Thousands Of Darwin's Hand-Written Manuscripts Made Available Online

photo credit: AMNH

While we can never pick Charles Darwin’s brilliant brain, a collaborative project is bringing us closer to his thoughts than ever before. As of his week, to mark the 155th anniversary of the publication of his iconic book On the Origin of Species, the Darwin Manuscripts Project has made a treasure chest of Darwin’s hand-written notes available online, allowing people across the globe to trace the development of the man that changed the way we look at the world.

photo credit: AMNH

The project, which is a collaboration between the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) and Cambridge University Library, was founded in 2003, and set out to digitize and transcribe a collection of Darwin’s writings. So far, more than 16,000 high resolution images of the naturalist’s notes, scientific writings and sketches have been made publicly available, but the project is only halfway through.

The documents hitherto released cover 25 years of Darwin’s life, “in which Darwin became convinced of evolution; discovered natural selection; developed explanations of adaptation, speciation, and a branching tree of life; and wrote the Origin,” according to the AMNH site.

You can even see a drawing by one of Darwin’s children, a scene of carrot and aubergine cavalry, which was sketched on the back of a page of the On the Origin of Species manuscript. You can also see his first use of “natural selection” as a scientific term, among many other things.

By June 2015, the archive will host more than 30,000 documents authored by Darwin between 1835 and 1882. The next release will cover the notes of his eight post-Origin books. The ultimate goal of the project, the AMNH explains, is to provide “access to the primary evidence for the birth and maturation of Darwin’s attempts to explore and explain the natural world.”

ORIGINAL: IFLScience

by Justine Alford

November 27, 2014

Redefining Blended Learning

In over a year of writing about blended learning—largely defined as using an online delivery of content to augment face-to-face instruction—I’ve heard the same, tired criticism from too many well-meaning critics. They associate the approach with 

• all parties needing to master overly intricate programming and Web 2.0 skills, 
• cheapening the traditional classroom environment and t
• he sacred student-teacher relationship.

Certainly, an advanced familiarity with all things technical comes in handy with blended learning. But set aside the 

• most engaging screencasts, 
• inspiring flipped classroom models, and 
• nifty online teaching and assessment tools. 

At its core, blended learning enhances and promotes entrepreneurship and risk-taking, while giving students the skills they need to succeed in an increasingly flat, competitive, and digital 21st century. That’s it. It doesn’t really matter how “tech savvy” you are, as long as you feel inspired to rethink how you approach teaching.

With the Internet at my students’ fingertips—with smartphones, quite literally—I’m not the only or even the best source of knowledge. What I do possess, though, and what no computer could ever replicate, is a deep passion for my subjects. I’m excited and energetic about history and journalism, and I do whatever I can to infect my students with a similar love of learning and discovery. To the best of my ability, I allow and encourage self-directed learning (which is a large component of blended learning), and I don’t penalize failure harshly, so long as I see a clear passion for improvement.

How else do I define blended learning, and how do I employ it in my classroom? Here are five approaches that every teacher should consider.

1. A large component of blended learning is self-directed learning. Whenever I assign a project or an essay, I allow students to propose their own topics. Too often, students are dependent on adults for guidance and direction. More often, we need to allow and encourage students to make their own decisions, even if that sometimes means seeing the consequences of their actions. After all, we learn equally from success and failure. At home and during class, my students explore online resources to inform their understanding. As challenging as it sometimes is, I refrain from offering immediate answers and solutions. If students can use the Internet to figure something out for themselves, they do. I might look like the bad guy, but I know it’s for their development.
2. Along these lines, I also coach and encourage students to think about what constitutes “credible information,” and where to find it online. This is a crucial skill for students to master, no matter what profession they ultimately pursue. At home, students use the Internet to learn about their own subjects, whether from videos, articles, or other media. This is blended learning, but it’s also self-directed learning. As online learning tools advance, teachers will become increasingly responsible for guiding students to appropriate sources, rather than teaching material directly themselves.
3. As I see it, a crucial part of the blended classroom environment includes teachers and students working and learning together. In my experience, this often involves using online tools. Three years ago, I worked with a former student to launch The Falconer, an online student news site. I can’t recount how many hours he and I spent watching “how-to” YouTube videos, learning not only about coding and maintaining a website, but also about recording podcasts, editing video, and streaming live events.
4. Blended learning also calls for rethinking how we assess, with or without online tools. In the near future, competency-based learning, where students progress at their own pace to master a predetermined set of skills, will lead the way. Grades will become less and less significant, eventually vanishing completely. Higher education is already making this a reality. At College for America at Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), students demonstrate mastery of 120 “competencies” rather than earn class credit. “Students show their mastery by completing tasks,” SNHU President Paul J. LeBlanc told me last May. “These are real-world hypotheticals. They’re not exams, they’re not the kind of isolated assignments you might get in a college class. They’re meant to be hypothetical, which mimic more closely how that competency is used in the real world.” I give grades because I have to, but in most cases, I allow students an infinite number of retakes.
5. Similarly, blended learning also calls for rethinking how we teach, with or without online tools. Students want to see the relevance in what they learn, and that’s hard to accomplish by studying subjects in isolation. On that front, I admit that my own teaching needs improvement. I should do more to reach out to teachers in other fields who are interested in having students work on a shared project. After all, students might be told that learning about the Civil War or the quadratic formula is important, but unless they can put such knowledge to practical use, they will eventually forget it. But if students can see that a concept has multiple applications, especially to real-world scenarios, they will be much much likely to remember.

