Education Technology
Article | August 4, 2022
Jeffrey Lee Funk and Gary Smith
Americans once believed that science was on our side. Radar, microwaves, penicillin, helicopters, magnetrons, and nuclear weapons helped win World War II and fight the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Vaccines for polio, smallpox, tetanus, measles, mumps, and rubella literally wiped out diseases that once killed millions. Televisions, polymers, radial tires, Velcro, vinyl, and freezers made our lives more comfortable. Nuclear power promised us energy too cheap to meter.
We celebrated the space program that sent astronauts walking on the moon and splashing back home again. The annual meetings of the American Association for Advances in Science were regularly covered by the media. New electronic products and medical technologies continued to astonish in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.
How things have changed! The last blockbuster technologies were the iPhone and iPad more than ten years ago and they are, at best, indirectly linked to scientific advances. Nanotechnology, superconductors, quantum computers, and fusion still seem far away as do replacements for integrated circuits, silicon solar cells, and lithium-ion batteries.
A week before the 1980 presidential election, President Jimmy Carter and challenger Ronald Reagan held their only debate—and Reagan sealed the deal by asking Americans, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” Nowadays, too many Americans don’t feel better off than they were 10 or even 20 years ago and the elite are tempting targets.
Millions of jobs left the country while economists proclaimed that it was all for the best. Now experts predict that robots and AI will eliminate millions of more jobs—not just blue-collar workers, but accountants, journalists, lawyers, architects, doctors, and nurses. The predictions sound like boasts and make the ruling elite look like the enemy.
Bill Gates tells us to stop eating meat while he flies around the world in his private jet. Politicians tell us to wear face masks while they party in McMansions inside gated communities. Universities say they need more government funding while professors are paid more money for doing less work then most taxpayers. Scientists say they need more largesse while they live among the elite and well-connected.
The rapid development of safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines in less than 11 months was an absolutely stunning achievement, done with real science applied to a promising but unproven type of vaccine called messenger RNA (or mRNA). Instead of nationwide celebrations, there was fear and paranoia. Here are some comments in response to a March 2021, CNBC news story on government guidelines for COVID-19 vaccinations:
I still haven’t gotten one, never will and no one is going to tell me what I can and can’t do vaccinated or not!!
Flu shots are proven to make you 38% more likely to catch another respiratory virus like Covid.
Easy way to target the elderly. Don't be fooled people.
Biggest scam in our lifetime.
I won’t vax I won’t mask I won’t follow mandates or guidelines and I’m armed.
Millions believe that 5G is being used to spread COVID-19 (and they have burned down cell towers to stop it) and that COVID vaccines are a nefarious plot (and they refuse to be vaccinated). A recent survey found that 44 percent of Republicans, 24 percent of independents, and 19 percent of Democrats believe that Bill Gates is developing a COVID-19 vaccine that will implant microchips in us so that our movements can be monitored.
Science was supposed to replace superstition and rumours with logic, reason, and empirical evidence. It still can.
How do we collectively resurrect the reputation of science? A starting point is better science education. Memorizing the names of the parts of a cell and then forgetting them after a test is not scientific understanding. Nor is deciphering the periodic table or memorizing trigonometric formulas. Science is fundamentally about being curious—about how things work and why they sometimes don’t work. Richard Feynman’s journey to Nobel laureate began with a boyhood curiosity about how radios work. He tinkered with them, took them apart, and put them back together. He fixed other people’s radios. He loved it.
He later wrote about his life-long curiosity:
When I was in high school, I’d see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do. I didn’t have to do it; it wasn’t important for the future of science; somebody else had already done it. That didn’t make any difference: I’d invent things and play with things for my own entertainment.
Kids don’t have to become Nobel laureates to appreciate how science can satisfy their curiosity. Kids who appreciate science can grow up to respect science and become scientists.
Another part of the problem is that far too many superbly intelligent, voraciously hard-working scientists devote so much of their time to generating the papers and citations that are now required for promotion and funding. Anirban Maitra, a physician and scientific director at MD Anderson Cancer Centre, wryly observed that, “Everyone recognizes it’s a hamster-in-a-wheel situation, and we are all hamsters.”
The public wants to see technologies that improve our lives, not long CVs filled with papers no one reads. We need scientific advances that are useful and affordable.
We also want stable jobs with decent pay. Semiconductor factories once provided good jobs but these were shipped overseas and new ones haven’t been created from new commercialized science-based technologies. Where are the American factories producing products based on nanotechnology, superconductors, fusion, quantum computers and new forms of semiconductors, displays, and solar cells?
