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    Dear Commons Community,

    On average, kids in Australia can expect to spend up to 15 more years in school than kids in Niger.

    A new report from Cornell University, international business school INSEAD and […]

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    Anthony Picciano commented on the post, Neuroscience: Not Only Don’t We have Answers – We Don’t Even Know What Questions to Ask!

    Anthony Picciano

    The email below was sent to me directly as a follow-up to this blog posting.

    Neurofuture: Reply to European Commission
    Catarina Ramos [catarina.ramos@neuro.fchampalimaud.org]

    Sent: […]

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    Dear Commons Community,

    President Obama will announce today that 60 of the nation’s largest school districts are joining his initiative to improve the educational futures of young African-American and Hispanic […]

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    Dear Commons Community,

    In the past few years, the issue of income inequality has become a major rallying cry among social, political, and economic activists seeking to redistribute wealth in the United States and around the world.  Occupy Wall Street in 2011 was one of several populist movements that captured the essence of this issue.  Thomas Piketty, in his current best seller, Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century, has stoked the issue further. However, a recent study by the World Bank and the Luxembourg Income Study Center, offers that globally, income inequality has been falling. As reported in today’s  New York Times

    “Income inequality has surged as a political and economic issue, but the numbers don’t show that inequality is rising from a global perspective. Yes, the problem has become more acute within most individual nations, yet income inequality for the world as a whole has been falling for most of the last 20 years. It’s a fact that hasn’t been noted often enough.

    The finding comes from a recent investigation by Christoph Lakner, a consultant at the World Bank, and Branko Milanovic, senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study Center. And while such a framing may sound startling at first, it should be intuitive upon reflection. The economic surges of China, India and some other nations have been among the most egalitarian developments in history.”

    With regard to the United States, income inequality has been rising due to a number of factors including those that have influenced the global income situation.

    “International trade has drastically reduced poverty within developing nations, as evidenced by the export-led growth of China and other countries. Yet contrary to what many economists had promised, there is now good evidence that the rise of Chinese exports has held down the wages of some parts of the American middle class. This was demonstrated in a recent paper by the economists David H. Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, David Dorn of the Center for Monetary and Financial Studies in Madrid, and Gordon H. Hanson of the University of California, San Diego.

    At the same time, Chinese economic growth has probably raised incomes of the top 1 percent in the United States, through exports that have increased the value of companies whose shares are often held by wealthy Americans. So while Chinese growth has added to income inequality in the United States, it has also increased prosperity and income equality globally.

    The evidence also suggests that immigration of low-skilled workers to the United States has a modestly negative effect on the wages of American workers without a high school diploma, as shown, for instance, in research by George Borjas, a Harvard economics professor. Yet that same immigration greatly benefits those who move to wealthy countries like the United States. (It probably also helps top American earners, who can hire household and child-care workers at cheaper prices.) Again, income inequality within the nation may rise but global inequality probably declines, especially if the new arrivals send money back home.”

    Assuming that all of the above is correct, while we can take heart that global income inequality is abating, here in the United States the situation is getting worse and is affecting our democratic principles to say nothing about the lives of the vast majority of Americans especially those living at or near poverty levels.  Thomas Piketty in his extensive analysis of the issue cautions that the top one percent has used their wealth to influence government policy in this country to the point that “a drift toward oligarchy is real and gives little reason for optimism about where the United States is headed.” (p. 514, Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century).

    Tony

     

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    Dear Commons Community,

    In a blog posting yesterday, Diane Ravitch called on the free press to sound the alarm when private interests seek to undermine, exploit, monetize, and control our public schools. Here is an excerpt:

    “What is most astonishing is to see the almost total indifference or ignorance of the mainstream media to an unprecedented and well-coordinated effort to privatize public education. Reporters don’t care that certain individuals and corporations are accumulating millions of dollars in taxpayer funding while schools are cutting their budgets and closing their libraries and increasing class sizes. Reporters don’t care that state authorities are allowing schools to open whose founders are not educators and may even be high school dropouts. Nor do they care when charter corporations claim to be “public schools,” yet refuse to permit the state to audit their expenditures, and in some states, refuse to share financial information with their own board. Has anyone tried to explain how a school can be “public” if its financials are not? Reporters know, but don’t care, that major charter chains contribute millions of dollars to state legislatures to make sure that no one investigates their use of public funds. A few reporters in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Florida have dared to pry into the cozy relationship between the charters and the legislature, but their exposes are followed by silence and inaction.

