Visual Turn

Want to receive our new PSA ft. Daniel Radcliffe on your mobile phone? Follow the directions above and we’ll send it to you after it airs during Glee on Tuesday night, Feb. 21 (8/7c on FOX)!

I admire and support the Trevor Project and the good work it does toward suicide prevention among queer youth. But why do so many organizations seem to think that the purpose of social media is to promote more social media?

inothernews: Sammy Davis Jr. plants a historic TV kiss on...

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 00:00:05 -0600

inothernews:

Sammy Davis Jr. plants a historic TV kiss on Carroll O’Connor’s cheek in this Feb. 19, 1972 episode of All In The Family. From the New York Times:

The Captain Kirk-Uhura kiss on “Star Trek” in 1968, compelled by telekinetic aliens, caused a stir, but the “All in the Family” kiss was more than a stir; it was in effect calling out a country that by 1972 routinely glorified black performers and athletes but was still full of people who thought and acted like Archie (Bunker, the show’s hyper-bigoted main character). The episode and the kiss have been making lists of top TV moments ever since.

americanroutes: Congratulations to Rebirth Brass Band for...

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 16:48:35 -0600

americanroutes:

Congratulations to Rebirth Brass Band for winning their first-ever Grammy!

We talked to Philip and Keith Frazier in 2005 about evacuating New Orleans for Katrina, and eventually coming home. And we spoke to drummer Derrick Tabb in 2010 about starting the Roots of Music marching band and music education program.

The disadvantages of an elite education

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 16:34:50 -0600

The disadvantages of an elite education:

An elite education not only ushers you into the upper classes; it trains you for the life you will lead once you get there. I didn’t understand this until I began comparing my experience, and even more, my students’ experience, with the experience of a friend of mine who went to Cleveland State. There are due dates and attendance requirements at places like Yale, but no one takes them very seriously. Extensions are available for the asking; threats to deduct credit for missed classes are rarely, if ever, carried out. In other words, students at places like Yale get an endless string of second chances. Not so at places like Cleveland State. My friend once got a D in a class in which she’d been running an A because she was coming off a waitressing shift and had to hand in her term paper an hour late.

That may be an extreme example, but it is unthinkable at an elite school. Just as unthinkably, she had no one to appeal to. Students at places like Cleveland State, unlike those at places like Yale, don’t have a platoon of advisers and tutors and deans to write out excuses for late work, give them extra help when they need it, pick them up when they fall down. They get their education wholesale, from an indifferent bureaucracy; it’s not handed to them in individually wrapped packages by smiling clerks.

— William Deresiewicz

Why teaching is hard One of the hardest things for an expert in...

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:25:00 -0600

Why teaching is hard

One of the hardest things for an expert in any field to remember is how it feels to be a novice in that field. Once you’ve gained enough experience that you start seeing the world in a different way, the world simply doesn’t look the same anymore.

This is a short clip from the WNYC Radiolab podcast. Host Jad Abumrad is interviewing pianist Jeffrey Swann about Richard Wagner’s epic four-opera cycle, The Ring of the Nibelung. Listen as Swann tries to demonstrate Wagner’s use of leitmotif by playing two variations of the spear motif from Die Walküre.

Jad gives a small sigh of frustration before he bravely admits, “See, I can’t hear the difference there.” Swann offers to deconstruct it for him, and we go from bewilderment to an “aha!” moment in less than 30 seconds.

This whole Radiolab podcast (“The Ring and I”) is pretty cool, but Jad’s “aha!” moment really jumped out at me as a teacher because, even though I know a bit about the concept of leitmotif (and I’ve seen the Ring live and listened to it on the radio and CD), I did not quite grasp right away what Swann was trying to demonstrate either. I had the same “aha!” moment right along with Jad.

Swann had to turn off his “expert” ears, and present the spear motif in a way that “novice” ears could “hear” it. That’s why teaching is hard, but why those “aha!” moments with learners can be so awesome!

americanroutes: In today’s Featured Archive Spotlight—just in...

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 04:02:07 -0600

americanroutes:

In today’s Featured Archive Spotlight—just in time for this week’s Carnival parades—we talk to flambeaux carriers.

Image by Matthew Hinton/Times-Picayune, via

"I want to know how a hundred years ago Louis Armstrong was able to get an excellent music education..."

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 03:59:49 -0600

“I want to know how a hundred years ago Louis Armstrong was able to get an excellent music education and a free trumpet in a segregated prison school when today our kids can’t even get music education in school.”

