteful and inefficient. And a Gallup poll found that more than half of Americans have only some, or very little, confidence in higher education.
We want to see greater transparency in how they spend our money. And it is our money, most of it,” since such a large percentage of the budget comes from tuition
According to San Jose State University researcher Ziming Lu, this is typical “screen-based reading behavior,” with more time spent browsing, scanning and skimming than in-depth reading. As reading experiences move online, experts have been exploring how reading from a screen may be changing our brains. Reading expert Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid, has voiced concerns that digital reading will negatively affect the brain’s ability to read deeply for sophisticated understanding, something that Nicholas Carr also explored in his book, The Shallows. Teachers are trying to steer students toward digital reading strategies that practice deep reading, and nine out of ten parents say that having their children read paper books is important to them.
“Digital reading is good in some ways, and bad in others,” he said: in other words, it’s complicated.
According to Julie Coiro, a reading researcher at the University of Rhode Island, moving from digital to paper and back again is only a piece of the attention puzzle: the larger and more pressing issue is how reading online is taxing kids’ attention. Online reading, Coiro noticed, complicates the comprehension process “a million-fold.”
Each time a student reads online content, Coiro said, they are faced with almost limitless input and decisions, including images, video and multiple hyperlinks that lead to even more information. As kids navigate a website, they must constantly ask themselves: is this the information I’m looking for?
Eureka: machine learning tool, brainstorming engine. give it an initial idea and it returns similar ideas. Like Google: refine the idea, so the machine can understand it better. create a collection of ideas to translate into course design or others.
Netlix:
influencers and microinfluencers, pre- and doing the execution
a machine can construct a book with the help of a person. bionic book. machine and person working hand in hand. provide keywords and phrases from lecture notes, presentation materials. from there recommendations and suggestions based on own experience; then identify included and excluded content. then instructor can construct.
Design may be the least interesting part of the book for the faculty.
multiple choice quiz may be the least interesting part, and faculty might want to do much deeper assessment.
use these machine learning techniques to build assessment. how to more effectively. inquizitive is the machine learning
students engagements and similar prompts
presence in the classroom: pre-service teachers class. how to immerse them and practice classroom management skills
First class: marriage btw VR and use of AI – an environment headset: an algorithm reacts how teachers are interacting with the virtual kids. series of variables, oppty to interact with present behavior. classroom management skills. simulations and environments otherwise impossible to create. apps for these type of interactions
facilitation, reflection and research
AI for more human experience, allow more time for the faculty to be more human, more free time to contemplate.
Jason: Won’t the use of AI still reduce the amount of faculty needed?
Christina Dumeng: @Jason–I think it will most likely increase the amount of students per instructor.
Andrew Cole (UW-Whitewater): I wonder if instead of reducing faculty, these types of platforms (e.g., analytic capabilities) might require instructors to also become experts in the various technology platforms.
Dirk Morrison: Also wonder what the implications of AI for informal, self-directed learning?
Kate Borowske: The context that you’re presenting this in, as “your own jazz band,” is brilliant. These tools presented as a “partner” in the “band” seems as though it might be less threatening to faculty. Sort of gamifies parts of course design…?
Dirk Morrison: Move from teacher-centric to student-centric? Recommender systems, AI-based tutoring?
Andrew Cole (UW-Whitewater): The course with the bot TA must have been 100-level right? It would be interesting to see if those results replicate in 300, 400 level courses
In the U.S., quitting Twitter and Facebook would pose a serious challenge for politicians, according to Republican strategist Alice Stewart.
German politicians have harnessed American social-media savvy. NPR’s Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson reports that Austin, Texas-based Harris Media, which helped create Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz’s online presence and briefly worked with the Trump campaign, was critical in crafting polarizing social media messaging for the AfD.
Twitter lost 9 million users worldwide in the third quarter of 2018, according to the latest company earnings report.
Facebook grew during the same period in every market except Europe, where it lost a million monthly active users. But it has faced a backlash since a whistle-blower revealed in March 2018 that some 87 million people had their data improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica. It was the beginning of a months-long scandal that revealed the network was slow to respond when Russian operatives used it to spread misinformation to influence U.S. elections.
“Trump effect” on bullying in schools, citing a study that found higher bullying rates in GOP districts after the 2016 presidential election.
