education

Universities--they are one of America's growing exports.

The University of California at Berkeley is signing a deal with the government of Saudi Arabia to help the country build an engineering graduate school there, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Under the alliance, the mechanical engineering department at Berkeley will collaborate on research and help recruit faculty for a graduate department that will be part of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (mascot unknown). The graduate department will accept male and female students and open in 2009.

In turn, Berkeley will receive millions, according to the Chronicle. It … Read more

Getting things done service The Class Connection is nowhere near as exciting as The French Connection, but potentially useful for students looking to organize the whirlwind of planning and information sharing that getting a modern day education entails. The service combines calendaring, messaging, flash cards, and social networking to help students manage their work and daily schedules alone or with others. The hope is that students can become better organized, and if everyone in the class uses it, they'll have a centralized place to share files, notes, and study materials with one another.

The most useful part of the … Read more

For the first time, the phrase "scientific theory of evolution" may be used in Florida's public classrooms, thanks to the state's Board of Education's recent vote. This decision brings the state's young learners up to the scientific standards of at least 150 years ago.

For more detail, check out the AP report on MSNBC: "Florida adopts 'scientific theory of evolution'"

Last year Amy put her PhD in neuroscience to good use when she wrote the article debunking Baby Einstein. I, too, aired my thoughts in an article titled buy now, pay forever: the business of tech toys. Today, a blog from open source community member Stormy Peters teaches that we may have it all wrong when it comes to rewards and motivation.

Adlerian psychology teaches that every human being has the goal of belonging, of making a place in his or her world. Discouraged children, who find themselves unable to accomplish this goal on the socially useful side of life … Read more

From now on, all research published by Harvard Arts and Sciences faculty will be available without a fee and with broad terms of use. It's a controversial decision, since it threatens the exclusive cachet of expensive peer-reviewed journals, and not all researchers are keen on granting complete freedom to cite their hard-earned insights.

Read the full story at Ars Technica: "Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences goes Open Access"

Ice storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, landslides, wildfires, floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis are just some of the forces of nature that can wreak havoc on the lives of untold thousands in a period of seconds, minutes, days, or months. As global temperatures rise and as a growing human population expands into more and more areas less and less suited for either habitation or rescue, the average person in the world (one of 6+ billion) faces an increasing likelyhood that he or she will face a real disaster that seriously disrupts possible response.

Consider the plight of Sri Lanka, which was devastated by a tsunami in 2004. According to a BBC eyewitness reporter:

There are no kind of emergency services here, there are no helicopters thumping through the sky to come to save people. It is a do-it-yourself rescue.

The final tally reported more than 40,000 dead and a staggering 2.5 million displaced. And from the report's summary: "Waves as high as six meters had crashed into coastal villages, sweeping away people, cars, and even a train with 1,700 passengers." Whatever infrastructure may have existed prior to the tsunami, it was completely overwhelmed by both the magnitude of human need and the destructive power of the disaster. Within hours, open-source software developers created the Sahana project, and within days, their home-grown solution was doing more to help the Sri Lankan people than first-world conventional software packages did in far less extreme circumstances. And now it is doing even more, with the One Laptop Per Child hardware platform.… Read more

Parents on the lookout for carefree, unintimidating ways to urge the sprout of their young kids' creativity ought to take a look at Ten Amazing Fruits. As the product name suggests, Ten Amazing Fruits stars a sampling of botanical characters, including the frequently miscast tomato (hurrah!) These are not, however, your garden-variety fruits. Each outsize organic possesses arms, feet, and a blank face upon which children can attach, Mr. Potato Head-style, a variety of digital features and appendages. A posh voice recites object names when the cursor mouses by, but a quick trip to the options can put an end … Read more

Henry Jenkins, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who is perhaps academia's leading fanboy, spent part of January in Shanghai and has been posting observations on his blog. I want to highlight one of his better contributions: on social responsibility in Chinese video game culture.

Video games, "freedom," and "addiction"

Jenkins was attending the International Games and Learning Forum, organized by MIT and Beijing University. There, the focus was on "serious games," those that might potentially be used to promote learning. His most frequently repeated observation was that, while U.S. experts on … Read more

Education.com aims to be the WebMD for parents looking for information about children. It does that by aggregating the most-searched for content on the Web related to kids: schools, activities, behavioral issues, and more.

The product the company is launching at Demo is School Finder, which is exactly what it sounds like.

Using already available information that Education.com has gathered in one place, users can search public, private, and charter schools. It has rankings based on test scores as well as parent opinions. It tracks information on school demographics and after-school activities. The tool also displays schools based … Read more