Posts tagged: education
Jennifer Widom:
Typically I teach around 100 students per year in my introductory database course. This past fall my enrollment was a whopping 60,000. Admittedly, only 25,000 of them chose to submit assignments, and a mere 6500 achieved a strong final score. But even with 6500 students, I more than quadrupled the total number of students I’ve taught in my entire 18-year academic career.
A fascinating post by the professor who taught the Introduction to Databases Stanford online course, first started in fall 2011.
This free downloadable tool includes step-by-step instructions and explains fundamental concepts. The wide range of tools to help students with complex mathematics includes a full-featured graphing calculator that’s designed to work just like a hand-held calculator and ink handwriting support to recognize hand-written problems.
It can solve equations, graph equations, and function as a graphical calculator. It’s quite an awesome application from Microsoft that’s worth running Parallels (Windows) for.
Cryptography online course by Stanford University:
Cryptography is an indispensable tool for protecting information in computer systems. This course explains the inner workings of cryptographic primitives and how to correctly use them. Students will learn how to reason about the security of cryptographic constructions and how to apply this knowledge to real-world applications.
Apart from crypto, Stanford is also offering 10 other courses for the January 2011 term.
They include the following:
- Intro to Computer Science,
- Machine Learning,
- SaaS,
- Human–Computer Interaction,
- Natural Language Processing,
- Game Theory,
- Probabilistic Graphical Models,
- Design and Analysis of Algorithms.
The respective links are available at the footer of each online course offering. There may be more to come…
Go learn something if you aren’t that busy.
InfoWorld:
iOS 5 version of online course covers nuts and bolts of building an iPhone/iPad program and getting it distributed through the App Store
Awesome! Stanford is truly on its mission to educate the world. Read their press release.
The Atlantic:
At the end of the school year, both little boys took the same standardized test given at all D.C. public schools—not a perfect test of their learning, to be sure, but a relatively objective one (and, it’s worth noting, not a very hard one).
After a year in Mr. Taylor’s class, the first little boy’s scores went up—way up. He had started below grade level and finished above. On average, his classmates’ scores rose about 13 points—which is almost 10 points more than fifth-graders with similar incoming test scores achieved in other low-income D.C. schools that year. On that first day of school, only 40 percent of Mr. Taylor’s students were doing math at grade level. By the end of the year, 90 percent were at or above grade level.
As for the other boy? Well, he ended the year the same way he’d started it—below grade level. In fact, only a quarter of the fifth-graders at Plummer finished the year at grade level in math—despite having started off at about the same level as Mr. Taylor’s class down the road.
A very interesting article on pedagogy.
Your mission is simple: achieve pleasant and readable text by distributing the space between letters. Typographers call this activity kerning.
Do you have the eye and what it takes to be a typographer?
A fantastic write-up on what is important for someone looking to go into a CS-related field.
A bold experiment in distributed education, “Introduction to Databases” will be offered free and online to students worldwide during the fall of 2011. Students will have access to lecture videos, receive regular feedback on progress, and receive answers to questions. When you successfully complete this class, you will also receive a statement of accomplishment. Taught by Professor Jennifer Widom, the curriculum draws from Stanford’s popular Introduction to Databases course.
Looks interesting and useful.
As a Secondary Four student, I experience first-hand the ugliness of the flaws the education system has. In fact, I spent one hour and forty-five minutes writing you this letter. Though I am not sure if you will ever get to read it ever in this lifetime, but this is something that I believe in. I believe in being the change I want to see in the world, or at least in my environment, as cliched as that sounds. Every one else will tell me that this is a waste of time, because I have Preliminary examinations next week and I could have been studying instead of typing this long Facebook note out.
This is the type of education system the Ministry of Education’s policies have cultivated. A system where fighting for things one believes in are seen as a ‘waste of time’, where reading anything non-school-related is seen as yet another waste of time. Is this the type of education a First World Country should have, one where students’ thoughts and abilities to express themselves are confined within the front and back cover of their textbooks, where it is better to be passive and just study hard under the system than fight to change it and waste one’s time, where having your own thoughts is a liability.
Have we lost the true meaning of education somewhere in the paper chase, buried under all the degrees and diplomas and paychecks? Or were we lost all along as to what education truly means?