    If present trends continue, the U.S. will have a dual system of education in another decade. Some cities will have few public schools, only charters that choose their students and exclude those with disabilities and those who can’t speak English. The few remaining public schools in urban districts will enroll the charter school rejects.”

    Sound the alarm!

    Tony

     

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    The CUNY Games Festival 2.0

    The CUNY Games Network of the City University of New York is excited to announce the second annual CUNY Games Festival to be held on January 16, 2015 at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.

    The CUNY Games Festival 2.0 is a one day conference to promote and discuss game-based pedagogies in higher education. We aim to bring together all stakeholders in the field: faculty, researchers, graduate and undergraduate students, and game designers. Both CUNY and non-CUNY participation is welcome.

    Our Call for Proposals is now open! Proposals are due on October 15, 2014. Please forward far and wide!

    Questions? Get in touch at contactcunygames@gmail.com!

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    Tony's Thoughts

    Dear Commons Community,

    Cornell Tech, a new joint venture between Cornell University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, has begun to take shape on Roosevelt Island in New York City. The first buildings will be occupied in 2017. However, the spaces in these and in future buildings will bear little resemblance to other college facilities. There will be few classrooms, practically no faculty offices and lots of open spaces designed to foster collaboration among students and faculty. Dan Huttenlocher, dean of Cornell Tech, in an interview with  The Chronicle of Higher Education comments:

    “Walls divide people and define spaces. They restrict movement. They discourage exchange. And they’re a pain to move if your needs change, especially when they’re stuffed with cables, ducts, and other infrastructural accessories.

    Mr. Huttenlocher is certain his needs will change [and] is overseeing the creation of an institution dedicated to technological innovation, academic experimentation, and the kind of serial flexibility those two principles require.

    “My goal as the dean is to create an environment where everything can be repurposed.”

    He and his team are in the tenuous middle stages of planning and building exactly that: the chameleon campus, a space where interchangeability permeates everything. As Cathy Dove, Cornell Tech’s founding vice president, puts it, “We want to embody the principle of iteration”

    The fundamental question is:

    “How do you create a new institution in an age where everything—office design, intelligent infrastructure, cloud computing, classroom technology—presents some opportunity to break with the past? What do you build? What do you wire? What kind of interactions do you encourage? Some institutions might create committees to try to anticipate specific changes. Cornell Tech is determined to do the opposite. Those responsible for building the campus of the future won’t pretend to know what the future holds. They only hope they’re building something malleable enough to handle it.”

    The article goes on to describe the first academic building. The second, third, and fourth stories of the five-level structure are undefined, dominated by large, uninterrupted spaces. Classrooms? Faculty offices? The building will have little of the former and none of the latter. Instead there are “office zones,” which will be filled with workstations; those seeking some form of enclosure can enter a “huddle room,” “swing space, “collab” room, or “hub lounge.” The entrepreneurial patois, conspicuous as it sounds, reflects a real attempt to break down traditional academic boundaries.

    All of this sounds most interesting and  a great place to learn, teach, and share.

    Tony

     

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    Dear Commons Community,

    Naomi S. Baron, a professor of linguistics and executive director of the Center for Teaching, Research & Learning at American University, has an article in The Chronicle of Higher […]

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    Dear Commons Community,

    The New York Times and other media are reporting that Rupert Murdoch has made a bid to buy Time Warner that would set in motion a massive merger of entertainment media conglomerates. As […]

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    Dear Commons Community,

    Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration and now the Chancellor’s Professor of Pubic Policy at the University of California, Berkley, has a blog posting reviewing […]

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    Dear Commons Community,

    For those of us who follow the activity of online software providers, Desire2Learn announced yesterday that it was renaming its learning-management system, which will now be called […]

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    Dear Commons Community,

    Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said Friday that Arne Duncan,  President Barack Obama’s education chief, has turned his back on the concerns of […]

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    Dear Commons Community,

    As reported by the press last week, many colleges and universities “are failing to comply with the law and best practices” on handling sexual violence, according to a new report, which […]

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    Dear Commons Community,

    The New York Times has an article analyzing the Corinthian Colleges debacle and pending bankruptcy. Here is an excerpt:

    “In the years before the mortgage crisis, financial regulators often looked the other way as banks and other lenders pursued reckless activities that cost investors, taxpayers and borrowers billions of dollars. When trouble hit, these regulators had to scramble to fix the mess that their inertia had helped create.

    This same dismal pattern is now playing out in the for-profit education arena.

    For years, federal and state regulators have done little as dubious operators of for-profit colleges and trade schools have pocketed tuitions funded by taxpayer-backed loans. Many students left these colleges with questionable educations and onerous debt loads that cannot be erased in bankruptcy.