- Wynton Marsalis (via thgts)

thusreluctant: The Cotton Office in New Orleans by Edgar Degas

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 03:42:40 -0600

thusreluctant:

The Cotton Office in New Orleans by Edgar Degas

Carnival parades have not graced the streets of the French...

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 01:23:16 -0600

Carnival parades have not graced the streets of the French Quarter since 1972 due to crowd control issues, and fear that first responders could not reach a fire or other major emergency on the narrow streets of the oldest section of New Orleans. The city and surrounding areas still host nearly 80 different parades in the fortnight leading up to Mardi Gras, which this year is celebrated on February 21, 2012.

Ensuring student success – Students are not to blame

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:34:37 -0600

Ensuring student success – Students are not to blame:

Many students may appear to be unqualified, unprepared and uninterested. But if you believe, as I do, that each one of them has a talent, each of one them has a capacity to develop – intellectually and emotionally – then it follows that each one should be given a fair chance to succeed.

— Arshad Ahmad, president, Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, Canada

New Horizons for Learning EdTech Database

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:29:00 -0600

New Horizons for Learning EdTech Database:

The venerable New Horizons for Learning journal, now hosted at Johns Hopkins University, has announced the addition of a database of educational technology tools reviewed by educators.

Why student success is such a radical idea

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 17:08:00 -0600

MIT recently announced its plans to offer its free online course materials with the opportunity to earn certificates of completion through its new MITx platform.

Sebastian Thrun recently announced he is leaving Stanford to offer free online courses through a platform called Udacity.com, which also will offer certificates of completion.

Both MITx and Udacity are experiments in offering online learning to large numbers of students for free, along with some kind of “official” recognition of achievement. One way they differ is in their orientation toward student success and completion.

MIT emphasized the rigor of its courses by pointing out that not all students will be successful:

“Reif emphasizes that the [MITx] courses will be built with MIT-grade difficulty. Not everyone will be able to pass them. But, he says, ‘we believe strongly that anyone in the world who can dedicate themselves and learn this material should be given a credential.’”

Chronicle: MIT Mints a Valuable New Form of Academic Currency

Thrun reflected on his own realization that weeding out students does not promote learning:

“In all my life of teaching, my 20 years of teaching at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford, I had always been a tough teacher. I had always given students really hard questions, I had always let them fail, and would come to their rescue, making myself look really smart. Here was no purpose of ‘weeding.’ This was an open university. There was no reason to reduce class size. There was no certificate to be earned. And here I was teaching a ‘weeder’ class. Then I started to realize that we set up students not for success but for failure. We really empowered the professors by looking smart, and we don’t really help the students to become smart.”

YouTube: Sebastian Thrun at the DLD Conference in Munich

MIT starts out with the traditional assumption that only a limited number of students should be successful. Thrun is instead starting out with the assumption that all students should be successful, provided enough support and opportunity to learn.

It’s no surprise that Thrun is leaving Stanford to pursue his vision on his own terms. Institutions and the academics within them are heavily invested in their own prestige and exclusivity. Even as they experiment with new learning formats, they measure the quality of their program by guaranteeing failure for some and success for others. Thrun takes the view that the success of his program is vested in the success of his students. This radical idea simply isn’t compatible with the mission of an institution like Stanford.

Of course it is the prestige of Thrun’s status as a now-former Stanford professor that enables him to be taken seriously, as is his role as a Google Fellow and the connections that brings (Google founder Sergey Brin is featured in a Udacity.com video). He’s not just some guy recording math lessons on YouTube, though Sal Khan and the Khan Academy have been part of his inspiration. The difference, though, is in how Thrun is using that prestige to create a platform that promotes successful learners.

The future will bring many more experiments and many more radical ideas designed to bring online learning and higher education to vast numbers of students. If you’re going to teach the world, maybe you should start out by expecting success. It will be quite a different world when education is no longer a zero-sum game.

Sebastian Thrun resigned as a tenured professor at Stanford to...

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 22:26:35 -0600

Sebastian Thrun resigned as a tenured professor at Stanford to pursue his own vision of online learning at udacity.com. He made his decision after 160,000 students from around the world signed up for the artificial intelligence class he offered online for free this fall.

Watch today’s announcement as he shares some really remarkable insights about the power of online teaching and learning. Really inspiring!

— Visual Turn

(Hint: skip the inane introduction and jump to Thrun’s talk at 2:20.)

"I used to think that technology could help education. I’ve probably spearheaded giving away more..."

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 10:48:55 -0600

“I used to think that technology could help education. I’ve probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But I’ve had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent. It’s a political problem.”

- Steve Jobs | 1996 interview with Wired.com (via courtenaybird)