(CBS News) Consumer Reports found significant levels of arsenic in apple juice earlier this year, and now, the magazine has a new study, showing many brands of rice also contain the toxin.
The arsenic enters into the rice when it is grown, according to Dr. Philip Landrigan, a pediatrician at New York's Mount Sinai School of Medicine. He explained the rice with the highest levels of arsenic is from Texas and Louisiana, and along the Gulf coast where fields were used to grow cotton a century ago.
“When there was cotton there they had to treat the cotton with arsenic pesticides to control the bowl weevil,” he said. “Now a century later, that arsenic is still in the soil, the rice is very effective at pulling it out of the soil in and it concentrates in the rice.”
Arsenic causes lung, skin and bladder cancer, Landrigan said. He added that arsenic is also very harmful to babies' brain development. If a baby is exposed to arsenic in the womb because the mother is eating arsenic or if a baby ingests arsenic in the first months of life in cereal, rice milk or other food, the arsenic could interfere with brain development, reduce the child's intelligence, and cause behavioral problems.
In May, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced their joint plan to “explore the frontiers of digital education” by offering free online courses to learners around the world. As a result, their new online learning platform edX entered the burgeoning world of MOOCs — that is, massive open online courses— backed by a hefty $60 million pledge from the prestigious institutions.
With the fall slate of classes starting soon and the University of California—Berkeley now on board, we spoke with edX’s president and first professor, Anant Agarwal, about MOOCs in general and edX in particular.
What are your main goals for edX as its president?
We really want to reinvent education. We want to offer education on a planet scale to people all around the world. Anybody who has an interest and the capability to master the material should be able to access the content for free. We also really want to revolutionize campus education. We’ve been finding that online technologies can be applied on campus to create new blended models of learning.
What do those blended models look like?
In a blended model, you do what is called flipping the classroom. Flipping involves having students do video [lecture] sequences and some concept exercises at home before they come to class. Then, you can ask the students to come into the class for interactive sessions where they can sit down and have discussions, ask questions, do interactive laboratories, solve problems. It kind of reverses what is done today and it can be very effective.
You taught the first edX class, Circuits and Electronics, from March to June this year. What did you learn about online education and MOOCs?
The whole area of MOOCs and planet-scale learning is in its infancy. Very little is known about it, so a lot of what we did was guesswork. When we began the course, we were really concerned about the large number of students enrolled. We had 154,000 students sign up and our staff was about six or seven people, which is the kind of staff that we have for a 100-person on-campus class. We didn’t know how we were going to deal with all the questions and so on that students usually have, but through our online discussion boards, we saw the students answering each other’s questions. There were no repeat questions because once someone asked a question everybody could see the response. In that way, we were able to serve 154,000 students with a very small staff. I think that was clearly our biggest learning experience and the biggest surprise we had.
Knights know that the arts–especially music–are essential to developing the creative and innovative impulses of entrepreneurs. Put more directly: no arts in education – fewer entrepreneurs.
Lesson Plans and Resources for Arts Integration
Dance in science, pop art in Spanish, or photography in math — there’s no end to the ways arts can be integrated into other curricula. Educators from Bates Middle School, in Annapolis, Maryland, share arts-integrated lessons and resources that you can use in your school.
Digital education is today where digital music was in 2001. The digital music revolution started unintended when peer-to-peer file service “Napster” started by Sean Parker & Shawn Fanning in 1999 controversially morphed into a digital music sharing service.
It became mainstream with the highly successful launches of the Apple iPod & iTunes in 2001 and now services like Spotify are taking it to next level by integrating it to our increasingly digital lifestyle. As is the case of all life-changing trends, an unintended start changed the whole experience of buying and consuming music.
I enjoy being part of the generation caught in between a massive revolution (Digital Immigrants – Digital Natives). It is fascinating to see how technology is becoming so pervasive that it is re-disrupting cultures all over again. As in the case of digital music, the most fundamental driving force to this change is the Internet. The Internet has fundamentally boosted our ability to access and share knowledge.
