They have proved that Veterans Today was right with our claim that academic espionage was one of the key areas where Israeli intelligence has invested major resources for a long time.
There is a troubling article over at Priceonomics titled, “Fraud in the Ivory Tower.” The post begins with the tale of former Tilburg University professor Diederik Stapel, who was found in 2012 to have fabricated or manipulated data in at least 30 papers that had been published in peer-reviewed journals. This case is a dramatic example of a growing problem; Fang Labs reports that instances of fraud or suspected fraud tripled between the 2002-2006 period and 2007-2011. Why the uptick?
We’re reminded that the famed “publish or perish” academic culture grows ever more demanding. At the same time, policies at scientific journals often mean that research integrity takes a back seat to provocative assertions.
Juárez Correa didn’t know it yet, but he had happened on an emerging educational philosophy, one that applies the logic of the digital age to the classroom. That logic is inexorable: Access to a world of infinite information has changed how we communicate, process information, and think. Decentralized systems have proven to be more productive and agile than rigid, top-down ones. Innovation, creativity, and independent thinking are increasingly crucial to the global economy.
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And yet the dominant model of public education is still fundamentally rooted in the industrial revolution that spawned it, when workplaces valued punctuality, regularity, attention, and silence above all else. (In 1899, William T. Harris, the US commissioner of education, celebrated the fact that US schools had developed the “appearance of a machine,” one that teaches the student “to behave in an orderly manner, to stay in his own place, and not get in the way of others.”) We don’t openly profess those values nowadays, but our educational system—which routinely tests kids on their ability to recall information and demonstrate mastery of a narrow set of skills—doubles down on the view that students are material to be processed, programmed, and quality-tested. School administrators prepare curriculum standards and “pacing guides” that tell teachers what to teach each day. Legions of managers supervise everything that happens in the classroom; in 2010 only 50 percent of public school staff members in the US were teachers.
The results speak for themselves: Hundreds of thousands of kids drop out of public high school every year. Of those who do graduate from high school, almost a third are “not prepared academically for first-year college courses,” according to a 2013 report from the testing service ACT. The World Economic Forum ranks the US just 49th out of 148 developed and developing nations in quality of math and science instruction. “The fundamental basis of the system is fatally flawed,” says Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor of education at Stanford and founding director of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future. “In 1970 the top three skills required by the Fortune 500 were the three Rs: reading, writing, and arithmetic. In 1999 the top three skills in demand were teamwork, problem-solving, and interpersonal skills. We need schools that are developing these skills.”
That’s why a new breed of educators, inspired by everything from the Internet to evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and AI, are inventing radical new ways for children to learn, grow, and thrive. To them, knowledge isn’t a commodity that’s delivered from teacher to student but something that emerges from the students’ own curiosity-fueled exploration. Teachers provide prompts, not answers, and then they step aside so students can teach themselves and one another. They are creating ways for children to discover their passion—and uncovering a generation of geniuses in the process.
As the cost of higher education mounts, debt-laden students, cash-strapped parents and members of the media are asking: is traditional college still the answer? Correspondent Mona Iskander reports on Enstitute, a two-year apprenticeship program that matches 18- to 24-year-olds with some of New York's top entrepreneurs.
Infopolicy – Henrik Brändén: Today’s technology shift has many parallels with the arrivals of mass-printed books at universities. At the time, teachers at universities were horrified that the availability of books undermined their ability to charge students for reading aloud. There is something to learn from history here.
In the most recent issue of Respons, Peter Josephson writes about the university crisis right after the turn of the century in 1800. Developments in information technology had kept an enormous pace: the printing costs had fallen, and an increasing amount of teaching material was available in books. This had created a crisis for teachers at universities. As far as anybody could remember, they had held lectures where they had read aloud from some book or manuscript of their own, where students had had to pay a small admissions fee to the lectures. But apparently, disrespectful students had started to skip those lectures – they would sit down in libraries to read instead.
Only four percent complete massive open online courses: setback or growing pains?
Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have relatively few active users, and user engagement falls off dramatically, especially after the first one to two weeks weeks of a course. Ultimately, only a handful of users persist to the course end.
That's the gist of a recent study from a University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education (Penn GSE) study. The study's authors, Laura Perna and Alan Ruby, analyzed the movement of a million users through sixteen Coursera courses offered by the University of Pennsylvania from June 2012 to June 2013.
