Walter Isaacson on Steve Jobs:
It was absurd, he added that American classrooms were still based on teachers standing at a board and using textbooks. All books, learning materials, and assessments should be digital and interactive, tailored to each student and providing feedback in real time.
Josh Sanburn:
In a new study to be published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, researchers asked a university professor and two students to spend 10 minutes looking through the Facebook profiles of employed college students. They were then asked a series of personality-related questions about those students, like whether they thought the students were dependable or emotionally stable.
The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because it values equality more than excellence.
Finland’s success is great and wonderful, but where is the invalid and unreliable data to back it up?
Gary Rubinstein:
Looking through the data I noticed teachers, like a 5th grade teacher at P.S. 196 who scored 97 out of 100 in language arts and 2 out of 100 in math. This is with the same students in the same year! How can a teacher be so good and so bad at the same time? Any evaluation system in which this can happen is extremely flawed, of course, but I wanted to explore if this was a major outlier or if it was something quite common. I ran the numbers and the results shocked me (which is pretty hard to do). Here’s what I learned…
This can’t end well.
Daniel Willingham:
The research literature on the impact of socio economic status on children’s learning is sobering, and it’s easy to see why an individual teacher might feel helpless in the face of these effects. Teachers should not be alone in confronting the impact of poverty on children’s learning. One hopes that the advances in our understanding the terrible consequences of poverty for the mind and brain will spur policymakers to serious action.
(Insert sarcastic comment about holding teachers accountable here.)
The Telegraph:
A study has found that people who appear to be constantly distracted have more “working memory”, giving them the ability to hold a lot of information in their heads and manipulate it mentally.
Stay on task.
Bill Gurley, Why Dropbox is Major Disruption (via christmasgorilla)
MET Life’s 2012 The American Teacher survey reported dramatic decreases in teacher’s satisfaction with their careers during the last 2 years, the lowest level in more than 2 decades.
Militarizing Your Backyard with Python: Computer Vision and the Squirrel Hordes (by Kurt Grandis)
Has your garden been ravaged by the marauding squirrel hordes? Has your bird feeder been pillaged? Tired of shaking your fist at the neighbor children? Learn how to use Python to tap into computer vision libraries and build an automated sentry water cannon capable of soaking intruders.
Now I just need a yard.
Saved for the next time I am subjected to an uninformed rant about the accuracy of Wikipedia.
On what makes a great designer:
It is so important to be light on your feet, inquisitive and interested in being wrong. You have that wonderful fascination with the what if questions, but you also need absolute focus and a keen insight into the context and what is important - that is really terribly important. Its about contradictions you have to navigate.
Spend an afternoon brushing up on Statistics. Discover how the Krebs cycle works. Learn about the fundamentals of Computer Science. Prepare for that upcoming SAT. Or, if you’re feeling particularly adventurous, learn how fire stick farming changed the landscape of Australia.
The ability to watch videos offline is a killer feature.
Rands:
They’ve observed this gap long before they became a lead with the question: “What does my boss do all day? I see him running around like something is on fire, but… what does he actually do?” The question gets personal when the now freshly minted manager begins to understand that life as a lead is an endless list of little things that collectively keep you busy, but, in aggregate, don’t feel much like progress.
It’s true for manager; it’s true for teachers. Firewall one hour a day when you’ll work on building something new instead of keeping the ship afloat.