The Internet has allowed us to re-imagine everything from reading a book to digesting the news to taking notes. Quite fittingly, the next big trend is going to be the disruption of education.
There’s been a long-time joke in education: if Rip Van Winkle woke up today, he’d be puzzled by just about every aspect of modern life–from planes to tablets –but he’d feel right at home in many classrooms. Now that’s starting to change in a big way.
Education has two challenges: access and effectiveness. It all started relatively quietly with Bill Gates’ favorite teacher Salman Khan’s YouTube channel, followed by highly successful “A.I. Class” experiment of Stanford University where over 160,000 enrolled from 190 countries. Here are a few other disruptive things happening right now that will changed education as we know it.
MOOCs
At the forefront we have Udacity, EdX, and Coursera (the “Big Three?”) that work with leading American universities to offer free online courses known as Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOC’s. Just in matter of months they have reached two million registered students from roughly over 200 countries. Students in MOOC’s typically watch short video lectures, complete automatically graded tests or assignments, and use online communities to work through concepts they don’t understand. MOOC’s mission is to make the world’s best academic programs accessible to masses for free.
Online Degrees
Led by 2tor, known to be most-funded education startup, there are hosts of private technology companies are on the mission of taking campuses online. They work with physical campuses to convert the courses offered in digital format so that they can be delivered online. They offer to reduce the cost of education and make the universities universally accessible.
Social Learning
Led by Edmodo, Schoology and Lore this is the most active space. The idea here is to apply modern social web technology to enhance effectiveness and management of in campus delivery of education. Most of these products have seen very large-scale adoption in the recent past and some of these are on the way to emerge as the integral part of formal education.
To me these initiatives will drive in some very fundamental change in the education. In addition to these there is a lot more happening, which I shall cover in subsequent articles. The fact is the Web’s infrastructure is built, the platforms have emerged, everyone is connected on social networks and open education resources are available everywhere; we now need to connect the dots and create a meaningful digital learning ecosystem in a way that augurs well with the digital life style of today’s learner.
There has been a lot of discussion recently about the personalisation of education. The sticking point is that most education is publicly funded, the state has a major stake in how it's conducted, and therefore dictates what should be taught in schools. […]
by Steve Wheeler
There has been a lot of discussion recently about the personalisation of education. The sticking point is that most education is publicly funded, the state has a major stake in how it's conducted, and therefore dictates what should be taught in schools. Because of lack of space, time and resources (you will always have this problem when the state intervenes) there is little latitude for personalised approaches and creativity is stifled. Every child gets the same content, and every child is tested in the same, standardised way. The result: children become disenfranchised and demotivated, teachers are exhausted and demoralised, schools are positioned unfairly in league tables, and governments measure success not through human achievement or creativity, but through cold, hard statistics. This is universal education, and if one size does not fit all … tough. Shame no-one has told the powers that be that universal education is unachievable.
Ivan Illich railed against this mindset way back in 1970 in his anarchical, visionary critique of the school system. In Deschooling Society, Illich called for personal learning through informal learning networks, and rejected the funnelling approach of mass, unidirectional, instructivist education systems. More recently, powerful modern day visionaries such as Stephen Heppell and Sir Ken Robinson are saying the same thing. They ask how we can sustain a factory model of education ‘production', where children are ‘batch processed' according to their age groups. It's obvious to any teacher or parent that children develop at different rates, and all have different talents and interests. I suppose we have Jean Piaget and his fellow ‘stage theory' psychologists to thank for that kind of constrained thinking.
The “Sharing Economy,” the “economy of the commons,” deserves and needs a point of reference equivalent to the large institutions of European social theory.
From a special section of the International Journal of Communication — Howard
“Aristotle could write that we ascribe “universal education to one who in his own individual person is thus critical in all or nearly all branches of knowledge, and not to one who has a like ability merely in some special subject.” Today nobody can know about everything. The flow of information so far exceeds what anyone can observe, learn, or appreciate that we must look at methods of compression, summarization, and filtering. These methods must achieve reductions of a million to one to cope with what is now routine. Fortunately, technology is making this possible.”
