Tag Archives: education

Silicon Valley should step up, help Iranians

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In a recent SF Gate Open Forum Post, Cyrus Farivar, a freelance technology journalist from California, looks at the ways in which technology has been used as a tool in the pro-democracy movement, official efforts to thrwart that, and technology developments that had made it more difficult for them to do so. He writes

But now that Iran has been experiencing turmoil surrounding its recent election, many Bay Area technology leaders finally realize the importance their technology and services can play in shaping world events. As foreign media have been kicked out of the country, information technology services suddenly have become a crucial tool to get and receive information from Iran.
Twitter famously received a call from the U.S. Department of State nearly two weeks ago asking the company to postpone its scheduled maintenance to suit those in Tehran’s time zone, rather than those on Pacific time.
Facebook recently added Persian language support for its iconic social networking site. Google took things to an entirely new level by launching its Persian version of Google translate, which allows for decent machine translation between English and Persian and vice versa. But why this newfound attention to the Persian language (and Iran) took so long remains a mystery. Google’s translation capability for Estonian even came online before Persian.

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So instead of superficial support, like Twitter users changing their avatars to green to support Iran’s reformist movement, Silicon Valley minds and money should pool resources as a way to help Iranians get around this information blockade by providing easier-to-use proxies, anonymizers and maybe even unfiltered Internet access through hardware.

Long-range Wi-Fi, 3G, satellite or other wireless communications devices from Iran’s neighboring countries or even the Persian Gulf could be used to get faster and better information in and out of Iran. One Arizona company, Space Data, even advertises the capability to use helium-filled balloons to provide Internet and mobile phone access. Much of Iran could theoretically be covered with one or two such balloons.
All of that may sound crazy, but not helping Iranian reformers at their darkest hour would be even crazier.

Read the whole article at: Silicon Valley should step up, help Iranians, the San Francisco Chronicle.

BBC Report: One Cleric's Legacy of Peace

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Dr Safrez Naeemi, Imam of Jamia Naeemia in Lahore, is a Pakistani cleric and advocate of non-violence who was killed on June 12 by a suicide bomber, very likely because of his outspoken criticism of the Taliban.

Muhammed Raghib Hussein Naeemi, Dr Naeemi’s son, heard about the attack in a phone call while he was driving.
He says he was angry, very angry but he knew immediately what he had to do.
“I realised that I would have to be very calm. So I ordered all of my father’s students not to harm anyone, not to start fires, not to kill anyone.”

The story is the subject of a piece from BBC Radio 4 called “One Cleric’s Legacy of Peace.” In a time when so much mainstream Western media only shows us troublesome images from the Islamic world, it is good to see such stories.
But though right-wing talking heads on in print and in the media may insist that Muslim clerics do not condemn terrorism, Dr. Naeemi and his son are not as unusual as the title of this article would suggest. I have grown so tired of hearing that claim because it is so absurdly and demonstrably false, and yet the people who make it, usually neo-conservative pundits, right wing Christians, and others in that vein, are never challenged. And yet in the days following the attacks of September 11th, 2001 Muslim clerics in places such as Iran, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Morocco and other Muslim countries denounced the attacks, and ordinary people paused to remember the victims (click here for a moving photo essay). According to the Council on American Islamic Relations,
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…those who commit acts of terror, murder and cruelty in the name of Islam are not only destroying innocent lives, but are also betraying the values of the faith they claim to represent. No injustice done to Muslims can ever justify the massacre of innocent people, and no act of terror will ever serve the cause of Islam.

A group called Muslims Against Terrorism has existed since 1998. The Fiqh Council of North America has written that people who commit terrorism in the name of Islam are criminals not martyrs. On this page you can read a sampling of condemnations issued by clerics from around the world. Even senior clerics from the Darul Uloom Deoband in India, a radically conservative institution established in 1857 and often linked in the media to the Taliban, issued a statement calling terrorism illicit and immoral.
The other point I’d repeat, as it is one I and others have made before, is that the media’s use of Madrassa is reckless and irresponsible. The term has become synonymous with conservative Muslim religious schools. In fact madrassa is an Arabic word that has found its way into other languages of the Muslim world as well and it simply means “school.” So if you were reading an Arabic text that spoke of the Harvard Business School or the London School of Economics, the names of those institutions would be translated with the world “Madrassa.” When I taught at the King Fahd School of Translation in Tangier, an institution that provides what is essentially a graduate level degree, I taught at the Madrassa Malik Fahd L’Turjama (apologies for the transcription) or the Ecole Supérieure Roi Fahd de Traduction.
In Rabat, Morocco there is a Spanish elementary school an American elementary school, a French elementary school, and I don’t know what else. All of the signs translate the name using the word Madrassa, just as the Moroccan schools do.
So it is not safe to assume that madrassas train students in radical Islamic theory. In fact, they may not teach them about Islam at all.

