Tag Archives: education

Worldviews Conference on Media and Higher Education

The Worldviews Conference on Media and Higher Education is happening this June in Toronto and they want people who are interested in discussing the relationship between academia and media to attend. I was invited to a pre-conference brainstorming session recently and I have to say that I’m looking forward to this event.

There are a lot of really good people speaking at the conference so if you’re interested in how the media represents academic findings and how academic institutions relate to media organizations you should conference out.

Higher education affects every aspect of our lives – from the economy and the environment, to culture and communications. While the media play a critical role in shaping public understanding of this institution, little discussion has taken place about how that influence is manifested – or about how, in turn, higher education uses the media to mould how the public perceives it.

But that’s about to change.

Introducing Worldviews: Media Coverage of Higher Education in the 21st Century. This innovative conference, scheduled for June 2011 in Toronto, Canada, will not only examine these issues, but explore why it’s important to do so.

The 2011 inaugural conference will consider a range of important issues, including:

How media coverage of higher education has changed over the past two decades and where it is headed
The impact of social media and how it is changing what is covered and how higher education is understood
The role the media play in influencing public policy debates on public education
How higher education engages with the media to inform public opinion
The different realities of the developing and developed worlds

Visit the conference’s website.

Never too Old to Learn

If you thought that just because you’re old doesn’t mean you can’t learn. Apparently some people have the idea that age limits learning ability. New research has started to counter that myth, here’s a study that shows that people in their early 30s tend to have optimal facial recognition skills.

That conclusion is dramatically different from what researchers previously thought – that this ability peaked in adolescence, said Laura Germine, a graduate student in psychology at Harvard who specializes in this disorder.

In a study published in the online version of Cognition, Germine, Ken Nakayama, a psychology professor at Harvard, and Bradley Duchaine, a psychology professor at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, detailed their results from a series of online experiments with about 60,000 participants.

They asked participants to take a series of tests involving face recognition of six young men. In another series of tests, they were also asked to learn and then recognize a series of women’s and children’s faces.

“People in their early 30s are best at this task,” said Germine in a phone interview with the Star. “Someone at age 16 and age 65 do about the same. Their face-recognition abilities are similar.”

Read more.

Hydroponics in Schools

In urban centres where the land has been used for buildings and other infrastructure there is little room for production farms, so how do we teach children about farming? Well, we can use hydroponics to grow plants and help people understand why plants and food are so great.

A school in New York City has installed a hydroponic greenhouse that makes use of rainwater to grow plants for their school.

There’s no soil in a hydroponic greenhouse, which captures and recirculates rainwater to the roots of plants. In capable hands — though maybe not in 5-year-old hands — the 1,400-square-foot structure can produce up to 8,000 pounds of vegetables every year. It is an experiment in environmental education its founders hope will be replicated in schools citywide.

Two mothers at the school, Sidsel Robards and Manuela Zamora, founded the greenhouse, inspired in 2008 by a trip to the Science Barge, a floating urban farm docked in Yonkers. They got New York Sun Works, the nonprofit green-design group that built the barge, interested enough to execute the greenhouse, a bright, open and wheelchair-accessible space, covered by glass and entered from the school’s third floor, that is essentially the Barge on a roof.

It includes a rainwater catchment system, a weather station, a sustainable air conditioner made of cardboard, a worm-composting center and solar panels. In the center of the room is a system resembling a plant-filled hot tub: an aquaponics system home to a community of tilapia, whose waste is converted into nitrate. The system loses water only when it evaporates to help cool plants, consuming only a tiny fraction of the water that a field of conventional dirt does.

“You basically can have this closed system, this symbiotic thing going on, where plants are eating food, creating waste, you’re converting it and then the plants are taking it up,” said Zak Adams, director of ecological design at BrightFarm Systems, which designed the greenhouse and the barge.

Read the full article at The New York Times.

Keep Learning for a Good Life

For some reasons that I don;t understand people find learning to be dull. If you’re one of those people this post is for you!

Learning is a great way to keep your mind active and acquire new skills to improve your life and ways you don’t necessarily foresee. There’s always areas that you can expand your knowledge in and lucky for us someone has put these into a handy blog post.

Here’s a snippet:

Challenge Yourself
Finally, give yourself a challenge or two. Next time you say, “I can’t”, stop and think. Maybe you really can’t cook … yet. There’s nothing stopping you learning.
Sure, you might find that you just don’t enjoy cooking. But at least you’ll know that you could put together a meal if you had to.
We start at a zero skill level for everything in life. Just because you can’t currently play the piano doesn’t mean that you’ll never be able to. With the internet, there’s a huge amount of content on every topic you can think of – and loads of it will be aimed at beginners.

Keep reading and learning at the source.

Two Aussie Schools go Green

Australia suffers a lot of droughts so it’s really good to see that at least two schools are taking steps to ensure that their water consumption is responsible.

While no longer breaking news, the endeavours of students and staff at two different Australian schools still merits attention. One school went bottled water free, whilst another became what they believe is the world’s first Carbon Neutral School.

In the first instance, a student-led initiative at Monte Santʼ Angelo Mercy College, in North Sydney will see the school install six water fountains and bottle refill stations to provide the 1,100 students with filtered tap water, so the canteen need apparently no longer supply bottled water, with all its attendant environmental woes.

The other school Oakhill College,, also in Sydney at Castle Hill spent six months completing an environment audit of its 42 hectares of facilities. The school will buy carbon offsets, while it uses the next five years to continue along it’s existing path of energy and water efficiency programs to the point it no longer requires the offsets.

Read more at Treehugger.