The new edition of Newsweek reports: “In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach. “[Indiana University professor Jonathan] Plucker recently toured a number of such schools in Shanghai and Beijing. He was amazed by a boy who, for a [...]
About a quarter of a century ago — when I was a young, impressionable Northwestern student wondering what I wanted to do with my life — I signed up for an upper-level seminar called “Writing Poetry.” It turned out that I was somewhat adept at deconstructing poems — and just plain awful at writing them. [...]
While I’m absolutely, positively in favor of colleges that assign their incoming freshman class one book to read, I’m intrigued by what the University of Pennsylvania is doing this year.As Real Clear Arts reports, “Instead of reading a common book, to be discussed on campus, freshmen have been asked to study and be ready to [...]
Harvey Mudd College math professor, and self-proclaimed mathemagician, Arthur Benjamin thinks so. He explains his reasoning in this fairly convincing three-minute talk.P.S. Let the record show that I took calculus in college, got an A, used it a bit in microeconomics, and have rarely thought about it again. But nearly every day I encounter an [...]
Allen Cochran of Cincinnati sent me an email the other day in which he asked an interesting question. Here’s what he wrote:“I applied to and was accepted to the The Ohio State University’s graduate school for Visual Communication and Design Development. I have worked as a freelance graphic designer since I was 15 but have [...]
A quick thought about the disconnect between how we prepare kids for work and how work actually operates:In school, problems almost always are clearly defined, confined to a single discipline, and have one right answer.But in the workplace, they’re practically the opposite. Problems are usually poorly defined, multi-disciplinary, and have several possible answers, none of [...]
Chad Moutray of the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy examined that question by following the fates of the college class of 1993. Some of Moutray’s more intriguing findings: “The self-employed tend to have slightly lower grade point averages (GPAs) than their wage-and-salary peers.” The students with the best grades were more likely to seek work in [...]
The core argument of AWNM is that left-brain abilities remain absolutely necessary — but that in a world of Asia, automation, and abundance, they’re no longer sufficient. The current BusinessWeek cites new research that offers another factual brick in this wall: “A new study concludes that social skills can be a better predictor of future earnings than [...]
Several people have told me recently about Visual Thinking Strategies, a non-profit that “uses art to foster kids’ capacities to observe, think, listen and communicate.” In fact, VTS was behind the Harvard Medical School art museum program I wrote about awhile back. It sounds like they’re doing great work. Find out more about their research and principles here.
“RISD is MIT for the right brain.”– John Maeda, incoming president of the Rhode Island School of DesignThe quote is from a great WSJ profile of the super-innovative Maeda. Check out the WSJ writer’s description of what Maeda is doing for his presidential inauguration:“On the day I visit, an assistant in his office is folding hundreds of 15-inch squares [...]