NITLE Event: Video Conferencing for Global Education

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Videoconferencing for Global Education: Tools for Teaching and Administration
August 13, 2009, 4:00 PM – 5:15 PM. EDT.

This session considers the uses of real-time audio and video communication tools in higher education, for both pedagogical and administrative purposes, with a particular focus on the widely used, free internet videoconferencing application, Skype. Todd Bryant, language technology specialist at Dickinson College, will discuss uses of the tool for the instruction of language, and present the Mixxer, an online application he developed for finding conversation partners for language learning. David Clapp, director of the Office of International Students and Off-Campus Studies at Wabash College, will discuss the use of Skype by his office to connect with students in advance of, during, and after programs, and the impact its use has had on recruitment for programs, student satisfaction, administrative effectiveness, and the costs of running programs.

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Registration Deadline, Friday, July 31st.

When Computers Leave Classrooms, So Does Boredom

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There is something of a backlash against the use of technology in the classroom, and this article,  “When Computers Leave Classrooms, So Does Boredom,” from The  Chronicle of Higher Education is one example of it.

College leaders usually brag about their tech-filled “smart” classrooms, but a dean at Southern Methodist University is proudly removing computers from lecture halls. José A. Bowen, dean of the Meadows School of the Arts, has challenged his colleagues to “teach naked” — by which he means, sans machines.
More than anything else, Mr. Bowen wants to discourage professors from using PowerPoint, because they often lean on the slide-display program as a crutch rather than using it as a creative tool. Class time should be reserved for discussion, he contends, especially now that students can download lectures online and find libraries of information on the Web. When students reflect on their college years later in life, they’re going to remember challenging debates and talks with their professors. Lively interactions are what teaching is all about, he says, but those give-and-takes are discouraged by preset collections of slides.

Bowen makes good points.  It is an interesting article with a fair amount of food for thought.  For example, it is interesting, though not surprising, that in a study published in the April Issue of British Educational Research, students gave low marks to computer-assisted classroom learning activities.  Nor does it surprise me that,

“The least boring teaching methods were found to be seminars, practical sessions, and group discussions,” said the report. In other words, tech-free classrooms were the most engaging.

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The second thing to remember is that technology for technology’s sake is never the end, so  technology should never be used for its own sake.  Unless technology is the subject of the course such as it might be in a course on new media or something of that nature, then it is a tool and should attract no more attention than the chalk board.   It should serve an end.
The one thing to always keep in mind is to put pedagogy first.  Before making use of any technology or tool from a DVD player to a complex video simulation, ask yourself what it will teach students and if the technology is the most effective way to do it..  You use a specific tool for a specific purpose, so that is the rule to love by.  One should never teach with blogs just to be teaching with them or with any technology simply for purposes of teaching with that technology, but rather for purposes of teaching, full stop.
Anyway, the expderiment at SMU is an interesting one.  Read the full article to check it out.

Wired Campus: College Libraries Team Up With Their Local Counterparts – Chronicle.com

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Even though it’s the big colleges that typically have the largest budgets and facilities, several universities are teaming up with their local public libraries to bring better service to patrons. At the American Library Association’s annual conference this week, a session titled “Our Town, Common Ground” highlighted some of those partnerships.
According to Library Journal, Cameron University, in Lawton, Okla. calls its local public library “The Little Library That Could.” Faculty members from the university present research at the library, and since both institutions have seen their budgets shrink in recent years, they share grant funds.

via Wired Campus: College Libraries Team Up With Their Local Counterparts – Chronicle.com.

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An informed citizenry is essential to the proper functioning of a democracy, but in our society there are not many opportunities for citizens to continue gain or continue learning outside of a formal education.  In a small way, initiatives like this provides one.

State of American Higher Education in a Global Context

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I am reading a somewhat worrisome article in The Chronicle of Higher Education with the headline “U.S. Faculty Members Feel a Lack of Clout, International Survey Finds” (account required for access). It concerns a soon to be published study surveying faculty members in 20 different nations, as well as Hong Kong, that was conducted in 2007 and 2008. One of the study’s author’s from the Center for International Higher Education said

the study’s results…show that American faculty members remain relatively isolated from their peers elsewhere. In examining the latest data from the United States, he says, he was struck by “how behind the curve Americans are when it comes to their views of internationalization, their knowledge about what is going on academically around the rest of the world, their use of data from scholars from other countries.”

