Lifelong Learning
It was one of the most frequently repeated stories of the year: college students, particularly left-leaning college students, are intolerant…
If it sounds like a caricature… well, it is. If nothing else, pundits and politicians seem to forget that the majority of college students do not attend private institutions like Columbia or Middlebury or even elite publics like Berkeley or Madison.
40% of those in higher education attend community colleges. Two out of every three community college students experiences food insecurity; about half of community college students are housing insecure. About a quarter of all college students in the US are 25 or older. About the same percentage are single parents. 40% of undergraduate students work 30 hours a week or more. Almost three-quarters graduate with student loan debt – debt that they may well carry into retirement.
The idea that college students are sheltered and pampered isn’t just wrong; it’s insulting.
But that’s the story that’s gets told. Again and again and again.
Excerpt by Tracy Chou via Quartz
In 2005, the late writer David Foster Wallace delivered a now-famous commencement address. It starts with the story of the fish in water, who spend their lives not even knowing what water is. They are naively unaware of the ocean that permits their existence, and the currents that carry them.
The most important education we can receive, Wallace goes on to explain, “isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.” He talks about finding appreciation for the richness of humanity and society. But it is the core concept of meta-cognition, of examining and editing what it is that we choose to contemplate, that has fixated me as someone who works in the tech industry.
As much as code and computation and data can feel as if they are mechanistically neutral, they are not. Technology products and services are built by humans who build their biases and flawed thinking right into those products and services—which in turn shapes human behavior and society, sometimes to a frightening degree…
But it is never too late to be curious. Each of us can choose to learn, to read, to talk to people, to travel, and to engage intellectually and ethically. I hope that we all do so—so that we can come to acknowledge the full complexity and wonder of the world we live in, and be thoughtful in designing the future of it.
From
Excerpt from The Atlantic — October 2014
The U.S. has its own tradition of apprenticeship going back many years. But like most kinds of vocational education, it fell out of fashion in recent decades—a victim of our obsession with college and concern to avoid anything that resembles tracking.
Today in America, fewer than 5 percent of young people train as apprentices, the overwhelming majority in the construction trades. In Germany, the number is closer to 60 percent—in fields as diverse as advanced manufacturing, IT, banking, and hospitality. And in Europe, what’s often called “dual training” is a highly respected career path….
[In Germany,] both employers and employees want more from an apprenticeship than short-term training… “In the future, there will be robots to turn the screws,” one educator told us. “We don’t need workers for that. What we need are people who can solve problems”—skilled, thoughtful, self-reliant employees who understand the company’s goals and methods and can improvise when things go wrong or when they see an opportunity to make something work better…
What makes dual training work, every manager told us, are the standardized occupational profiles, or curricula, developed by the federal government in collaboration with employers, educators, and union representatives…
It’s no surprise that tech skills will be in demand. However, [Devin Fidler at the Institute of the Future] says that ‘computational thinking’—the ability to manage the massive amounts of data we process individually each day, spot patterns, and make sense out of all of it—will be valued.
Related jobs: Software developer jobs will grow 18.8% between now and 2024, according to the BLS, while computer systems analyst jobs will increase 20.9% by 2024. Market research analyst and marketing specialist jobs, which also require those analytical skills, will increase 18.6%…
Thousands of articles and tutorials have been written about data science and machine learning. Hundreds of books, courses and conferences are available. You could spend months just figuring out what to do to get started, even to understand what data science is about.
In this short contribution, I share what I believe to be the most valuable resources – a small list of top resources and starting points. This will be most valuable to any data practitioner who has very little free time.
Source: Hitchhiker’s Guide to Data Science, Machine Learning
Mastering [Minecraft] requires rigorously logical thinking, as well as a great deal of debugging: When your device isn’t working, you have to carefully go over its circuitry to figure out what’s wrong.
One fifth grader I visited, Natalie, was assembling a redstone door on her iPad while I watched. But nothing happened when she flicked the “on” lever. “I did that wrong,” she said with a frown, and began tracing her way through the circuit. Eventually the problem emerged: A piece of redstone was angled incorrectly, sending the current in the wrong direction.
This is what computer scientists call computational thinking, and it turns out to be one of Minecraft’s powerful, if subtle, effects. The game encourages kids to regard logic and if-then statements as fun things to mess around with. It teaches them what computer coders know and wrestle with every day, which is that programs rarely function at first: The work isn’t so much in writing a piece of software but in debugging it, figuring out what you did wrong and coming up with a fix.
Minecraft is thus an almost perfect game for our current educational moment, in which policy makers are eager to increase kids’ interest in the “STEM” disciplines — science, technology, engineering and math. Schools and governments have spent millions on “let’s get kids coding” initiatives, yet it may well be that Minecraft’s impact will be greater. This is particularly striking given that the game was not designed with any educational purpose in mind.
Excerpt from Campus Technology — March 2016
“If you think the great colleges and universities of the past will be the only great colleges and universities in the future, then you’ve forgotten everything you knew about evolution and you need to up your game,” asserted Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University.
“Our society is evolving much more rapidly than any institution of higher education,” Crow said, pointing out that the current production of college degrees in the U.S. is woefully behind population growth. To achieve its goals in graduation rates, higher education needs a new wave of innovation, he said, citing his own university’s efforts to create a new model of education where “full immersion and digital immersion are possible, costs are constrained and the scale is all scales, from individual learner to massive groups of learners, all operating at the same time.”
Crow outlined a framework for innovation wherein knowledge is emphatically at the center of every educational enterprise, “like a black hole of unbelievable intense energy.” Built around that, he said, are immersive, technology-enhanced learning (both on-campus and online), massive-scale learning, and the concept of education through exploration. “Now there are no more teachers, no more professors at the front of the stage — they are engaged in the creation of learning environments that allow people to learn at scales and in ways that have previously been not possible.”…
The goal is not to turn kids into your kind of adult, but rather better adults than you have been, which may be a little challenging considering your guys credentials.
But the way progress happens is because new generations and new eras grow and develop and become better than the previous ones. It’s the reason we’re not in the Dark Ages anymore. No matter your position of place in life, it is imperative to create opportunities for children so that we can grow up to blow you away.
No one has ever said, oh this child of mine, my fondest wish is they will ace statewide benchmark math and science tests when they’re 16…
When you actually listen to people’s statements about their dreams for our kids, you hear a very different language. Kids who experience joy. Kids who are connected and engaged. Kids who fall in love with their life and all of life. Kids with kindness and generosity, Kids who are happy.
That is the language of human thriving.
Education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education — the best teachers and schools don’t exist where they’re needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching.