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Today's Document
shark vs the universe
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Origami Around
will byers stan first human second
Misplaced Lens Cap
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Andulka
Noah Kahan
occasionally subtle
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
KIROKAZE
tumblr dot com
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
Janaina Medeiros
Cosimo Galluzzi
Game of Thrones Daily
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
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@montessoriindia
4,000 Years of History, in an Animated Scroll
Buenos-Aires-based information designer Santiago Ortiz has animated John Sparks’s iconic 1931 Histomap, which visualizes 4,000 years of human history, into a zoomable scroll.
(Thanks, Wendy)
Circle of Life
The genome of Gloeobacter violaceus, drawn as a gorgeous circular plot by visionary biological data artist Martin Krzywinski (from this paper). Within its concentric layers of information are buried genome composition, relation to other species, and overall genetic structure. It’s also very pretty.
Gloeobacter is an ancient photosynthetic bacterium that branched off the rest of the photosynthetic tree (including cyanobacteria and, later, plants) and has its own strange way of eating sunlight.
Krzywinski’s informative and beautiful data visualizations are featured at Wired Science, check ‘em out: Circle of Life: The Beautiful New Way to Visualize Biological Data
There have been many measures taken to try to turn the educational system towards more control, more indoctrination, more vocational training, imposing a debt, which traps students and young people into a life of conformity… That’s the exact opposite of [what] traditionally comes out of The Enlightenment. And there’s a constant struggle between those. In the colleges, in the schools, do you train for passing tests, or do you train for creative inquiry? […] Passing tests doesn’t begin to compare with searching and inquiring and pursuing topics that engage us and excite us. That’s far more significant than passing tests and, in fact, if that’s the kind of educational career you’re given the opportunity to pursue, you will remember what you discovered.
Lendary linguist and cognitive scientist Noam Chomsky, born 85 years ago today, on the purpose of education (via explore-blog)
"Hence, in short, while sophisticated algorithms and developments in MR, building upon with big data, now allow many non-routine tasks to be automated, occupations that involve complex perception and manipulation tasks, creative intelligence tasks, and social intelligence tasks are unlikely to be substituted by computer capital over the next decade or two. The probability of an occupation being automated can thus be described as a function of these task characteristics."
The diagram and quote are both from a study at Oxford University on the Future of Employment [PDF].
While conventional education system caters well to the aspects of Perception and manipulation, they severely lack when it comes to Creativity and Social Intelligence. This is in stark contrast to the Montessori methods that lay an equal importance on all of these, in an age appropriate manner for the child.
Interestingly, the occupational variables used to find the probability of computerisation of an occupation are aspects very well addressed in a Montessori method:
- Assisting and caring for others - Persuasion - Negotiation - Social perceptiveness - Fine arts - Originality - Manual dexterity - Finger dexterity - Cramped work space
How to find work that makes your heart sing.
If only we allowed our children to find their vocation instead of forcing them to confirm to the desires of the parents and pushing them into Engineering or Medical colleges so that they can become an IT professional or a doctor!
Einstein
Montessori takes special care to nurture this innate human capability. Dare we say the same is true of our regular schools though?
Technology is for learning, not teaching
Eight year old Om came back early from his evening play and walked up to his father working from home on his office laptop. Sensing that his father was engrossed with his work, he waited until his father could talk to him. Om asked if his father could pump air into the rear tyre of his bicycle. His father was a bit surprised since it was not a week since he had pumped into the front tyre but nevertheless wound up the piece of work he was doing and went to pump his son's bicycle tyres. When Om's father had finished pumping air Om excitedly told that he could now figure out when his bicycle tyres needed air from the quality of his ride. Shouting that when there was enough air in his tyres his cycle had thumps and bumps but not when they were flatter Om peddled out to join his friends.