The scientific evidence on what works is complicated.
For example, this 2007 review of anti-bullying programs found “little discernible effect on youth participants.”
twenty-some years of empirical research that shows punishing kids is unhelpful
Instead, he argues that schools should combine consequences for bullies with mediation, counseling or a learning experience.
School shootings and violence have prompted schools to take an even more punitive stance against student misbehavior, experts I talked to said.
the higher a school’s climate rating — that is, the more that students, parents and teachers think their school is a safe place where people are respected — the lower the bullying rates. Similarly, the higher the social-emotional skills, such as the ability to wait and not react impulsively, the lower the bullying rates. But what hasn’t been clearly proven is that improvements in school climate or social-emotional skills will necessarily lead to a reduction in bullying.
the popular hip-hop lyrics Web siteRap Genius, will announce a pilot project to use hip-hop to teach science in 10 New York City public schools. The pilot is small, but its architects’ goals are not modest. Dr. Emdin, who has written a book called “Urban Science Education for the Hip-Hop Generation,”
hip-hop “cypher,” participants stand in a circle and take turns rapping, often supporting or playing off one another’s rhymes.
“All of those things that are happening in the hip-hop cypher are what should happen in an ideal classroom.”
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Students analyze rap lyrics with code in digital humanities class
Some teachers are finding a place for coding in English, music, science, math and social studies, too
by TARA GARCÍA MATHEWSON October 18, 2018
Fifteen states now require all high schools to offer computer science courses. Twenty-three states have created K-12 computer science standards. And 40 states plus the District of Columbia allow students to count computer science courses toward high school math or science graduation requirements. That’s up from 12 states in 2013, when Code.org launched, aiming to expand access to computer science in U.S. schools and increase participation among girls and underrepresented minorities in particular.
As Norwegian Refugee Council research found, 70 percent of Syrian refugees lack basic identification and documents showing ownership of property.
The global passport
Host nations certainly has a share in the damage, as they face problems concerning the accessibility of vital information about the newcomers — dealing with the undocumented refugee, the immigration service can’t gain the information about his/her health status, family ties or criminal record, or verify any other vital data that helps them make a decision. Needless to say, this may lead to the designation of refugee status being exploited by economic migrants, fugitives or even the war criminals that caused the mass displacement to begin with.
Another important issue is data security. Refugees’ personal identities are carefully re-established with the support of clever biometric systems set up by the U.N. Agency for Refugees (UNHCR). UNHCR registers millions of refugees and maintains those records in a database. But the evidence suggests that centralized systems like this could be prone to attacks. As a report on UNCHR’s site notes, Aadhaar — India’s massive biometric database and the largest national database of people in the world — has suffered serious breaches, and last year, allegations were made that access was for sale on the internet for as little as $8
Finland, a country with a population of 5.5 million, cannot boast huge numbers of refugees. For 2018, it set a quota of 750 people, mainly flying from Syria and the Democratic Republic of Congo. That’s way less than neighboring Sweden, which promised to take in 3,400. Nevertheless, the country sets a global example of the use of effective technology in immigration policy: It’s using blockchain to help the newcomers get on their feet faster.
The system, developed by the Helsinki-based startup MONI, maintains a full analogue of a bank account for every one of its participants.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2018, the billionaire investor and philanthropist George Soros revealed that his structures already use a blockchain in immigration policies
In 2017, Accenture and Microsoft Corp. teamed up to build a digital ID network using blockchain technology, as part of a U.N.-supported project to provide legal identification to 1.1 billion people worldwide with no official documents.
a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with blockchain platform IOTA to explore how the technology could increase efficiency.
Playing video-game shooters, we now know, is not a major contributor to youth violence. Granted, kids’ enthusiasm for Fortnite can be a little much, but we are old enough to remember Garbage Pail kids and have played Pokémon.
Fortnite is, in many respects, a classic “third place”—a place that is neither home nor school, but where kids can socialize and play beyond the watchful eyes of parents or teachers. These are places where kids learn to negotiate conflict, become independent, and explore what kind of person they want to be. They are important experiences that we too often design out of our kids’ lives through structured activities and all of the shuffling back and forth we do in today’s busy world.
we’ve seen that one of the best things educators can do is bystander training.
