“Five years from now on the web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world,” Gates said at the Techonomyconference in Lake Tahoe, CA today. “It will be better than any single university,” he continued. He believes that no matter how you came about your knowledge, you should get credit for it. Whether it’s an MIT degree or if you got everything you know from lectures on the web, there needs to be a way to highlight that.
He made sure to say that educational institutions are still vital for children, K-12. He spoke glowingly about charter schools, where kids can spend up to 80% of their time deeply engaged with learning. … But his overall point is that it’s just too expensive and too hard to get these upper-level educations. And soon place-based college educations will be five times less important than they are today.The Internet is inherently egalitarian. With Internet access and a computer, teachers everywhere have access to the same educational resources and materials. Too often, teachers in struggling school districts are stuck with outdated and worn textbooks. Why do we continue to use these increasingly outdated teaching methods? Gates points out some of the weaknesses with these conventional, costly textbooks:
One particular problem with the education system according to Gates is text books. Even in grade schools, they can be 300 pages for a book about math. “They’re giant, intimidating books,” he said. “I look at them and think: what on Earth is in there?“ According to Gates, our text books are three times longer than the equivalents in Asia. And yet they’re beating us in many ways with education. The problem is that these things are built by committee, and more things are simply added on top of what’s already in there. Gates said that technology is the only way to bring education back under control and expand it.Technology will significantly decrease the rising costs of education, while also providing students everywhere with the same learning opportunities. If state education boards, school districts, and teachers continue to incorporate online resources into the classroom curriculum, we can simultaneously beat the economic downturn and give our students the education they need to fully take advantage of life’s opportunities.
WASHINGTON — Adele Dalesandro stepped inside the U.S. Supreme Court wide-eyed. She spoke in whispers, trying to absorb everything about the room she had read so much about but had never seen. Her first impression was that it was much smaller than she expected. “This is not something you can replicate in the classroom,” said Dalesandro, who has taught high school government and politics classes in St. Charles, Ill., for 14 years. The teacher had become a student again. Dalesandro was part of a group of 30 social studies teachers from around the country who got a behind-the scenes look this week at the Supreme Court as part of the Supreme Court Summer Institute for Teachers. The six-day program that ended Tuesday covered subjects ranging from choosing the court’s docket to nominating a justice, an especially relevant topic this summer with the upcoming confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan.The article references Justice O’Connor’s iCivics, which recently entered a partnership with Harlan.
Additionally, only 33% of 18-24 year olds could name a single case decided by the Supreme Court. Less than 1% can name Plessy v. Ferguson and Marbury v. Madison.
The results are quite depressing, and are a sad commentary on the knowledge of our young citizenry on the Supreme Court and the Constitution.
Among people 18-24, the results are appreciably worse. This shows me that students are not gaining the necessary education in High School and College.
All the more reason why our work at the Harlan Institute to teach students about the Supreme Court and the Constitution is vital.
| Josh Blackman (202) 294-9003 The Harlan Institute info@harlaninstitute.org twitter: @HarlanInstitutehttp://HarlanInstitute.org | Jeff Curley (202) 661-6527 iCivics Inc. jeff.curley@icivics.org www.icivics.org |
The most popular educator on YouTube does not have a Ph.D. He has never taught at a college or university. And he delivers all of his lectures from a bedroom closet. This upstart is Salman Khan, a 33-year-old who quit his job as a financial analyst to spend more time making homemade lecture videos in his home studio. His unusual teaching materials started as a way to tutor his faraway cousins, but his lectures have grown into an online phenomenon—and a kind of protest against what he sees as a flawed educational system. “My single biggest goal is to try to deliver things the way I wish they were delivered to me,” he told me recently. The resulting videos don’t look or feel like typical college lectures or any of the lecture videos that traditional colleges put on their Web sites or YouTube channels. For one thing, these lectures are short—about 10 minutes each. And they’re low-tech: Viewers see only the scrawls of equations or bad drawings that Mr. Khan writes on his digital sketchpad software as he narrates. The lo-fi videos seem to work for students, many of whom have written glowing testimonials or even donated a few bucks via a PayPal link. The free videos have drawn hundreds of thousands of views, making them more popular than the lectures by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, famous for making course materials free, or any other traditional institution online, according to the leaders of YouTube’s education section. Mr. Khan calls his collection of videos “Khan Academy,” and he lists himself as founder and faculty. That means he teaches every subject, and he has produced 1,400 lectures since he started in 2006. Now he records one to five lectures per day.What an amazing story!
“People that play these fast-paced games have better vision, better attention and better cognition,” said Daphne Bavelier, an assistant professor in the department of brain and cognitive science at the University of Rochester. Bavelier was a presenter at Games for Learning, a daylong symposium on the educational uses of video games and computer games. The event, the first of its kind, was an indication that electronic games are gaining legitimacy in the classroom. President Barack Obama recently identified the creation of good educational software as one of the “grand challenges for American innovation,” and the federal Department of Education’s assistant deputy secretary for the Office of Innovation and Improvement, Jim Shelton, attended Thursday’s conference. Panelists discussed how people learn and how games can be engineered to be even more educational. “People do learn from games,” said J. Dexter Fletcher of the Institute for Defense Analyses. Sigmund Tobias of the State University of New York at Albany said an Israeli air force study found that students who played the game “Space Fortress” had better rankings in their pilot training than students who did not. He added that students who played “pro-social” games that promote cooperation were more likely than others to help out in real-life situations like intervening when someone is being harassed.
Clarence Thomas is the most well known justice but could be named by only 19 percent of Americans. Chief Justice John Roberts was named by 16 percent of people. Sonia Sotomayor, the newest justice, could be named by only 15 percent of Americans following a highly visible nomination and confirmation process last year. According to the FindLaw.com survey, the percentages of Americans who can name any U.S. Supreme Court justices are:Curiously, the most taciturn Justice is the most well known. And Justice Kennedy, the most important Justice on the bench, is the least well known. Poor Justice Breyer.Only 1 percent of Americans could correctly name all nine current members of the Supreme Court. In addition, many Americans think that retired justices Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter are still active members of the Supreme Court. O’Connor and Souter retired from the Court in 2006 and 2009, respectively.
- Clarence Thomas – 19%
- John Roberts – 16%
- Sonia Sotomayor – 15%
- Ruth Bader Ginsburg – 13%
- Antonin Scalia – 10%
- Samuel Alito – 8%
- John Paul Stevens – 8%
- Anthony Kennedy – 6%
- Stephen Breyer – 3%