All very good questions by a secondary 4 graduating student. She is clearly convicted and passionate about highlighting the flaws of the education system and I’m glad she made the effort to write this heartfelt letter.
We need more students who actually realise that grades are really secondary in the grander scheme of things. Character development and values come first.
I can’t overstate how much TED has changed my life personally, and what a tour de force it has been culturally. I’ve previously said that my first month of watching TED talks in 2006 gave me more — more insight, more knowledge, more inspiration, more creative restlessness to do something with my life — than four years of “Ivy League education” combined, and I’ll say it again. In more ways than I can count, TED has changed my outlook on the world, vastly expanded my scope of curiosity, and infinitely enriched my life with the tremendously interesting, generous and kind people I’ve been fortunate to meet in the TED community, online and off.
If you’re busy, use the TED app or Squrl (Instapaper for Videos) to watch them offline in the future.
For their JC 1 Project Work, a group of Pioneer Junior College students have come up with a creative and innovative way to achieve smaller class size in schools. Noticing that their school hall is used only sparingly, usually for the school assembly, and is empty most of the day, they suggested that the hall be partitioned into separate units of small classrooms with movable structures that can also block off noise. To overcome the cost and difficulty of recruiting more teachers that are needed, they urged greater use of new social media such as Facebook and Twitter to promote teaching as a career.
I find it heartening that students are moving towards social issues, rather than taking on generic and safe issues.
I am reminded of someone who told me of his experience in the United States, where he went to do a course in broadcasting. In the early years of the three- or four-year course, he was carefully taught the “how-to” and given project assignments in which he could demonstrate his mastery of the required skills and art. For his final-year project, however, his project had to meet one simple requirement: it must break all the rules. You don’t flout the rules, you don’t graduate. How’s that as a stab at a new paradigm?
I agree much with the systemic issues with our education system that Alex highlighted in his article.
A shockingly common refrain that I’ve seen in the comments section of YouTube videos of opposition speeches are insinuations that the opposition have no plans for Singapore when elected. I hope these are their personal thoughts and are not parroted phrases from disinformation sowers. Either way, comments of such effect reflect extremely lazy and sloppy mental faculty.
Concrete plans (Manifesto) by each opposition party are available on their individual websites. It scares me that they can’t even be bothered to find out before screaming that they have no plans. This ridiculous expectation of being spoon-fed reflects very poorly of our education system. With the rise of the Internet and Google, is it that difficult to lift a finger to access each party’s manifesto and read?
More annoyingly, for those that just parrot arguments without thinking over their merits, deserve to be shot on two counts. One for propagating misinformation and two for being intellectually dishonest and lazy.
Another common refrain pertains to the details of the manifestos. Most often, they will claim that the ideas presented in the manifestos are “too vague” and are thus “unreliable” and “non-credible”, and hence they should support the ruling party.
This line of logic puzzles me as the manifesto produced by the ruling party is even more vague, complete with sentences that anybody can come up with. For the calibre of the ruling party they claim to be, I’d expected more. I’m insulted that the skimpy manifesto of theirs is actually produced by the group of the most highly paid ministers in the world. Surely they could have put in a little more effort? Or at least, stop claiming that the opposition lacked concrete plans, and that their manifestos require more scrutiny. In fact, there’s nothing in the ruling party’s manifesto to even scrutinise to return them their favour.
Quoting their favourite gauge of merit, the “track record”, I believe that the various parties’ manifestos are good representations of it. Any party in or out of parliament can produce one, as long as they put their hearts and minds to it.
Based on this gauge, how does the ruling party fair compared to the opposition parties? How much effort and thought can you see and feel from it?
If you were a teacher and you’ve tasked your students to produce a manifesto of what policies they would like to introduce in Singapore, what kind of grades would you give the various submissions?
So really, voters of Singapore, voters for our future, please exercise critical thinking and do a little bit of homework before believing everything that the ruling party claims, especially the press and media. Don’t be lazy, physically and intellectually. Think and find out.
NoteSlate /// intuitively simple monochrome paper alike tablet device
This device shall replace my foolscap pad and pen for classes.