    Regulators have finally woken up to this ugly reality. And, once again, taxpayers and borrowers will pay the price of regulatory failures.

    Last week, after years of being on the financial precipice and facing accusations of improper recruiting practices by authorities in several states, Corinthian Colleges, a for-profit education company with 74,000 students in more than 100 locations around the country, began to wind down its operations. In an agreement with the federal Department of Education, Corinthian said it would halt admissions and try to sell 85 of its campuses.

    At another 12 Corinthian campuses, students can continue their studies until they graduate. Certain students who choose to stop attending classes will receive refunds, the company said.

    Even as the company’s fortunes faded in recent years, Corinthian’s five top executives piled up real money: Over the last three years, they’ve shared $12.5 million in salaries and cash bonuses.

    But taxpayers and Corinthian students — a vast majority of whom have borrowed to finance their educations — will be the biggest losers. When Corinthian eventually vanishes, its graduates will be left holding degrees from a defunct institution. This will make it even tougher for them to get jobs, resulting in higher default rates on their federal student loans.

    What kind of losses might the taxpayers incur? Let’s do some arithmetic: Corinthian students received approximately $1 billion a year in federal financial aid. So if default rates on the last two years of aid were to rise by 20 percent, that would generate $400 million in losses.

    “Many of the students who have already graduated will default on their loans and will be followed by the federal government for the rest of their lives,” said Robyn Smith, of counsel to the National Consumer Law Center and author of a recent report on how states can improve oversight of for-profit schools. “If the regulators had been better at doing their jobs, this could have been avoided.”

    The article provides further details and is definitely worth the read. The bottom line is that Corinthian ripped off students and taxpayers while the United States Department of Education, state departments of education, and other regulators did practically nothing until it was too late.

    Tony

     

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    Dear Commons Community,

    Peter Greene, a teacher, writer, and blogger at curmudgucation, has an insightful blog posting on the hard part of teaching. He starts his posting with:

    “The hard part of teaching is […]

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    Brain Neuroscience

    Dear Commons Community,

    Gary Marcus, a professor of psychology at New York University, and an editor of the forthcoming book The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World’s Leading Neuroscientists, comments on two major funding proposals for studying the brain in an op-ed piece in the New York Times. Essentially he posits that science knows so little about brain function that we have not even formulated the right questions to ask about how to study it. Here is an excerpt:

    “In spite of the many remarkable advances in neuroscience, you might get the sinking feeling that we are not always going about brain science in the best possible way.

    This feeling was given prominent public expression on Monday, when hundreds of neuroscientists from all over the world issued an indignant open letter to the European Commission, which is funding the Human Brain Project, an approximately $1.6 billion effort that aims to build a complete computer simulation of the human brain. The letter charges that the project is “overly narrow” in approach and not “well conceived.” While no neuroscientist doubts that a faithful-to-life brain simulation would ultimately be tremendously useful, some have called the project “radically premature.” The controversy serves as a reminder that we scientists are not only far from a comprehensive explanation of how the brain works; we’re also not even in agreement about the best way to study it, or what questions we should be asking.

    The European Commission, like the Obama administration, which is promoting a large-scale research enterprise called the Brain Initiative, is investing heavily in neuroscience, and rightly so. (A set of new tools such as optogenetics, which allows neuroscientists to control the activity of individual neurons, gives considerable reason for optimism.) But neither project has grappled sufficiently with a critical question that is too often ignored in the field: What would a good theory of the brain actually look like?

    Different kinds of sciences call for different kinds of theories. Physicists, for example, are searching for a “grand unified theory” that integrates gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces into a neat package of equations. Whether or not they will get there, they have made considerable progress, in part because they know what they are looking for.

    Biologists — neuroscientists included — can’t hope for that kind of theory. Biology isn’t elegant the way physics appears to be. The living world is bursting with variety and unpredictable complexity, because biology is the product of historical accidents, with species solving problems based on happenstance that leads them down one evolutionary road rather than another. No overarching theory of neuroscience could predict, for example, that the cerebellum (which is involved in timing and motor control) would have vastly more neurons than the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain most associated with our advanced intelligence).

    But biological complexity is only part of the challenge in figuring out what kind of theory of the brain we’re seeking. What we are really looking for is a bridge, some way of connecting two separate scientific languages — those of neuroscience and psychology.

    Such bridges don’t come easily or often, maybe once in a generation, but when they do arrive, they can change everything. “

    Dr. Marcus makes a great case for the fact that when it comes to understanding the basic aspects of the brain, science has a way to go!

    Tony

     

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