What are your thoughts on blended learning, and how it’s defined? I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below.

ORIGINAL: Spin Edu

Writing in the Sciences

ORIGINAL: Stanford



Writing in the Sciences

Date:
Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Platform: OpenEdX

This course teaches scientists to become more effective writers, using practical examples and exercises. Topics include: 

• principles of good writing, 
• tricks for writing faster and with less anxiety, 
• the format of a scientific manuscript, and 
• issues in publication and peer review. 

Students from non-science disciplines can benefit from the training provided in the first four weeks (on general principles of effective writing).

COURSE FORMAT In the first four weeks, we will review principles of effective writing, examples of good and bad writing, and tips for making the writing process easier. In the second four weeks, we will examine issues specific to scientific writing, including: authorship, peer review, the format of an original manuscript, and communicating science for lay audiences. Students will watch video lectures, complete quizzes and editing exercises, write two short papers, and edit each others’ work.

COURSE SYLLABUS Week 1 - Introduction; principles of effective writing (cutting unnecessary clutter)
Week 2 - Principles of effective writing (verbs)
Week 3 - Crafting better sentences and paragraphs
Week 4 - Organization; and streamlining the writing process
Week 5 - The format of an original manuscript
Week 6 - Reviews, commentaries, and opinion pieces; and the publication process
Week 7 - Issues in scientific writing (plagiarism, authorship, ghostwriting, reproducible research)
Week 8 - How to do a peer review; and how to communicate with the lay public

PREREQUISITES
The course has no prerequisites other than fluency in English.

FAQ:
Will I get a Statement of Accomplishment?

Yes, students who score at least 60 percent will pass the course and receive a certificate.
Students who score at least 90 percent will receive a certificate with distinction.

How much of a time commitment will this course be?
You should expect this course to require 4 to 8 hours of work per week.

Any additional textbooks/software required?
There is no textbook for this course. Students who would like additional reading may enjoy:
- On Writing Well, William Zinsser;
- The Elements of Style, Strunk and White;
- Sin and Syntax, Constance Hale;
- Essentials of Writing Biomedical Research Papers, Mimi Zeiger;
- http://www.aacc.org/publications/clin_chem/ccgsw/Pages/default.aspx

Instructor(s) Kristin Sainani
Clinical Assistant Professor, Stanford University

Kristin Sainani (née Cobb) is a clinical assistant professor at Stanford University and also a health and science writer. After receiving an MS in statistics and PhD in epidemiology from Stanford University, she studied science writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has taught statistics and writing at Stanford for a decade and has received several Excellence in Teaching Awards from the graduate program in epidemiology.

Return to Stanford Online Course catalog

How Education Will Fix Itself

ORIGINAL: Big Think
by Niall Ferguson
August 19, 2013

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

Let's suppose you are running the perfect state, the perfect government. You would want to go on a little world tour before you got down to business to see the best practices. What are the educational systems that really do well, that produce the kinds of things that are desirable - social mobility, innovation, creativity - but also high skill levels for the mediocre because that’s in many ways the most important thing.

That would be the first port of call. Let’s go to Finland or Singapore or pay a visit to the Shanghai Education District. They seem to be doing something right. And then take a long hard look at our system, and particularly at the high schools. I think the biggest weakness in the U.S. system lies at the level of secondary high school education where there are a great many public schools that do not deliver. And this is zip code related. It’s essentially bad schools in poor areas. I think that’s our biggest problem.

