My comment on Steve Denning's sterling article on education
UC online degree proposal rattles academics —and me!
[This is from last July, sorry, but I'm transferring from another blog.]
"Within
30 minutes of a class being taught at Stanford, we're able to offer it
around the world," said Andy DiPaolo, senior associate dean at the
School of Engineering. "We think in many ways it's comparable (in
quality). It's not live instruction. We've tried not to lock students
into a specific time." Students in Stanford's online manufacturing
class, for example, live in different time zones yet team up online to
design, say, a car lock, DiPaolo said. "This is not a second-tier
program," he said. "We have identical admissions, identical
requirements" for online and traditional degrees. But some UC faculty
and graduate student instructors believe removing face-to-face
interaction by definition diminishes quality.
Actually the quote points up a major problem...they want to just plunk the original onto the web. Not design it FOR the web. Misses the whole idea of what "online" can really mean. The article's pretty stark in laying out attitudes toward online instruction in that plunked down form, but doesn't address the alternatives at all.
And no, I don't have the full answer, but by gum, I've got part of it! Dialogues are the key for CocoLoco.
Watch The Timestamp: Lightning slowed down 300x.
Watch The Timestamp: Lightning slowed down 300x. [VIDEO]:
Wow!
This is great fodder for a lecture in grade school through post-Grad. I
only wish that Wimp.com had the ability to put in a lecturer of some sort
to tell us all about this, blow-by-blow...er...strike-by-strike. "How was
this filmed?" she wonders.
Arkk! How to choose a career?
Thinking way back on it, music was not really MY choice as a career. As a
granddaughter of a concert pianist with a 50+ student piano school in
upper-class Webster Groves in Missouri, I received free piano lessons
from the age of six and layed the ground for a fine technical basis to
enter college as a music major.
But what I really needed and what
is now possible was the opportunity to really understand what
occupations derived from what educations. Begin with the end.
What
I want to build as part of CocoLoco is a "warehouse" of occupations
with interviews with key people in multiple levels of jobs explaining
how their degree in say Civil Engineering or Math or Environmental
Science really played into their job. How were they able to use various
courses...or not. Right now, career counseling goes not gather, refine
and use the web to really give students an idea of both what's available
and where it can lead.
For instance the following. Why not
construct a series of videos showing for instance how civil engineering
can lead to essential, absorbing, rewarding jobs. The following is an
example of one candidate. What kind of careers lead to working on
one-ton flywheels? Or electrical engineering leading to developing
batteries that are better and better, or turbine generators. Hey, as the
daughter of an airline mechanic, I would have loved to have been able
to see where mechanics could lead beyond my father's chosen profession.
How's this for stimulating an interest in science, electronics, etc.:
Pushed Along by Wind, Power Storage Grows - NYTimes.com: "Electric companies are using other strategies for storage and frequency regulation. In Stephentown, N.Y., near Albany, a Massachusetts company, Beacon Power, is building a bank of 200 one-ton flywheels that will store energy from the grid on a moment-to-moment basis to keep the alternating current system at a strict 60 cycles.Yes, YouTube is there and you can search all you want, but high school—maybe even grade school kids—need some structure for this to find info with impact without spending a ton of time finding it. School districts, counties, states could get into the act here in Peru and make getting a idea of what you'd like really easy. But I think CocoLoco is going to lead the way.
Atop each flywheel is a device that can be a motor at one moment and a generator the next, either taking energy and storing it in the flywheel or vice versa. The Energy Department provided a $43 million loan guarantee to assist in the $69 million project.
The Energy Department is also supporting storage projects that rely on compressed air. Surplus electricity is used to pump air into an underground cavity; when the electricity is needed, the air is injected into a gas turbine generator. In effect, it acts as a turbocharger that runs on wind energy captured the previous night, instead of natural gas burned at a peak hour.
Love these little choppers...want one!
Aggressive maneuvers for autonomous quadrotor flight. [VIDEO]
This is another example for a CocoLoco "Which career should I choose?" video.
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Me: Live the Golden Rule
Treat others like you want to be treated...for the good of us all. Studied piano from age 6; love to create useful things. Also known to be very honest and somewhat stubborn!...but with a smile. —Missouri Mule
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Great two articles reflecting a LOT of thought. Thanks!
Re kids getting interested more in math and science. How can you get interested in something if you don’t really have a clue of where it might lead, other than to more advanced course of same.
I wish that I had had a chance to see what it took to achieve some of the mind-perplexing inventions/products we’re now seeing. Consider the Japanese guy who invented the small machine that turns plastics into usable motor oil right before your eyes; the guys who worked on the Smart bird from Festo, the first robot bird that, well, flies like a bird, women who work on auto design, or graphic animators who work on these wonderful videos showing how cells in the body work—what did the folks who worked on these take in high school or university?
Why not do professional videos starring these folks, showing what they’ve accomplished and then interviewing them about what they took in school, what were their favorites? was it worth it? do they use it? What would they recommend for study to get to where they are?
I was ‘gifted’ with a grandmother who had been concert pianist, so I got free piano lessons and went on in music education, a Fulbright, and uh, then winding up a journalist! My Dad was a mechanic, and I do love to ‘fix’ things, make things better, etc.
But what would I have become if I had had even a smidgen of exposure to folks with interesting specialties in civil engineering, in chemistry, in biology, or in mining, etc.!!
Maybe it exists, but y’all who are interested and/or working in US education perhaps could think about creating a website not only for schools in your district, but in your state and beyond, with courses listed and a breakdown of where taking those courses might lead. And if it’s to be available more widely, then get in touch with the funding ‘suits’ further up the ladder and get money to produce truly interesting, stimulating, well-done, and yes, mildly entertaining :-), videos to be seeded in the course listing where appropriate.
I think this would give reality-based incentive to kids to look at math and science courses more positively for a real idea of where they might wind up!