Later in the evening, Om wondered how really did his bicycle pump work. His father, a technologist by profession and a Montessorian by training, said that he really did not know and asked him to find the answer on Google. Om took his father's tablet and clicked on the Google widget and asked his father what should he type to get the answer? His father did not dictate the question, instead he asked his son to type in English that which he had asked in the vernacular. Om voiced his question for confirmation from his father who just pointed his jaw at the tablet indicating his son to just try it out. While typing out his query Om, who was very comfortable with phonics thanks to his early years in a Montessori, got stuck with the spelling for cycle after 'cyc' and asked his father for help.
His father surprisingly asked Om to read out the questions that Google Suggest had thrown up. There were queries about Cyclones and Cycling and at the last there was a query with the word cycle in it. Om's father asked Om to use the spelling of cycle in that query and continued to finish his query "how does cycle pump work'. Lo! and behold Google Suggest came up with the correct word 'bicycle' rather than the colloquial 'cycle' in the query and Om touched it to get the search results. The search results page of Google came up with a video at the top and a list of pages with information about the query beneath it. Om's father asked his son to open the video link and got back to his laptop and started working. But he was only acting so that Om would not keep asking him questions further and kept a watch on Om from the corner of his eyes.
The video used an outline diagram of a bicycle pump, as is the norm in a Montessori Elementary environment, to identify the different parts of the pump and the different stages of the whole process of pumping air into the tubes. Om kept moving back and forth in the video to listen and watch again the parts that he could not understand. This piqued his father's curiosity and he started looking at what Om was doing. He was rightly rewarded with a question from Om forcing him to get back to his laptop screen so that Om could figure out on his own. Admittedly the English accent was foreign which might have been a bit difficult for Om to understand, but thanks to his previous exposure to such videos and the clear and evenly paced narration by the presenter it did not prove to be such a tough challenge. Om's father was right; Om indeed had grown to a stage where he could watch and listen to more such videos on his own.
Om proudly declared to his father that he understood how his bicycle pump worked. Understanding the need for an immediate follow up and yet realising Om would not be in a mood to write or draw anything in the evening, his father requested Om to explain the working in an excited voice. The real trick was in making it sound as if he really did not know how the pump worked. Om recounted it correctly, down to the detail of the way the two 'small gates' worked. When his father informed Om that this 'small gate' had a special name and was called a 'valve' Om excitedly started flapping his palms and demonstrated the alternating action of the valves. The open valve was represented by a horizontal palm and the closed valve by a vertical one - and Om took his time to finish flapping his palms.
Probably because he was still in the zone, Om asked his father if the Merriam-Webster Dictionary app would show him if he searched for Earth. When his father asked him to try it out Om opened the app and wondered how to ask. His father took this opportunity to introduce Om to the speech to text feature in the app and asked Om to click on the icon of a microphone. Om's father explained that Om had to now speak out the word clearly for the app to recognise what he was asking. Om tried a couple of times without success. His father voiced aloud the word Earth and it correctly showed the word. He then passed on the tablet to Om and asked him to try again. This time the app correctly recognised the word and Om found that the app did not show him any images.
Om's father then asked him to use Google search widget again to search but this time he showed him that even that widget had the same mic icon. Om touched it to open up the speech to text app but this time around he had to try many times before he could get the correct word. So Om had to really get his local accent out of the way before the app could recognise the word correctly, and in this he got his father's help.
And thus in a few minutes with an internet connected tablet and the hands off presence of his father, who merely nudged his son along rather than spoon feed answers, Om had made quite a quantum leap in subjugating technology for his use rather than the technology making him a passive receiver of mind numbing content.
Let's teach kids to code
In this very insightful TEDx talk MIT's Mitch Resnick shares about how children aged 8 and above are learning to code the fun way using Scratch, a technology he and his team developed. He says:
“Young people today have lots of experience…interacting with new technologies, but a lot less so of creating [or] expressing themselves with new technologies. It’s almost as if they can read but not write.”
It even ties in with the previous TEDx talk shared here about the three H's in Education - Hands, Heart & Head - by Satish Kumar.
