Education

The digital revolution has transformed education, but it may also be slowly poisoning us. Despite the purported benefits of educational technology, professor and former public school teacher, Amber Woodlee, suggests that our investment in these tools might actually be making our schools worse. She argues that the platforms that students and teachers rely on limit our lives to a small collection of Silicon Valley behemoths, sowing disinformation, and normalizing surveillance in the lives of youth. This focus on digital tools over teachers and the teaching profession reduces the innovation and imagination of students and teachers, leading us to question if the benefits of these technologies are worth the tradeoffs. Read full article here

Professors around the world are using TikTok to engage their students remotely during the pandemic. Stuart Middleton, a senior lecturer at the University of Queensland, Australia, swaps famous movie scenes with terms from the strategic management courses he teaches to make his posts fit with the playful spirit of the platform. Meanwhile, Caitlin Light, an assistant professor at Binghamton University, challenged her students to use their TikTok skills to explain science concepts and what research looks like to the public. As TikTok is the most-visited site on the internet, college classrooms may increasingly look to use the platform to connect with students. Read full article here

Books are often bought with high hopes and good intentions, but they tend to get left unread on the shelves. However, Japanese have a word, Tsundoku, for this tendency – it is more of an affectionate term for ‘bookworm’. Nassim Nicholas Taleb believes that an anti-library of unread books is more valuable than the books we have already read. Marie Kondo take note: it is possible to love a book without having read it. This is proven by Aaron Lansky’s Yiddish Book Center which recovered over one million books and created the Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library. Read full article here

The teacher shortage in the United States is a growing problem with no easy solutions. From online teaching and four-day school weeks to lowering standards and increasing class sizes, school districts are resorting to extreme measures to cope with the shortage. Unfortunately, these coping strategies reduce teachers’ effectiveness and threaten students’ ability to learn, and are indicative of the severity of the teacher shortage. Read full article here

Equal opportunities, but unequal benefits? The Kalamazoo College Free-College Program has been criticised for being unfair to boys and men. The program was started in 2013 by an anonymous donor who wanted to provide free education to all students. There are many male benefactors and supporters, but men aren’t getting the same benefits as their female counterparts. By creating and implementing social programs more favourable to girls and women, including specific student mentoring, school choice programs, and income boost programs, boys receive less attention and motivation. Read full article here

Could you imagine taking your educational courses in a completely virtual world? Schools are finding it quite difficult to make the transition to a digital learning environment due to data privacy concerns, adaptability, and operational cost. The metaverse will incur significant costs in licenses, digital library access, and faculty training on top of equipment upgrades and maintenance. For now, metaverse applications will also need high-speed network systems as most equipment and information sharing are bandwidth-extensive, making it impossible in rural areas without sufficient infrastructure. Read full article here

Educators have three jobs—teacher, bureaucrat, and cop—that have always clashed with each other, and lockdowns only made this worse. The teacher’s job was often eschewed in favour of fulfilling the roles of bureaucrat and cop. The bureaucrat and cop roles—which valued fairness and order, respectively—worked hand-in-hand to make online classes easier for educators. Educators enforced rigidly objective class requirements with increased surveillance, like eye trackers, to ensure no cheating took place, at the cost of eroding student trust and engagement with the subject matter being taught. Read full article here

Throughout the ages, education and universities seemed to fuel nations’ rise as global powers. Nothing illustrates this better than China. Once the most powerful entity in East Asia as the great Qing Empire, it was renowned as the standard for knowledge and civilization even in Europe. And now, its emergence as one of the global centres for education, research, world-class universities coincides with its rise to global power once again. It’s the latest in a line of powerful nations that have focused on research, from Britain, to Germany, to America. Read full article here