Catch up on the week with one simple serving of Friday File. We've pieced together 10 interesting news bites you may have missed and put them together in bite-size morsels.
Dive in by clicking on the first picture.
No More Teachers
Alice Cooper may have it got it right. At least partially. Educators in Rio de Janeiro hope to prepare students to become tomorrow's technology innovators by sending them to a school with no more teachers. Instead, 180 children aged 12 to 15 receive instruction via devices, teams of six, and mentors, using their own approaches to education. These may include video, reading, and individual or group activities, via netbooks, campus-wide WiFi, or tablets in a Google-like environment. By 2014, the Brazilian city plans to add five more GENTEs -- Ginásio Experimental das Novas Tecnologias Educacionais, or New Technologies Experimental High Schools -- to the program. Alison Diana (Source: GENTE)
Did we miss anything? Add your Friday File ingredients in the comments.
In Philadelphia, students are on the street "organizing" because their school system is planning to drop atheletics, the arts, libraries and all extracurriculars in order to meet budget.
My comment was that these organizers should try and form indepedent sports leagues and art centers for youth, and partner with existing library systems. Why should so much activity be coupled specifically with school?
And when I go to the local public libraries here near Kent, WA, USA, I find the most used areas are the study rooms with big round tables, high ceilings and windows, and the computer desks. The library has already become a self-driven classroom and in some sense the schools themselves are obsolete!
As McLuhan wrote (Counterblast, 1969):
The traditional classroom is an obsolete detention home, a feudal dungeon.
I think the only way to have an opinion about this project is to first learn everything about it, with all the details, expectations, etc. This would include going through a demo session, and knowing methodoligies applied.
Knowing only that this project is using virtual and online teaching/learning resources and mentors instead of teachers is not enough.
Also, if there are mentors in the classroom it means the students are not alone. The idea of having teachers acting as mentors is not new. It has been talked about in the teaching sphere for some time now. I am not a bit surprised that someone has finally started a project like this.
Nice..but I am afraid that they would end up using social media tools like Facebook and all, all day long as they all will be having their own hand held devices.
And I hope these children will experience some very good and fruitful time,engaging themselves in productive activities and pondering upon innovative ideas!
My question about the Klingon translator is not in a bad or serious manner. :) Unfortunately, we can't read tone of voice here, because it would have made a difference.
As a Star Trek fan I liked to see it, I found it fun, and I liked trying it.
Bill Gates will continue to be crowned the richest man in the world for some good time.
I view what the NewYorker has rolled out as quite a development--it basically renders what Wikileaks has done to be useless. There is one tidbit of news, though, that I thought was striking--how Bill Gates has again been "crowned" the richest man in the World...despite having given away as much as he has. It shows that despite the "hoopla" over Windows 8/tablets/etc., it shows that MSFT is hitting all the right notes.
The need to transform education as we know it is absolutely vital. We should encourage such innovations--but I am uncomfortable with doing away w/teachers. They play a vital and crucial role. :)
I am smelling this as a method to cut costs as recorded lectures are easy and cheaper to give and teachers cost a lot and difficult to manage. This method ok for education to people in remote areas but video can never be as effective as a teacher in-person can be.
Every new idea has a risk and I am pretty sure that before this idea of 'teaching without teachers' got to the mainstream, the introducers must have thought about it and tested it. I hope all such ideas are also validated by the education authorities of the state instead of private institutions themselves trying out and putting kids' time at stake.
That education experiment in Rio has a very high risk... What if it doesn't work? Those kids will miss one year of their life (im exagerating, but they'll surely miss something).
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I've been excited by a few technology announcements, and bored by many, but Google's I/O announcement this week is the first where I found myself getting choked up and teary.
What's the prognosis for telehealth? Medical professionals have technologies they need; some state legislatures are enacting supportive laws, and both employers and employees tout the benefits. Yet other states have let proposals wither, insurers aren't sure how to charge for services, and physicians worry about liability and patient care.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
Subsidized handsets, rather than locked handsets, should be the focus of regulators. We're not getting good deals, not fostering innovation, and weakening our power as buyers.
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