Education

Changing Education Paradigms

Changing Education Paradigms Sir Ken Robinson In this talk from RSA Animate, Sir Ken Robinson lays out the link between 3 troubling trends: rising drop-out rates, schools’ dwindling stake in the arts, and ADHD. An important, timely talk for parents and teachers.

Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we’re educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence.

The animation in the video below is very good and illustrates his points well. The transcript of his lecture is also include underneath the video. [Read more…]

Business Schools Add Courses On Ethics, But Are Graduates More Ethical?

Business Schools ethics MBA by Ben Schiller –
Post-financial meltdown, business schools are trying to make their graduates more responsible. But does taking one class on ethics work, or does a new ethical model need to permeate the curriculum?

Many industry watchers saw business schools as contributing factors in the financial crisis, arguing that, by failing to challenge orthodoxies, and overlooking “socially useless” activities, they helped create conditions for collapse. That nearly every relevant banker, regulator, and politician was an MBA graduate helped make the case.

But what about now? Have b-schools changed?

Yes, and no, according to a survey of how schools are teaching social, environmental, and ethical topics.[Read more…]

How to Develop a Disruptive Product

Principles of Biology digital textbook by Eric Markowitz –
One of the world’s oldest publishing companies brought in a ringer to revolutionize the way the company does business. The result? The first fully-interactive textbook.

Nature Publishing Group, which publishes several highly regarded scientific journals and textbooks, was founded in England in 1869, eight years before electric lights illuminated the streets of London. Now, 140 years later, with the help of Harvard Classics scholar Vikram Savkar, the company is beginning to disrupt the traditional textbook model that it helped to create.

This month at California State University, the company released Principles of Biology, an interactive, constantly updating biology textbook that retails for less than $50. Like most digital textbooks, the software is accessible on laptops and tablets, but unlike most digital textbooks, it’s not just a scan of a .pdf. The company calls it a “digital reinvention of the textbook,” meaning that students can interact with the material; they can literally match amino acids and corresponding DNA with their fingers. Inc.com’s Eric Markowitz spoke with Vikram Savkar about what it takes to create a culture of innovation in an old-school company. [Read more…]

The Superiority of School Vouchers Demonstrated

School Vouchers by Gary Jason –
The failure of the American K-12 public school system has been obvious for decades. Some of us fossils can recall the public uproar that accompanied the release of the report “A Nation at Risk” back in 1987, documenting the mediocre at best, disastrously bad at worst performance of the nation’s public schools.

The public school special interest groups (the PSSIGs) — that is, public school administrators, education department professors, “labor studies” professors, textbook publishers, and most notoriously teachers unions and their members — managed to turn the outrage into support for jacking up spending.

Over the last quarter-century, we have nearly doubled our national per capita spending — we now outspend per capita for K-12 education every other nation on Earth but one. But our national student scores have remained flat, while internationally, we have dropped in ranking among developed nations from 14th during the 1970s down to 24th place today. [Read more…]

Education As We Know It Is Finished

7/12/2010 – Clayton M. Christensen & Michael B. Horn –
Classrooms are giving way to online learning–forever.

School is out, and for most students enjoying their midsummer pleasures, class time is a distant memory. Changes are underway that make it likely to stay that way. The schools students return to in the fall will look quite different from those they left behind. [Read more…]

Why B-Schools Set Up Entrepreneurs To Fail

Forbes.com | by Sramana Mitra | 2/26/2009
Business schools need to focus on bootstrapping, not only raising money from VCs.

I know I am entering highly contentious territory. Academia generally looks down upon entrepreneurs even as they teach entrepreneurship in business schools and other university programs around the world.

Meanwhile, I have come to observe that most business school programs have an extensive emphasis on fundraising, especially from venture capitalists, and very little pragmatic understanding of what it really takes to get a venture off the ground. As a result, business schools launch students into the real world with completely unrealistic expectations, set up to fail. [Read more…]

Government Schools Win Again

American Thinker | by Lloyd Brown | April 10, 2009

Whew! That was close. Nearly 1,700 children had escaped from the failing public schools in Washington, D.C., and were getting a decent education in private schools – just like the children of fat-cat liberal politicians.

But the fat-cat politicians in Congress put a stop to that. They killed the voucher program that a recent study showed had provided those children some hope of escaping from poverty. [Read more…]