Tech giants want boost in schools
Matthew Benson
The Arizona Republic
Jul. 22, 2007 12:00 AM
TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. - The heads of two of America's titans of the high-tech economy, Google and AT&T, had a simple message when they met with the nation's governors Saturday: Get us a skilled workforce. And get out of the way.
As things stand, they say government regulations often hamper business investment. Qualified workers are in short supply.
Case in point: AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson said his company is hard-pressed to find the 50,000 new hires it's seeking each year, including 4,000 positions that are returning to the United States from India. Part of the blame, he and Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt agreed, lies with an underperforming education system.
"They're graduating the same number of engineers in India that we are in the U.S., and their economy is 7 percent the size," Stephenson said. "In my opinion, our education system has fallen flat. We've gotten fat and lazy."
Their sobering assessment of the problem came before a panel of roughly three dozen governors gathered in this lakeside community for the 99th annual conference of the National Governors Association. Gov. Janet Napolitano, chairwoman of the association, is pitching her Innovation America initiative as part of the cure.
It includes a call for more rigorous K-12 education standards with a focus on math and science education. State universities are to be not only educational institutions, but also economic engines with the products of their research and development hitting the marketplace and spinning off companies.
It's no small undertaking, and Napolitano urged her gubernatorial colleagues to fend off inertia by using their office "as a bully pulpit to create a sense of urgency about this."
The watchword: Innovation.
It was on the lips of governors from Minnesota to Maine as they discussed how their states are trying to use what Napolitano calls "mental capital" to adapt to an increasingly competitive global economy and buffer against collapse in any single industry.
Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, a Democrat, offered her state as an example of the need: "Because of the challenges in our auto sector, we know the advantages of investing in the diversity of the economy."
'A real revolution'
That's the "why." The "how" is where it gets trickier.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a Republican and the incoming NGA chairman, suggested that classrooms leverage new technology and get away from the traditional blackboards-and-textbooks focus.
In Maine, high school students must now complete four years of math and science, up from two, and the state is working with its neighbors to become a hub for information technology.
"We are very much at the beginning of a real revolution in innovation, information and governing," Schmidt said.
In much of Arizona, of course, wireless-telephone service remains a pipe dream - let alone high-speed broadband with streaming video and the like. That's changing.
Just weeks ago, even the tiny central-Arizona town of Superior went digital by launching its own wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi) network. Largely funded by a $270,000 federal grant, it's hoped that the high-speed Internet will create economic opportunities in the mining town. There are plans to allow local residents to access online business courses through Central Arizona College.
Expanding wireless and broadband reach across Arizona is key, Napolitano said, adding, "Ultimately, everybody needs to be linked."
Catching up
Arizona is pushing other efforts as well - raising academic rigor, increasing math and science requirements, reforming higher education. The state has pledged $100 million during the next four years to Science Foundation Arizona, an incubator for new biotechnology and research firms.
Just as important as reducing regulation and improving education is ensuring that Arizona's tax burden remains competitive, said Steve Voeller, president of the Arizona Free Enterprise Club. Arizona has cut hundreds of millions of dollars from its property- and income-tax rates in the past couple of years.
For now, though, the state struggles to churn out quality graduates in numbers that lure the highest-paying employers. Arizona State University President Michael Crow conceded that and said it's evident in struggles that he knows Google is having to secure a workforce for its new facility in Tempe.
"We're going to catch up," said Crow, who was at the conference. With the necessary reforms, he said, ASU and the state can begin to reach their new innovation economy within 10 years.
How will we know? "When we are one of the places that are consistently looked at by leading-edge industries."
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
The 6th Mind: "Priming the Pump" with Truth, Trust, Deeds!
Who’s Minding the Mind?
In a recent experiment, psychologists at Yale altered people’s judgments of a stranger by handing them a cup of coffee.
The study participants, college students, had no idea that their social instincts were being deliberately manipulated. On the way to the laboratory, they had bumped into a laboratory assistant, who was holding textbooks, a clipboard, papers and a cup of hot or iced coffee — and asked for a hand with the cup.
That was all it took: The students who held a cup of iced coffee rated a hypothetical person they later read about as being much colder, less social and more selfish than did their fellow students, who had momentarily held a cup of hot java.
Findings like this one, as improbable as they seem, have poured forth in psychological research over the last few years. New studies have found that people tidy up more thoroughly when there’s a faint tang of cleaning liquid in the air; they become more competitive if there’s a briefcase in sight, or more cooperative if they glimpse words like “dependable” and “support” — all without being aware of the change, or what prompted it.
Psychologists say that “priming” people in this way is not some form of hypnotism, or even subliminal seduction; rather, it’s a demonstration of how everyday sights, smells and sounds can selectively activate goals or motives that people already have.
More fundamentally, the new studies reveal a subconscious brain that is far more active, purposeful and independent than previously known. Goals, whether to eat, mate or devour an iced latte, are like neural software programs that can only be run one at a time, and the unconscious is perfectly capable of running the program it chooses.
The give and take between these unconscious choices and our rational, conscious aims can help explain some of the more mystifying realities of behavior, like how we can be generous one moment and petty the next, or act rudely at a dinner party when convinced we are emanating charm.
“When it comes to our behavior from moment to moment, the big question is, ‘What to do next?’ ” said John A. Bargh, a professor of psychology at Yale and a co-author, with Lawrence Williams, of the coffee study, which was presented at a recent psychology conference. “Well, we’re finding that we have these unconscious behavioral guidance systems that are continually furnishing suggestions through the day about what to do next, and the brain is considering and often acting on those, all before conscious awareness.”
Dr. Bargh added: “Sometimes those goals are in line with our conscious intentions and purposes, and sometimes they’re not.”
Priming the Unconscious
The idea of subliminal influence has a mixed reputation among scientists because of a history of advertising hype and apparent fraud. In 1957, an ad man named James Vicary claimed to have increased sales of Coca-Cola and popcorn at a movie theater in Fort Lee, N.J., by secretly flashing the words “Eat popcorn” and “Drink Coke” during the film, too quickly to be consciously noticed. But advertisers and regulators doubted his story from the beginning, and in a 1962 interview, Mr. Vicary acknowledged that he had trumped up the findings to gain attention for his business.
Later studies of products promising subliminal improvement, for things like memory and self-esteem, found no effect.
Some scientists also caution against overstating the implications of the latest research on priming unconscious goals. The new research “doesn’t prove that consciousness never does anything,” wrote Roy Baumeister, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, in an e-mail message. “It’s rather like showing you can hot-wire a car to start the ignition without keys. That’s important and potentially useful information, but it doesn’t prove that keys don’t exist or that keys are useless.”
Yet he and most in the field now agree that the evidence for psychological hot-wiring has become overwhelming. In one 2004 experiment, psychologists led by Aaron Kay, then at Stanford University and now at the University of Waterloo, had students take part in a one-on-one investment game with another, unseen player.
Half the students played while sitting at a large table, at the other end of which was a briefcase and a black leather portfolio. These students were far stingier with their money than the others, who played in an identical room, but with a backpack on the table instead.
The mere presence of the briefcase, noticed but not consciously registered, generated business-related associations and expectations, the authors argue, leading the brain to run the most appropriate goal program: compete. The students had no sense of whether they had acted selfishly or generously.
In another experiment, published in 2005, Dutch psychologists had undergraduates sit in a cubicle and fill out a questionnaire. Hidden in the room was a bucket of water with a splash of citrus-scented cleaning fluid, giving off a faint odor. After completing the questionnaire, the young men and women had a snack, a crumbly biscuit provided by laboratory staff members.
The researchers covertly filmed the snack time and found that these students cleared away crumbs three times more often than a comparison group, who had taken the same questionnaire in a room with no cleaning scent. “That is a very big effect, and they really had no idea they were doing it,” said Henk Aarts, a psychologist at Utrecht University and the senior author of the study.
The Same Brain Circuits
The real-world evidence for these unconscious effects is clear to anyone who has ever run out to the car to avoid the rain and ended up driving too fast, or rushed off to pick up dry cleaning and returned with wine and cigarettes — but no pressed slacks.
The brain appears to use the very same neural circuits to execute an unconscious act as it does a conscious one. In a study that appeared in the journal Science in May, a team of English and French neuroscientists performed brain imaging on 18 men and women who were playing a computer game for money. The players held a handgrip and were told that the tighter they squeezed when an image of money flashed on the screen, the more of the loot they could keep.
As expected, the players squeezed harder when the image of a British pound flashed by than when the image of a penny did — regardless of whether they consciously perceived the pictures, many of which flew by subliminally. But the circuits activated in their brains were similar as well: an area called the ventral pallidum was particularly active whenever the participants responded.
“This area is located in what used to be called the reptilian brain, well below the conscious areas of the brain,” said the study’s senior author, Chris Frith, a professor in neuropsychology at University College London who wrote the book “Making Up The Mind: How the Brain Creates our Mental World.”
The results suggest a “bottom-up” decision-making process, in which the ventral pallidum is part of a circuit that first weighs the reward and decides, then interacts with the higher-level, conscious regions later, if at all, Dr. Frith said.
Scientists have spent years trying to pinpoint the exact neural regions that support conscious awareness, so far in vain. But there’s little doubt it involves the prefrontal cortex, the thin outer layer of brain tissue behind the forehead, and experiments like this one show that it can be one of the last neural areas to know when a decision is made.
This bottom-up order makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. The subcortical areas of the brain evolved first and would have had to help individuals fight, flee and scavenge well before conscious, distinctly human layers were added later in evolutionary history. In this sense, Dr. Bargh argues, unconscious goals can be seen as open-ended, adaptive agents acting on behalf of the broad, genetically encoded aims — automatic survival systems.
In several studies, researchers have also shown that, once covertly activated, an unconscious goal persists with the same determination that is evident in our conscious pursuits. Study participants primed to be cooperative are assiduous in their teamwork, for instance, helping others and sharing resources in games that last 20 minutes or longer. Ditto for those set up to be aggressive.
This may help explain how someone can show up at a party in good spirits and then for some unknown reason — the host’s loafers? the family portrait on the wall? some political comment? — turn a little sour, without realizing the change until later, when a friend remarks on it. “I was rude? Really? When?”
Mark Schaller, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, has done research showing that when self-protective instincts are primed — simply by turning down the lights in a room, for instance — white people who are normally tolerant become unconsciously more likely to detect hostility in the faces of black men with neutral expressions.
“Sometimes nonconscious effects can be bigger in sheer magnitude than conscious ones,” Dr. Schaller said, “because we can’t moderate stuff we don’t have conscious access to, and the goal stays active.”
Until it is satisfied, that is, when the program is subsequently suppressed, research suggests. In one 2006 study, for instance, researchers had Northwestern University undergraduates recall an unethical deed from their past, like betraying a friend, or a virtuous one, like returning lost property. Afterward, the students had their choice of a gift, an antiseptic wipe or a pencil; and those who had recalled bad behavior were twice as likely as the others to take the wipe. They had been primed to psychologically “cleanse” their consciences.
Once their hands were wiped, the students became less likely to agree to volunteer their time to help with a graduate school project. Their hands were clean: the unconscious goal had been satisfied and now was being suppressed, the findings suggest.
What You Don’t Know
Using subtle cues for self-improvement is something like trying to tickle yourself, Dr. Bargh said: priming doesn’t work if you’re aware of it. Manipulating others, while possible, is dicey. “We know that as soon as people feel they’re being manipulated, they do the opposite; it backfires,” he said.
And researchers do not yet know how or when, exactly, unconscious drives may suddenly become conscious; or under which circumstances people are able to override hidden urges by force of will. Millions have quit smoking, for instance, and uncounted numbers have resisted darker urges to misbehave that they don’t even fully understand.
Yet the new research on priming makes it clear that we are not alone in our own consciousness. We have company, an invisible partner who has strong reactions about the world that don’t always agree with our own, but whose instincts, these studies clearly show, are at least as likely to be helpful, and attentive to others, as they are to be disruptive.
Monday, July 30, 2007
SMART SEATS + SMART BAORDS + SMART TEACHERS = SMART LEARNERS!
(JAY KARR/McClatchy-Trinbune)
Fifth-grader Paula Lusena touches her science lab Smart Board, an electronic blackboard that allows students and teachers to project and manipulate graphic displays by touching and moving items around.
High-tech teaching
Smart Boards engage students weaned on the Internet
July 30, 2007
HILTON HEAD ISLAND, S.C. -- At the start of each school day, Bluffton Elementary science teacher Tara Crewe fires up her laptop and video projector and beams the day's agenda onto a big-screen version of a 21st-Century blackboard.
What happens next is mind-boggling. Using a new interactive electronic white board, Crewe taps a yellow sun on the screen, and a quiz appears.
When a student answers a question, Crewe swipes a dry eraser over a blank line on the screen, revealing the correct answer almost magically.
Welcome to the future of teaching.
As schools across the country try to find ways to reach tech-savvy children in the video-game and Internet-saturated Information Age, these new interactive Smart Boards have emerged as a tool for teachers to engage students.
"It's turned learning in the classroom into the interactivity and entertainment kids are used to at home," Crewe said. Using Smart Boards "has made me a better teacher and made the kids more motivated learners."
Most of Crewe's instruction time is spent in front of the Internet-connected touch-screen board, which is linked to her laptop computer.
