Ubi de Feo Figures Out How to Teach Coding to Code-Challenged Designers - Core77
This looks like a really awesome initiative in teaching abstract thinking.
A Study In Movement
An amazing way to inspire science!
As you’ll read below, our friends over at Open Culture do a fantastic set-up to this amazing graphic novel-style story about Dark Matter — however I will add that if you love science, comics or anything inbetween, you will love this.
“We finally got the big announcement. After decades of work, physicists have pinned down the Higgs Boson. It’s a major milestone. But physicists at CERN won’t be left with nothing to do. The same folks at PhD Comics who gave us this helpful primer that uses animation to explain the Higgs Boson have also produced a companion video on Dark Matter, the mysterious stuff being researched by CERN scientists and their Large Hadron Collider.
In the clip above, physicists Daniel Whiteson and Jonathan Feng underscore how much of the universe remains dark to us. We understand about 5% of what makes up the cosmos. Another 75%, we call Dark Energy, the other 20%, Dark Matter, which are possibly manifestations of the same thing (or possibly not). Research on Higgs Boson will tell us something important about the origin of mass in the universe. But whether any of this will help explain Dark Matter (which accounts for most of the matter in the universe and behaves differently than the mass we understand — it neither emits nor absorbs light) — that’s another big question.”
(via)
Why The Next Big Ideas In Education Will Come Out Of New Orleans | Fast Company
One of my favorite clients ever is in FastCompany today!
[University] does what it’s supposed to do, encouraging young adults to survey a broader field of perspectives, exhorting them to tap into a deeper well of information, inviting them to draw their own conclusions, and allowing them to figure out for themselves what they believe and who they are.
It’s a College, Not a Cloister - NYTimes.com
Santorum disgusts me. Really, anyone who advocates a constriction of exposure to views rather than a broadening turns my stomach, especially if they consider themselves even moderately educated.
Evolution, Creationism and Our School System
Teaching creationism or intelligent design in a science class is like teaching faith healing in a medical college or teaching students how to speak in ‘tongues’ as part of a foreign language class.
If critical periods aren’t quite so firm as people once believed, a world of possibility emerges for the many adults who harbor secret dreams — whether to learn a language, to become a pastry chef, or to pilot a small plane. And quests like these, no matter how quixotic they may seem, and whether they succeed in the end or not, could bring unanticipated benefits, not just for their ultimate goals but of the journey itself. Exercising our brains helps maintain them, by preserving plasticity (the capacity of the nervous system to learn new thing), warding off degeneration, and literally keeping the blood flowing. Beyond the potential benefits for our brains, there are benefits for our emotional well-being, too. There may be no better way to achieve lasting happiness — as opposed to mere fleeting pleasure — than pursuing a goal that helps us broaden our horizons.
Ughh… I want to work on amazing stuff like this.
IDEO collaborated with Steelcase to find and design the right platform for improving the classroom experience.
The final product, dubbed the Node chair, has received praise for promoting student collaboration, allowing educators to reconfigure classrooms to fit different teaching styles, and enabling institutions to save money by making spaces more flexible and accommodating for varied uses.”
Using Research to Predict Great Teachers
It’s like Moneyball for teachers.