You can’t really solve this problem at the university level. You can’t say, we’ve got to redress this by making universities work differently because until you are doing a good job of secondary education, the game is already over by the time you get to SATs. So I think that would be the first part of the problem.

And then the question becomes, do you aim to produce a better system of public education, which would be a kind of Scandinavian solution? Or, do you say, that is never going to work here, we’re not Denmark. Let’s have more competition so that it’s not a monopoly of public schools, but it’s actually a competitive system. That’s the British solution, if you like. A solution where there’s a much larger private sector and in which the competition between the public and private sectors is the driver.

We’ve got that here, but only in the university sector. It’s only in the university sector that you’ve got private institutions like Harvard competing with public ones like Berkeley. My kind of preference is to explore getting more competition to percolate down into the secondary level. But there’s another way of thinking about this, which is really different. And that’s to say, this problem will solve itself. It will solve itself because technological innovation is revolutionizing how we learn so totally that the conversation we’ve just had about colleges and schools will look anachronistic in about 20 years.

The way one can learn through the internet is one of the most exciting things going on right now from my vantage point. And I believed in this from early on. I was even involved in a failed startup called Box Mind in the 1990’s that was supposed to make available the best quality academic lectures in the world to absolutely anybody. And we were ahead of our time.

We have, I think, now reached a point where that is doable and that is happening. In some ways, Big Think is part of that. One can have a tutorial with one professor and a million tutees. And that’s exciting. It’s also exciting that the textbook, in its old and tedious form is dying and is going to be replaced by eTextbooks that are interactive, web-enabled, and that is exciting not just because it’s cool and iPads are better than textbooks. It’s exciting because done right; the e-Textbook allows teachers to monitor progress of pupils much more efficiently. But once you’ve got people doing that sort of work it’s easier to monitor performance. You don’t have to check every single student; the little red light will tell you who’s really falling behind in the algebra exercises.

So I’m actually pretty optimistic about what technology can do for education. I think we know a lot more than we’ve put into effect about what works in the classroom and indeed, outside of the classroom. We’ve got a huge challenge on our hands because there’s another side to technology which creates what I call, the Attention Deficit Disorder problem where the technology is so good that the students can’t study. There’s a text every minute, there’s an email every 10 minutes that simultaneously on Facebook and on Khan Academy and on Google News and in fact they don’t learn anything. They certainly don’t read War and Peace. My test is, are you able – I mean, I ask my students this. Can you read War and Peace? Have you read it? No, of course not. Can you read it? Could you read it? Can you imagine being able to have read it by Monday?

So we’ve got to make sure that the technology enhances our learning capability, not destroys it. And we’ve tipped, finely balanced at this point. I think the opportunity’s definitely there, but right now I think it’s not working, it’s not happening. In fact, if anything, the power of technology is a source of distraction to the average student and not enhanced learning. So we’ve got to really make sure that it goes towards more efficient learning. Let’s get away from the lecture, the monologue where everybody sits and the professor bloviates for 50 units. Let’s make it interactive. Let’s recognize how long the typical attention span is. Let’s make the materials more interactive. Let’s take games and make them educational. Everybody loves to play games, especially the male of the species. Educational games are a huge part of where education is going. And we know that they work. We know that once you engage somebody in a strategy game, they learn more about history. A marketing game, they learn more about marketing.

In Their Own Words is recorded in Big Think's studio.

A True Elite Education at Half the Price

ORIGINAL: INC

Leigh Buchanan | Inc. magazine

Oct 30, 2012

The Minerva Project has a plan to take online education to the next level.

Illustration by Brett Ryder

Add caption

Illustration by Lauren Tamaki

You'll get no brownie points for how good an athlete you are, for how much money your parents can donate. Ben Nelson, CEO of the Minerva Project

There may be no brand more venerable than the Ivy League. Individually and together, its eight members connote the pinnacle of scholarship. No university has emerged to challenge its intellectual supremacy in more than a century. On that timeline, Caltech, founded in 1891, is a start-up.

