A weekly collection of education-related news from around the web.

Educator’s Notebook #131 (May 15, 2016)

    • New York Times
    • 05/13/16

    Organizers said the project could have a big scientific payoff and would be a follow-up to the original Human Genome Project, which was aimed at reading the sequence of the three billion chemical letters in the DNA blueprint of human life. The new project, by contrast, would involve not reading, but rather writing the human genome — synthesizing all three billion units from chemicals. But such an attempt would raise numerous ethical issues. Could scientists create humans with certain kinds of traits, perhaps people born and bred to be soldiers? Or might it be possible to make copies of specific people?”

    • New York Times
    • 05/10/16

    I don’t know about you, but I’m really bad at being self-disciplined about things I don’t care about. For me, and I suspect for many, hard work and resilience can only happen when there is a strong desire. Grit is thus downstream from longing. People need a powerful why if they are going to be able to endure any how.”

    • EdSurge
    • 05/10/16

    “Adaptive learning” is a popular edtech buzzword, used by curriculum and learning management systems alike. Enthusiasts promise this technology has the ability to make educational experiences more personal, efficient and scalable. Yet, there’s a big problem. There’s very little clarity around what this technology does, doesn’t do and how it actually works.”

    • Digital Promise
    • 05/10/16

    The map was built using data from nearly 100,000 articles published between 2005-2014, found in 183 academic journals from the Web of Science database. We analyzed the bibliographic record (title, keywords, author, cited references, and abstract) for each article and created a bibliographic coupling network, to link articles sharing at least two common references.”

ADOLESCENCE

ATHENA

ATHLETICS

CREATIVITY

CURRICULUM

DIVERSITY/INCLUSION

HIGHER ED

HUMANITIES

LEARNING SCIENCE

MINDFULNESS

PEDAGOGY

READING/WRITING

STEM

TECH

WORKPLACE

Z-OTHER

Issues

Every week I send out articles I encounter from around the web. Subject matter ranges from hard knowledge about teaching to research about creativity and cognitive science to stories from other industries that, by analogy, inform what we do as educators. This breadth helps us see our work in new ways.

Readers include teachers, school leaders, university overseers, conference organizers, think tank workers, startup founders, nonprofit leaders, and people who are simply interested in what’s happening in education. They say it helps them keep tabs on what matters most in the conversation surrounding schools, teaching, learning, and more.

Peter Nilsson

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