A Lifelong Learner Shares Thoughts About Education
I came across this article Building An App In 45 Minutes With Meteor By Sacha Greif and I can’t help but wonder about using it in a class this year. Why not? Indeed.
Please read the original post, much better conversation, links, serendipitous continuity. I have captured the article below as I want to use it in class and you know how things tend to disappear just when you want them online. Silly editors, school takes place on a longer timeline.
My goal this year is to leverage ‘Open Badges’ at the high school level to demonstrate where a student may acquire a skill.
This update in. The NYTimes post was too old so I include a more relevant piece from yesterday on GettingSmart, one caution on all of this is that this process is just beginning and the well funded publishers and certificate authorities will start the show; however, the final word will be from the crowd as always.
I am including the post as the last post contained links that disappeared. Thanks to the sharp eyed reader who pointed this out.
What is Immersion?
It has been almost two decades since the beginning of the web. This means that the web is no longer just a technology of the present, but also, a record of our past.
Email, one of the original forms of social media, is even older than the web and contains a detailed description of our personal and professional history.
Immersion is an invitation to dive into the history of your email life in a platform that offers you the safety of knowing that you can always delete your data.
Just like a cubist painting, Immersion presents users with a number of different perspectives of their email data.
It provides a tool for self-reflection at a time where the zeitgeist is one of self-promotion.
It provides an artistic representation that exists only in the presence of the visitor.
It helps explore privacy by showing users data that they have already shared with others.
Finally, it presents users wanting to be more strategic with their professional interactions, with a map to plan more effectively who they connect with.
So Immersion is not about one thing. It’s about four. It’s about self-reflection, art, privacy and strategy. It’s about providing users with a number of different perspectives by leveraging on the fact that the web, and emails, are now an important part of our past.
From The Atlantic, not that blue-collar workers generally do more advanced math than their white-collar counterparts. I am not suggesting all of CTE is targeted at blue-collar jobs anymore; however, it is interesting that those students often think that math is less important to them.
Remember sitting through high school math class while the teacher droned on about polynomial equations and thinking there wasn’t a chance you’d ever use any of it in life? Well, if you’re like most Americans, chances are your 17-year-old self was absolutely correct.
As it turns out, less than a quarter of U.S. workers report using math any more complicated than basic fractions and percentages during the course of their jobs. The graphs below are based on survey data compiled by Northeastern University sociologist Michael Handel. Handel surveyed about 2,300 workers first from 2004 through 2006, then again between 2007 and 2009. The catchall category of "any more advanced" math includes algebra through calculus. And as you can see, most workers aren’t doing a whole lot of high-level computations.
You might be surprised by who’s doing the most advanced math day-to-day. It’s not white-collar workers. Rather, it’s high-skill blue-collar workers, shown in dark blue on the graph below. Before you glance over it, here’s a breakdown of jobs categories:
- Upper level white collar, e.g. management, technical, and professional occupations
- Low level white collar, e.g. clerical and sales workers
- Upper level blue collar, e.g. craft and repair workers like skilled construction trades and mechanics
- Lower level blue collar, e.g. factory workers and truck drivers
These numbers alone aren’t an open and shut case against teaching complex math to most high school students. But they do suggest that what we teach today has little relationship to the broad demands of the job market, and that we should at least be conscious of the possibility that we’re putting educational road blocks in front of students without a practical application for them.
At the same time, it’s clear that some of the best blue-collar jobs do in fact require a level of mathematical literacy on par with what you’d expect a student to know if they were college bound. To me, that hints at an argument for more high level vocational programs: It might help if students actually knew that those boring equations really one day would earn them a paycheck.
