I'm glad to see Google providing more material about how to use search effectively — Howard
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GOOGLE SEZ:
Help your students become better searchers
Web search can be a remarkable tool for students, and a bit of instruction in how to search for academic sources will help your students become critical thinkers and independent learners.
With the materials on this site, you can help your students become skilled searchers- whether they're just starting out with search, or ready for more advanced training.
Summary: Is iTunes U a viable platform for school systems to implement?
Many of us remember Steve Jobs and his wish to ‘revolutionize education’, but how many universities and colleges are taking advantage of the learning-based tools Apple has provided?
Created in 2007, iTunes U is advertised by Apple as a service that can be used to design and distribute courses that go beyond traditional print media. Designed to appeal to educators, the platform can be used to create interactive learning material for students at university, college or K-12 level.
According to Apple, there have been over 700 million downloads to date of iTunes U. However, are there many colleges and universities who have made the transition from their own platforms to the modern service on offer?
It searches only the 35,000 Web sites that our staff of research experts and librarians and teachers have evaluated and approved when creating the content on findingDulcinea. We constantly evaluate our search results and “fine-tune” them, by increasing the ranking of Web sites from organizations such as the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, PBS and university Web sites.
SweetSearch helps students find outstanding information, faster. It enables them to determine the most relevant results from a list of credible resources, and makes it much easier for them to find primary sources. We exclude not only obvious spam sites, but also marginal sites that read well, but lack academic or journalistic rigor. As importantly, the very best Web sites that are often buried on other search engines appear on the first page of SweetSearch results.
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To see a short video of us demonstrating SweetSearch, click here.
For more, including a comparison of search results between SweetSearch and Google and Bing, read this blog post.
We'd love to get your feedback on SweetSearch. Try your own searches and let us know what you think by e-mailing info@dulcineamedia.com.
SweetSearch.com is owned and operated by Dulcinea Media. Click here to learn more about our Company and staff.
Jonah Lehrer has been described as a kind of “one man third culture” – after training in Neuroscience at Columbia with Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel, he studied literature and philosophy on a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. Since then, he has written three books that examine and blur the boundaries between science and art, reason and imagination. His latest: IMAGINE: How Creativity Works, looks at the neuroscience and the real-world phenomenon of creativity in case studies ranging from the emotional and spiritual burnout that led to Bob Dylan's brilliant album Highway 61 Revisited to the invention of the Swiffer.
Amazon Page
Here, Lehrer talks with Big Think's Jason Gots about failure as an integral, essential part of the creative process, and why American schools are so good at killing creativity.
Phi Beta Iota: Tip of the Hat to Berto Jongman for this find. Lehrer is an M4IS2 master — “the brain is a category buster.” Honorably priced to begin with, Amazon has taken another $10 off, this book is a major bargain in hardcover at $15.00.
For years I have done similar approaches when teaching….and have been told to stop because “it is not the way it is done!” My classes were consistently better equipped to deal with the problems they faced as intelligence officers than the school house folks……they weren't afraid of an intelligence failure of the information kind, only the grey matter kind…..
Most of our high schools and colleges are not preparing students to become innovators. To succeed in the 21st-century economy, students must learn to analyze and solve problems, collaborate, persevere, take calculated risks and learn from failure. To find out how to encourage these skills, I interviewed scores of innovators and their parents, teachers and employers. What I learned is that young Americans learn how to innovate most often despite their schooling—not because of it.
Phi Beta Iota: The article restates what has been known for decades. That the WSJ should think this is in any way new is itself a statement on the WSJ state of mindlessness. Schools today — the exceptions aside — are industrial era rote prisons that beat the creativity out of children by the fifth grade. There is a need to learn history and memorize formulas — no question on that point — but learning to learn in the modern era — and learning to program the electronic tools with which we can learn and share and make sense despite the moral and intellectual constipation of Google, Microsoft, and Oracle, to name just three dead-end companies — this matters.
“In November 2009, boyd traveled to New York City to deliver what she expected to be a major address at the Web 2.0 Expo, one of the year’s most important gatherings of Internet professionals. Her topic was what she terms “living in the stream,” or how not to drown in the flood of information that comes at us all the time. Teens, she believes, are especially good at this. The most web-savvy of them manage to stay open to all the digital stuff without having to process everything. They take what they can handle and remain untroubled that much may elude their grasp. It’s a kind of cyber-Zen. “The goal is . . . to be peripherally aware of information as it flows by, grabbing it at the right moment, when it is most relevant and valuable, entertaining or insightful,” she said at the Expo. “It is about a sense of alignment, of being aligned with information.” She talked about the high some Twitter users get “feeling as though they are living and breathing with the world around them, peripherally aware and in tune, adding content to the stream and grabbing it when appropriate.””
Naïve, young college student or disloyal American ready to spy for the People’s Republic of China (PRC)? Glenn Duffie Shriver, aka Du Fei, was a student at Grand Valley State University (GVSU) in 2001 when he decided to attend a study abroad program known as “China Summer School” in Shanghai, China. He enjoyed his time in this country so much, he spent his junior year studying at East China Normal University in Shanghai, where he developed a strong interest in Chinese culture and became proficient speaking Mandarin Chinese. After graduating from GVSU in 2004 with a degree in International Relations, Shriver returned to Shanghai to continue his language studies and to seek employment. Desperate for money, he responded to an advertisement to write a political paper on U.S.-China relations regarding North Korea and Taiwan. He met with his contact, Amanda, several times and was paid $120 for his paper. Amanda praised Shriver for his work, offered to introduce him to friends of hers by the name of Mr. Wu and Mr. Tang, and encouraged him to build a close relationship with them.
Shriver has admitted that he realized his new “friends” were PRC intelligence officers, and that he understood when they asked him to apply for positions in the U.S. government or law enforcement that they were expressly interested in classified material.
So in April 2005, Shriver applied for a job as a foreign service officer for the U.S. State Department as suggested by his “friends.” He took the Foreign Service Exam in Shanghai, and although he did not pass, PRC intelligence officers paid him $10,000 for his efforts and his “friendship.” One year later, Shriver made a second attempt at passing the Foreign Service Exam, but again failed. However, this attempt earned him a shocking $20,000.
Phi Beta Iota: One wonders why he was not doubled back, since US clandestine efforts in China are virtually non-existent. This is interesting at multiple levels. With 22.4% unemployment in the USA (not the false statistic the government offers of under 9%) and with both young graduates and senior professionals at closer to 40% unemployment, the question has to be asked: what part of our failure to provide for the general welfare, as called for in the preamble to the US Constitution, combined with the complete lack of civic duty instruction and practice across 24 years of study, can be blamed for this young man's vulnerability?