It allows her to link to educational videos, Web sites, slide-show presentations and blank screens -- like traditional white boards -- that she can draw on, save and print.
She often invites students to come to the front of the class and reveal answers with a simple swipe of the hand.
This kind of hands-on involvement with each lesson is especially beneficial to students with learning disabilities, those who have a hard time staying focused and children who learn more efficiently through interaction.
Crewe, one of the first teachers in her area to use the technology, started teaching with the Smart Board in January, when Bluffton Elementary installed them in six classrooms. Twenty-four teachers there now use the boards.
In the next several weeks, the district will roll out 48 more boards to schools throughout the county. To buy the equipment, Bluffton Elementary used a combination of district money and federal Title 1 funds, said Principal Kathleen Corley.
Each board costs about $1,500. The total per classroom with installation is around $3,800, according to the school district.
The benefits of the technology far outweigh the costs, said Crewe, who added she'd pay money out of her own pocket if the boards weren't provided by the district.
In classrooms with Smart Boards, homework completion rates are up as much as 60%, Corley said.
"You can demand, you can beg them, you can punish them, you can reward them," she said. "But the biggest thing is motivating them. And that's what these boards do. They help engage students in active learning."
Copyright © 2007 Detroit Free Press Inc.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Education Futures (ANYONE?)
eSN TechWatch: Redefining 'intelligence' -- July 23, 2007
http://www.eschoolnews.com
Futurist Andrew Zolli discusses the trends shaping education’s future—including the need to redefine what it means to be “smart.”
Monday, July 16, 2007
DO NOT Be ALARMED! BUT The Genie IS Out of the Bottle!
New Generations, New Media Challenges
By Jonathan Fanton
Tuesday, Jun. 19 2007
Children coming of age today are the first generation to grow up digital. In
their world, the use of computers, the Internet, cell phones and interactive
video games is commonplace.
We used to worry that computer technology would remain in the hands of the
privileged; now it is carried in the backpacks and shirt pockets of those from
all walks of life.
On Saturday, the 2007 National Media Education Conference gets underway in St.
Louis. The theme of the four-day series of workshops and screenings — the
nation's largest gathering of media educators — is "iPods, Blogs and Beyond:
Evolving Media Literacy for the 21st Century."
Clearly, access to technology no longer is the central issue. More than 90
percent of those between the ages of 12 and 17 are online. The number of
high-speed Internet connections, necessary for the richest content experience,
is growing by 40 percent annually. Participation in the all-digital virtual
world known as Second Life has risen dramatically — from 500,000 to nearly 5
million people in two years.
Today's young people increasingly express themselves and build communities with these powerful tools of technology. The real gap between tomorrow's digital haves and have-nots will be a lag in competence and confidence in the fast-paced variegated digital universe building and breeding outside schoolhouse walls.
Research, some of it funded by the MacArthur Foundation, is just beginning to fathom how deeply our children have absorbed new technology: the role it plays in their lives and how it affects their learning, play and socialization. What this research suggests is that today's digital youth are in the process of creating a new kind of literacy; this evolving skill extends beyond the traditions of reading and writing into a community of expression and problem-solving that not only is changing their world but ours, too:
— They have created communities the size of whole nations by channeling personal affiliations through message boards or meta-games or dedicated
websites such as Facebook, Friendster and MySpace.
— They have mastered digital tools to create new techniques for personal
expression: modding, digital sampling, mash-ups and zines — not to mention new
paths of distribution for personal works of video and text.
— They have redefined the notion of "play" to include complex problem-solving, mentoring, the archiving of knowledge and real-time conversations on issues of policy and politics of global interest and importance.
Henry Jenkins, director of the media studies program at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, calls this a new "participatory culture," one that
presents low barriers to artistic expression and social engagement that suggests that a richer environment for learning may lie outside the classroom.
Online and after school, youths in this new participatory culture are
assimilating new languages and rules, vast troves of research and perspectives
on the nature of order and community that vault across traditional boundaries
of race or creed or culture.
In meta-games such as Civilization III and SimCity, participants develop and
manipulate dynamic models of real life; they teach and legislate, create and
share, connect and collaborate, reflecting the value of team-building and consensus over autonomous solutions.
Moreover, through virtual characters and identities — even some that disturb
parents — teens can experiment through trial and error, make poor moral choices
or learn the downside of risk-taking without jeopardizing actual careers or
lives. They learn to value challenge and appreciate complexity, even as they assimilate facts and assess developments at breathtaking speed.