Also, this is something that could be implemented in an Elementary (6-12 years) environment and even used as follow up activities!
Any takers? What do you think?
Why are most school buses yellow? Why not some other color? Why not burnt sienna, like a crayon? Why not light-medium robin’s egg blue, like a jewelry box? Why not magma orange, like a Lamborghini? The answer is Frank W. Cyr, a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, who became known as the “father of the yellow school bus” for research he led in the 1930s. Dr. Cyr, who died at 95 in 1995, had traveled the country, surveying pupil transportation in an era when school buses cost $2,000 apiece but differed widely from manufacturer to manufacturer and jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Some states had safety standards; some left the task to local school districts. “In many cases, standards have been set up by more or less hit-and-miss methods,” according to an account that Dr. Cyr oversaw. Then, in the spring of 1939, he called together educators, school bus manufacturers and paint experts for a conference that approved the nation’s first school bus safety standards — 42 pages covering everything from axles, batteries and emergency brakes to the inside height of the passenger compartment to, yes, the color that the world saw outside. The standards were published in a booklet with a yellow cover: the yellow was the color the group had chosen.
A brief and fascinating history of why the school bus is yellow (via explore-blog)
Mapping the distribution of higher education in America. Compare and contrast with the distribution of poverty:
Do we have the statistics on distribution of education in India published anywhere?
Man is introduced to the Montessori Elementary children as a special animal that came at the end of the geological clock who had hands to work with, a heart to love and a head to think.
Satish Kumar talks passionately about the very same 3 'H's - Hands, Heart & Head - in this TEDx video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAz0bOtfVfE
On the fallacious assumptions by the designers of RTE (Right to Education Act of India):
High enrolment means children are in school.
Children are in school from age six onward.
Children in a given grade/ class are homogenous (of a similar age, ability etc.).
Textbooks are at appropriate age/grade level.
Every year the country’s capability to deliver education is improving.
Source: Why Indian education needs to get back to reality
Building the Pink Tower
[In Production]
With the help of the world’s best wildlife filmmakers and photographers, conservationists and scientists, Arkive is creating an awe-inspiring record of life on Earth.
Freely accessible to everyone and preserved for the benefit of future generations, ARKive is a truly invaluable resource for conservation, education and public awareness.
Here in this link are educational resources for children grouped according to age ranges familiar to Montessori adults, yet slightly different: 5-7, 7-11, 11-14, 14-16, 16-18.
Suitable for 5 to 18 year olds, ARKive’s free fun-packed teaching resources cover a range of key science and biology subjects including: adaptation, endangered species, food chains, Darwin and natural selection, classification, identification, conservation and biodiversity.
These teaching resources include: classroom presentations, activities and handouts, teachers' notes as well as links to ARKive species profiles and scrapbooks.
A tribute to India's natural heritage on Republic Day.
Tamil Nadu state government's 7th standard Science Text book contains a passage about the human-elephant conflict that arises due to depletion of forest cover and food sources for the pachyderm.
Now imagine if these children are able to experience it first hand? By showing them the signs of depletion of forest cover, the signs of poaching, cattle grazing and other such activities? 7th Std., or pre/early-teens might be a right age to influence them towards ecosystem threats & conservation. But for them to be able to identify with the ecosystem itself, that should begin much earlier. Birding in the neighbourhood, planting, watering, etc. can all be activities done in the immediate vicinity of young children, even toddlers maybe. City bred children are the farthest from such ecosystems. Heck even plants. I think the national council must make it mandatory, as part of the curriculum, for children to take care of plants in the school, indoor potted or outside garden. It is a part of Montessori schools for the 6-12 year olds BTW.
Peeragogy.org
With YouTube, Wikipedia, search engines, free chatrooms, blogs, wikis, and video communication, today’s self learners have power never dreamed-of before. What does any group of self-learners need to know in order to self-organize learning about any topic? The Peeragogy Handbook is a volunteer-created and maintained resource for bootstrapping peer learning.