American scientists are the best in the world and real science can produce useful innovation and good jobs, but these need to become our priorities.
Jeffrey Funk is a retired Associate Professor, most recently from the National University of Singapore and now an independent technology consultant. He received the NTT DoCoMo Mobile Science Award for lifetime contributions to the social science aspects of mobile communications. His research has been reported in the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times.
Gary N. Smith is the Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics at Pomona College. His research on financial markets, statistical reasoning, and data mining often involves stock market anomalies, statistical fallacies, and the misuse of data. He is the author of The AI Delusion, (Oxford, 2018) and co-author (with Jay Cordes) of The 9 Pitfalls of Data Science (Oxford 2019), which won the Association of American Publishers 2020 Prose Award for Popular Science & Popular Mathematics, and The Phantom Pattern Problem (Oxford 2020).
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Education Technology
Article | October 7, 2022
Even before the pandemic, Dr. Kyle Wagner, Northeastern Technical College (NETC) president, was a strong proponent of distance learning. Many of the residents in the rural South Carolina communities the school serves, where incomes fall below the national poverty level, don’t pursue a college education due to factors including lack of access to transportation and childcare. He firmly believed that enabling off-campus learning could overcome these barriers, and was working to expand the school’s remote learning program when the pandemic hit.
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Education Technology
Article | July 14, 2022
If you’re designing an edtech app, think about the role AI will play in your design. Artificial intelligence is support teachers and students expect to have. When done right, it’s engaging. Finally, it’s already in use in instruction. Both teachers and their students benefit from using apps that include AI. Artificial intelligence supports instruction with chatbots, grading, and taking attendance. These are tasks that can limit teacher interaction time with students. AI frees up the teacher to focus on instruction with students. Artificial intelligence also supports students by maintaining and analyzing their academic histories and setting learning objectives and timelines.
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Education Technology
Article | July 5, 2022
Imagine a virtual world where people socialize and work, and are represented by their virtual avatars. The concept may date back 50 years as part of sci-fi stories. Thanks to advancements in digital technology, it is seeing the light of the day in the form of Metaverse. The concept has been contemplated by many scientists, writers, and artists alike. However, the release of Metaverse proved to be the pinnacle of the many possibilities that digital transformation holds in store.
The most exciting part is innovating powerful applications of Metaverse across industries, and Facebook is already on it. Not just employees, but any institution that no longer requires its stakeholders to be present physically, from banking to socialization to education, will discover the biggest opportunity for transformation.
Learning in 2-Dimension
Online education has received a shot in the arm in the past couple of years, more out of necessity than anything else. From K-12 to higher education, children are affected and protected by online learning in educational institutions. Inclusive online education is the biggest challenge faced by educators. Next, engaging students in an environment that does not employ their full sensory capabilities hampers learning. Despite these challenges, virtual classrooms remained the bastion of academics and learning at a time when many industries came to a standstill.
The phase allowed software providers and institutes to identify challenges, assess their needs, and contribute to driving innovation in the edtech space. Thanks to the exponential increase in the demand for better solutions, edtech can now consider moving from a virtual classroom that shoots up screen time to a classroom simulation that is much more immersive, engaging, and effective. Virtual spaces have been around in some form for some time now, especially in the gaming world. With games like Second Life, Minecraft, and The Sims, many children and young adults are already familiar with the use of technology to live and play virtually. Metaverse will only make it easier to transform education completely.
Anywhere Classrooms
Although both online learning and virtual spaces have been around for a while, the conflux of both will engineer a new dimension and disruption for education. The blurring of physical boundaries and geographies is one of the most significant advantages of the Metaverse.While access to virtual classrooms still remains a big hurdle, the value addition from VR-based classrooms could solidify the case for virtual only classrooms.
Compared to reading and lectures, which have a knowledge retention rate of 5% and 10%, respectively, VR has a retention rate of 75%. The high retention rate can encourage educational institutes to redirect their teaching equipment budget to educate more children, say, at the NASA space station or in the Amazon rainforest, all without them having to leave their homes. Anywhere classrooms may just be the detour that education needs to leverage the current landscape and create a powerful transformation for the industry.
To Wrap Up
Education is heading for a rebranded future with classrooms being replaced by virtual reality in the pursuit of remote learning. Anywhere classrooms will help eliminate virtual walls that are currently nowhere near providing the experience that a real classroom can. With children being well-versed with virtual reality ecosystems, Metaverse will further simplify the seamless adoption of a two-dimensional learning space that offers better education, near hands-on experience, and actionable knowledge.
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