But now there is the Minerva Project. Ben Nelson, former CEO of the online photo service Snapfish, is building a school he asserts will be more rigorous than Harvard or Yale. "It will be harder to get into Minerva than any other university," says Nelson. "You'll have the same criteria for your grades, essay, and application. But you'll get no brownie points for how good an athlete you are, for how much money your parents can donate, or for what state you were born in." While Nelson is raising the floor established by elite universities in terms of who qualifies for admission, he is also raising the ceiling in terms of how many to admit. Like virtually every other higher-education start-up, Minerva, based in San Francisco, will live online. That means Nelson can swing wide his doors to tens of thousands of top-drawer students, many of them international. "Harvard allows 2,000 students into the admission cycle, of whom 200 are not American," says Nelson. "Clearly, that's not a good representation of the smartest people in the world."

The company, a for-profit, expects to admit its first class of several hundred in the fall of 2014 or 2015. Tuition will cost less than $20,000--half the price of the Ivy League. In April, Benchmark Capital invested $25 million, the largest seed round in its history. "The idea of giving kids a world-class, credentialed education is the most ambitious goal we've seen in this space," says Kevin Harvey, a Benchmark general partner.

Minerva isn't Nelson's first stab at transforming education. Twenty years ago, at the University of Pennsylvania, he enrolled in a class about the history of universities. "I studied Penn and Franklin and Hopkins," says Nelson. "Then I looked around and said, 'This is not what it's supposed to be.'?" His chief criticism: Schools were training people to be successful but not to become the kind of leaders who could move the world forward. So he joined the student government and spent the next four years loudly advocating for change.

Post-Snapfish, Nelson thought again about education reform. He still wanted to improve elite education, but his more pressing concern was to expand it. Since Nelson's graduation, top schools had adopted needs-blind admission policies, and students around the world increasingly coveted a U.S. education. The result was far more demand from worthy students than the Ivies and their prestigious brethren could handle. "Admissions officers at elite universities will tell you that they could take everyone they've accepted, reject them, then accept the next tier 10 times over and not be able to tell the difference in quality," says Nelson.

Minerva will be global in more than its student body. Nelson plans to establish dormitory clusters in cities around the world. After their freshman years, students will be strongly encouraged to spend each semester in a different location. Students unable to participate in this movable feast must demonstrate proficiency in three languages to graduate.

Minerva's curricular innovations emerge from a distinction Nelson draws between knowledge dissemination and intellectual development. Knowledge, he maintains, is free and ubiquitous on the Internet, with nonprofits like Khan Academy and schools like Stanford posting thousands of lectures and lessons. So Minerva will offer no introductory classes. Rather, students are expected to master the basics of every subject on their own. During their freshman year, all students will follow the same core curriculum focused on subjects including multimodal communications and complex-systems analysis. That foundation laid, every subsequent course can be taught at a very high level. "If you were to look at sophomore-junior-senior years at Minerva, they will be equivalent to junior-senior-and-master's years at most other elite universities," says Nelson.

He is also upending the pedagogic convention whereby tenured faculty deliver weekly lectures, followed by discussion sections presided over by beleaguered grad students. The school will bestow Minerva Prizes--characterized by Nelson as Nobel awards for teaching--on star academics at top universities. Prizewinners will "curate" classes for Minerva. That will entail creating original course materials; the professors can also invite their respected peers to contribute specialized expertise. Classes will gather online to view and discuss the material, overseen by the full-time faculty--all of whom will be Ph.D.'s or the equivalent and all of whom will receive both salaries and stock options.

Nelson's vision has already resonated at the highest levels of traditional academe. Former Harvard president and Treasury Secretary Larry Summers offered to chair Minerva's advisory board after a single meeting with its founder. Another adviser is Bob Kerrey, a former U.S. senator, Nebraska governor, and president of the New School. "What he's got is one of the best private-education ideas I've ever heard," says Kerrey. "I think he's going to be successful, and as a consequence, university presidents across the country are going to be able to say to their boards and their faculties, 'We have to change.' He's going to have a very, very positive impact on all of higher education in America."

For Nelson, that impact will be measured by how many brilliant students he can endow with what he calls the Minerva brain and establish in roles in which they can make a difference. Toward that end, he is creating a department to help graduates raise money and make connections for new businesses and other projects. The department will also perform many functions of a traditional publicist--promoting the accomplishments of alumni so alumni can concentrate on their actual work. "We want to create an ethos where what's rewarded is doing as opposed to self-promotion," says Nelson. "It's the difference between graduating people who are focused on themselves and graduating people who are focused on moving the world forward."

Leigh Buchanan is an editor at large for Inc. magazine. A former editor at Harvard Business Review and founding editor of WebMaster magazine, she writes regular columns on leadership and workplace culture. @LeighEBuchanan