Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

CategoryEducation

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Custom library

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
Increasingly, library staff are told to ‘free up’ their bookshelves by discarding books, that one day libraries won’t have books but rather fun and games. Read More ›
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Universität Hörsaal mit schwebenden transparenten Blasen

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
Maybe we need to believe that there is a Mind behind the universe in order to provide guardrails against deeply crazy stuff claiming to be science. Read More ›
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Student child holding smartphone during control exam test at school and cheating on the exam

Chegged Out: How ChatGPT Schooled a Study Giant

AI has transformed how students approach both learning and cheating

AI 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 ›

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John Harvard Statue in Harvard Square, Cambridge

Free Speech Report at Harvard: Professors Afraid to Speak Up

The elite college still fails to promote free speech

Perhaps 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 ›

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Side view at diverse group of children sitting in row at school classroom and using laptops

Will More Computers in Schools Help Students Learn?

Or is it just the smartphone problem, only bigger? A veteran teacher responds
The veteran teacher is assuming, of course, that the computer is there to assist in learning tasks, not to import the student’s social whirl into the classroom. Read More ›
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Closeup macro of hedera helix English ivy green leaves, toned with retro vintage filters. Textured natural green background. View from top above.

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
Schools that are rediscovering a commitment to intellectual freedom may have an edge after a decade of declining enrolment, with worse to come. Read More ›
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Young boys absorbed with cell phones. Concept of dependence on technology, children hooked on mobile, smartphone addiction, addicted to screens or devices and excessive phone use.

The Smartphone is the Enemy of Learning

Digital devices are hijacking kids' ability to concentrate in the classroom
How can students be expected to read and study or engage in discussions when educators are competing with TikTok videos and Instagram in the classroom? Read More ›
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Child kid son pupil student bad behavior boy schoolboy playing video game on mobile phone at lesson at school hide smartphone under class desk distract from studying gadget addiction writing learning

Finally Something the Politicians Agree On: Phone-free Schools

Governors in both red and blue states are getting screens out of classrooms
I grew up in a “phone-free” school in the 2010s and would highly recommend it. Phones represented clear threats to learning, collaboration, and creativity. Read More ›
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group businesspeople thumbs down together. concept rejection and boycott.

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
Idea boycotts have been known to suppress new ideas for centuries. It used to be thought of as a negative idea, a sort of dark ages… Read More ›
silhouette form of bull and bear on technical financial graph

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
The current, widely-favored 60/40 strategy has little or nothing to recommend it beyond the fact that it is what everyone else is doing. Read More ›
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Augmented Reality Bookshelf on Smartphone

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 classroom

This 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 ›

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Group of multiracial young people using smart mobile phone device outdoors Happy university students watching cellphones sitting in college campus Teenagers addicted to social media te : Generative AI

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 smartphone

Ben 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 ›

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: A journey through a kaleidoscopic, mathematical dreamscape, punctuated with intricate details, entwined and layered to create a mesmerizing wonder.

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
Mathematics underlies our entire universe at its most basic level. Correct answers conform to reality. The war on 2 + 2 = 4 is just plain doomed. Read More ›
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ChatGPT Artificial Intelligence conversational chat bot by open ai using machine learning, Generative AI

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
On a serious note, Smith and Funk stress that — despite chatbot buzz — we must both practice critical thinking skills and teach them to students. Read More ›
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3d rendering of High Angle View Inside a Conference Hall

Why Do Universities Ignore Good Ideas?

Funding agencies see if the researcher is tenured or has already received funding. It's a vicious cycle.
Katalin Karikó’s Nobel Prize didn’t prove that universities don’t fund good ideas. It merely reminded us that they rarely do. Read More ›
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graduation

Artificially Smart: Artificial Intelligence and Higher Education

Understanding needs to remain the metric by which students are evaluated
If steps aren’t taken to ensure that conceptual mastery remains the standard for higher education, most students will complete their degrees as technicians. Read More ›
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Group of students using laptops and other devices in classroom.

The Kids Aren’t Taking Notes

Colleges have become too dependent on digital methods of learning and communication.
Visit a typical classroom in the United States and you’re bound to see just about every student “taking notes” behind a computer screen as the professor lectures at the helm. Read More ›
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Fall College Campus. University student dorm with autumn leaves

Where Are All the Men?

Physicist Lawrence Krauss notes that men are vanishing from the sciences

Noted 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 ›