CategoryEducation
A Library Without Books Is Like a Book Without Pages
There is a disturbing new phenomenon afoot – babies and toddlers are turning up at nurseries and schools not knowing what books are, or how to use them
Michael Shermer: Wokeness Poisons Science and I Am No Longer Woke
A number of well-known one-way skeptics and atheists are beginning to feel the consequences of prescribed insufferable virtue
Chegged Out: How ChatGPT Schooled a Study Giant
AI has transformed how students approach both learning and cheatingAI is going to both create and destroy businesses. An interesting victim of AI is the academic assistance business. Academic dishonesty, the dark side of academic assistance, is a fancy term for cheating. With profit-motivated websites like Chegg.com, cheating became easier. When taking an exam, a student could take a photo of a difficult problem and send it to Chegg. In literally minutes, the student would be sent the answer over a cell phone. How do they do it? Often Chegg employs smart nerds from poor countries who, by local standards, are paid big bucks for their efforts. To use Chegg, a subscription is needed. But why include a human in the loop when AI can give you a quicker Read More ›
Free Speech Report at Harvard: Professors Afraid to Speak Up
The elite college still fails to promote free speechPerhaps no sphere of society has become more vulnerable to “groupthink” than the modern American university. Concerns about free speech rights have long circled the discourse over the last couple of years, with cancel culture coming for everyone who even hints at heterodox viewpoints. Rikki Schlott, a writer for the New York Post, recently wrote a report on how some professors at Harvard University, the most prestigious academic institution in the United States, feel hemmed in by the prevailing campus consensus. At a place where the quest for truth is engraved on its founding banner, academics no longer feel comfortable doing just that: professing what they take to be different reflections on what counts as the truth. Schlott writes, Harvard Read More ›
Will More Computers in Schools Help Students Learn?
Or is it just the smartphone problem, only bigger? A veteran teacher responds
Ivy League Schools Are the Worst for Censoring Free Expression
The top five for freedom of expression were state universities, says intellectual freedom watchdog FIRE in its fifth annual report; some schools are improving
The Smartphone is the Enemy of Learning
Digital devices are hijacking kids' ability to concentrate in the classroom
Finally Something the Politicians Agree On: Phone-free Schools
Governors in both red and blue states are getting screens out of classrooms
Scholars Association Changes Policy, Now Backs Academic Boycotts
If AAUP members have run out of challenging new ideas themselves, they can at least suppress them when they are introduced by others
How can someone who fails be faulted when everyone else is failing?
Market turbulence can cause endowment fund managers to travel with the herd — sacrifice returns in order to reduce annual volatility
Ban the Phones and Bring Back the Books
It's time for the book, a time-tested vehicle of delight and instruction, to make a comeback in the classroomThis summer, several states have proposed banning smartphones in public schools or introducing programs that will limit kids’ phone use during school hours. So far New York, Indiana, Ohio, California, and Oklahoma have proposed bans or restrictions, showing rare bipartisan concern over the issue. The impetus for this movement came in May when Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders sent a letter to every fellow governor in the United States with a complimentary copy of The Anxious Generation, a new book by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Haidt shows how starting in the early 2010s kids’ mental health steeply declined. The main culprit? The smartphone, which soon became an ensnaring substitute for “real life.” Gen Z, those born after 1995, were the first Read More ›
A World-Famous Pediatrician on How To Help Kids Learn Better
Start, Ben Carson says, by eliminating the distractions created by constant input from media. Today, that must include the smartphoneBen Carson is a world-famous pediatric neurosurgeon and professor of medicine emeritus at Johns Hopkins. He … performed the first successful separation of conjoined twins who were attached at the back of the head (occipital craniopagus twins). The operation, which took place in 1987, lasted some 22 hours and involved a 70-member surgical team. Carson also refined a technique known as hemispherectomy, in which one-half of the brain is removed to prevent seizures in persons with severe epilepsy. – Britannica Carson started out comparatively disadvantaged but his mother made sure he got a good education: He later became active in politics, serving as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (1917–21). But he also retained a longstanding concern for education, especially Read More ›
Arts major cracks hard math through practice, practice, practice
She became an engineering prof that way. The war on math is certainly not over but the warriors may be starting to find themselves on the back foot
At Chronicle of Higher Ed: Critical Thinking Isn’t Just Chat
Gary Smith and Jeffrey Funk test Big Tech’s chatbots for critical thinking skills before an academic audience — with sobering but often hilarious results
Why Do Universities Ignore Good Ideas?
Funding agencies see if the researcher is tenured or has already received funding. It's a vicious cycle.
Artificially Smart: Artificial Intelligence and Higher Education
Understanding needs to remain the metric by which students are evaluated
Why Do People Who Want to Dumb Down Education Pick Math?
When right and wrong answers are clear, rewarding the wrong answer is an easier victory for them to celebrate.
The Kids Aren’t Taking Notes
Colleges have become too dependent on digital methods of learning and communication.
Where Are All the Men?
Physicist Lawrence Krauss notes that men are vanishing from the sciencesNoted physicist Lawrence Krauss wrote an article in Quillette noting how men are vanishing from science and academia. Despite the perception that STEM and related fields are male dominated, Krauss shows how, due to decades of affirmative action programming and cultural shift, that’s no longer the case. He writes, As April Bleske-Rechek and Michael Bernstein have shown, while men still occupy three quarters of STEM positions (despite the fact that the percentage of women in STEM has more than doubled since 1980), the situation is precisely reversed in the fields of health, education, administration, and literacy. While massive efforts are underway to correct the imbalance between men and women in STEM, there have been no concomitant efforts to increase the numbers Read More ›