Anyone who knows me or my work is aware of my concern with the cultural isolationism of the United States and its consequences. The consequences are real and have real world implications, financial, political and social. But this article shows that there is far more to be concerned about. Good scholarship is built on that which comes before it, and without full awareness of it all, one ends up repeating that which has been done before, or simply missing out on helpful information that would advance ones own research.
The study also found that

the United States is seen as losing its advantage over many nations in terms of the perceived quality of its higher-education facilities, and that many faculty members in highly developed nations are less engaged in the affairs of their universities and see their institutions’ management as more heavy-handed than was the case in the early 1990s.

and that the number of publications refereed journals, appears to has declined slightly in the United States while rising quickly in countries like Brazil and some of the new “Asian tigers.” Moreover, American faculty are more likely to disproportionately likely to engage in research that is “socially oriented,” whereas in other places it is basic or applied research that is more common.
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The Pentagon fears a severe shortage of scientists and engineers at government laboratories could erode the military’s technological edge in developing weapons and other projects in coming years, spawning a hiring boom at military research laboratories and an expansion of scholarships, advertising campaigns, and other ways to recruit a new generation of researchers.

Quite simply there is a growing gap between the number of degrees awarded in fields like engineering, computer science, physical science, math, etc., and the number of positions available in these fields.
So now the question is whether or not the current economic crisis will exacerbate the crisis. There are two ways in which it might do so, either by making higher education even less affordable as larger numbers become unemployed or see their savings and investments devoured, or because budget cuts caused by the massive hit the endowments of far too many colleges have sustained in recent months begin to hurt the quality of education.
Technology-assisted collaboration can offer higher education a way to achieve greater efficiency and do things in a more cost-effective manner without compromising standards of education. But it takes creative thinking, planning and a serious investment of time and energy. Certainly resources must be allotted, as well, but sometimes it takes only a reallocation of existing resources. This, however, is the subject of a longer entry, perhaps at some point to come.

Value of Memorization? Brains Outside the Head?

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Here’s some food for thought from the issue of Adbusters I received recently.

We used to have an intellectual ideal that we could contain within ourselves the whole of civilization. It was very much an ideal—none of us actually fulfilled it—but there was this senses that, through wide reading and study, you could have a depth of knowledge and could make unique intellectual connections among the pieces of information stored within your memory. [Richard] Foreman [author of The Gods are Pounding My Head] suggests that we might be replacing that model—for both intelligence and culture—with a much more superficial relationship to information in which the connections are made outside of our own minds through search engines and hyperlinks. We’ll become “pancake people” with wide access to information but no intellectual depth, because there’s little need to contain information within our heads when it’s so easy to find with a mouse click or two.
-Nicholas Carr, “Computing the Costs,” The Sun Magazine, www.the sunmagazine.org

I’m sympathetic to many aspects of the argument, and was talking with some folks at the NITLE summer seminars this week about the fact that memorization does, in fact, remain an important though often neglected skill in the modern world.
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That said, we do need depth of learning, and I do fear it is being lost. Knowing where to find something is know the same as knowing it and until you know it is doesn’t actually figure into your everyday thinking. Simply knowing where to find something is not the same as having been exposed to it. Having been exposed to it is not the same as having studies it, and that is still a step below having truly learned or internalized it. Oddly enough, when you memorize things or at least learn them very well, you find they come to the fore to enlighten the world or be enlightened by the world at the time when they are the most useful. They simply cannot do that if you have to look them up, even if all the knowledge in the world is at your finger tips.
I am and always have been terrible at memorization, but I wish I had been more drilled in the skill. What will the children of tomorrow think?

Teaching Copyright

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Teaching Copyright is a web site “created to help teachers present the laws surrounding digital rights in a balanced way.  Oh what a brave Depression Depression, generially caused by a chemical imbalance in our brain, which renders addiction an incurable disease! The psychological theory – Views drug or alcohol addiction as problematic behavior. tadalafil cheap prices Mostly the pills which are been super cialis cheap suggested to people these days are not so effective and fail to live up to their expectations. If the diagnostics indicate a urologic disorder, do not hesitate to consume any anti-impotence drug including viagra order cheap , Kamagra or any FDA (Food And Drug Administration) approved drug to speak a sizzling chemistry. Erectile dysfunction is also referred an inability to mastercard cialis get or sustain an erection. new world!  The teachers the site is created for are not those in higher education, but rather those teaching students considerably younger.  Can you imagine?

Colleges Scan Facebook During Admissions

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via Top News – Colleges scan Facebook during admissions.