The downside may be that in the sunset of the old information culture, we are not understanding this new media literacy soon enough. Those who have no opportunity or desire to be part of these revolutionary digital communities may be deprived of vital virtual skills that would prepare them for full
participation in the real world of tomorrow.
In this new media age, the ability to negotiate and evaluate information online, to recognize manipulation and propaganda and to assimilate ethical values is becoming as basic to education as reading and writing. The children who truly will be left behind in the evolving digital culture are those who fail to bridge this participation gap.
Our challenge is to develop these educational forces, opening up our classrooms to the learning in which children now engage largely outside of school. In the end, we may find that the best way to institutionalize and encourage this new media literacy is to understand and harness what our young digital culture seems to be doing pretty well on its own.
Jonathan Fanton is president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which is funding a $50 million initiative to understand how digital technologies are changing kids and learning.
SPecial to the St. louis Post-Dispatch
By Jonathan Fanton
Tuesday, Jun. 19 2007
Children coming of age today are the first generation to grow up digital. In
their world, the use of computers, the Internet, cell phones and interactive
video games is commonplace.
We used to worry that computer technology would remain in the hands of the
privileged; now it is carried in the backpacks and shirt pockets of those from
all walks of life.
On Saturday, the 2007 National Media Education Conference gets underway in St.
Louis. The theme of the four-day series of workshops and screenings — the
nation's largest gathering of media educators — is "iPods, Blogs and Beyond:
Evolving Media Literacy for the 21st Century."
Clearly, access to technology no longer is the central issue. More than 90
percent of those between the ages of 12 and 17 are online. The number of
high-speed Internet connections, necessary for the richest content experience,
is growing by 40 percent annually. Participation in the all-digital virtual
world known as Second Life has risen dramatically — from 500,000 to nearly 5
million people in two years.
Today's young people increasingly express themselves and build communities with these powerful tools of technology. The real gap between tomorrow's digital haves and have-nots will be a lag in competence and confidence in the fast-paced variegated digital universe building and breeding outside schoolhouse walls.
Research, some of it funded by the MacArthur Foundation, is just beginning to fathom how deeply our children have absorbed new technology: the role it plays in their lives and how it affects their learning, play and socialization. What this research suggests is that today's digital youth are in the process of creating a new kind of literacy; this evolving skill extends beyond the traditions of reading and writing into a community of expression and problem-solving that not only is changing their world but ours, too:
— They have created communities the size of whole nations by channeling personal affiliations through message boards or meta-games or dedicated
websites such as Facebook, Friendster and MySpace.
— They have mastered digital tools to create new techniques for personal
expression: modding, digital sampling, mash-ups and zines — not to mention new
paths of distribution for personal works of video and text.
— They have redefined the notion of "play" to include complex problem-solving, mentoring, the archiving of knowledge and real-time conversations on issues of policy and politics of global interest and importance.
Henry Jenkins, director of the media studies program at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, calls this a new "participatory culture," one that
presents low barriers to artistic expression and social engagement that suggests that a richer environment for learning may lie outside the classroom.
Online and after school, youths in this new participatory culture are
assimilating new languages and rules, vast troves of research and perspectives
on the nature of order and community that vault across traditional boundaries
of race or creed or culture.
In meta-games such as Civilization III and SimCity, participants develop and
manipulate dynamic models of real life; they teach and legislate, create and
share, connect and collaborate, reflecting the value of team-building and consensus over autonomous solutions.
Moreover, through virtual characters and identities — even some that disturb
parents — teens can experiment through trial and error, make poor moral choices
or learn the downside of risk-taking without jeopardizing actual careers or
lives. They learn to value challenge and appreciate complexity, even as they assimilate facts and assess developments at breathtaking speed.
The downside may be that in the sunset of the old information culture, we are not understanding this new media literacy soon enough. Those who have no opportunity or desire to be part of these revolutionary digital communities may be deprived of vital virtual skills that would prepare them for full
participation in the real world of tomorrow.
In this new media age, the ability to negotiate and evaluate information online, to recognize manipulation and propaganda and to assimilate ethical values is becoming as basic to education as reading and writing. The children who truly will be left behind in the evolving digital culture are those who fail to bridge this participation gap.
Our challenge is to develop these educational forces, opening up our classrooms to the learning in which children now engage largely outside of school. In the end, we may find that the best way to institutionalize and encourage this new media literacy is to understand and harness what our young digital culture seems to be doing pretty well on its own.
Jonathan Fanton is president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which is funding a $50 million initiative to understand how digital technologies are changing kids and learning.
SPecial to the St. louis Post-Dispatch
Friday, July 6, 2007
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