education

Corporal punishment at schools

Here we are, at 21st century, talking about a reform or a revolution in the education (with the likes of Ken Robinson), discussing how far behind the modern schooling systems are and how disconnected they are from the realities of the world and things like the Internet, and yet, corporal punishment at schools is still a reality. And I’m not talking about some small forgotten country in the middle of the poor Asia or Africa, but the United States of America. Yes, you’ve heard me right! The citadel of democracy and the flagman of all things digital still allows kids to be beaten at schools. And not only allows – there are still schools that exercise that right. Read more at the Online Schools’ Education Debate.

so many would be surprised to learn that 19 U.S. states still have laws on the books that allow the administration of corporal punishment in school

[…]

the Holmes County High School, where corporal punishment is practiced with support from school employees and students. There are no state-wide regulations in place on how physical punishment is to be administered, so Holmes Country has designed its own. The wooden or fiberglass paddles that the school principal Eddie Dixson uses are locally sourced: made by students taking wood shop class.

Khan Academy – a MUST KNOW!

I’ve heard about KhanAcademy.org a few times since about 2009-2010. But I haven’t really explored it or learned much about it. It was just one of those “good things” on the Internet, which was about education and which was a not-for-profit. And now I can’t believe I’ve been missing out on it. Wikipedia page describes the project in a rather dry language:

The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit educational organization, created in 2006 by Indian American educator Salman Khan, a graduate of MIT. With the stated mission of “providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere”, the website supplies a free online collection of more than 2,800 micro lectures via video tutorials stored on YouTube teaching mathematics, history, healthcare and medicine, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, economics, cosmology, organic chemistry, american civics, art history, microeconomics and computer science.

There you go. A cheese slogan, a single guy, a bunch of videos on YouTube – what’s all the big fuss about, right? Wrong! Here is a better way to get introduced to the project – a TED talk by Salman Khan.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM95HHI4gLk]

Continue reading Khan Academy – a MUST KNOW!

University of Central Lancashire Cyprus, (UCLan Cyprus)

Cyprus Mail reports:

CONSTRUCTION of a modern €53 million campus has begun in Pyla to accommodate the first British university on the island, University of Central Lancashire Cyprus, (UCLan Cyprus).

UCLan Cyprus will open in October this year and students will have the option of studying their programme entirely in Cyprus or transferring for part of their studies to the UK. They expect to have 5,000 students initially. All courses will be taught in English.

These are some interesting news. Of course, we have quite a few universities here in Cyprus, but most of them, with the exception of maybe University of Cyprus, were speed-track-converted from a bunch of colleges. It’ll be interesting to see how different a “real” university is going to be, and if it will create any worthy competition to push the educational institutions a bit. The level of local schools wasn’t all that high back when I was a student, and judging by the younger candidates that I interviewed for jobs in the last few years, the situation isn’t getting any better. Hopefully, the UCLan Cyprus arrival can change this.

New University of Cyprus library

Cyprus Mail reports that the construction of the new University of Cyprus library has begun. It will take a while, so the doors are expected to open some time in September, 2014. While reading through the article, one particular paragraph took me a while to understand.

The library’s collection, which will be housed in an impressive dome-shaped building holding around 600,000 books, more than 30,000 magazines and 40,000 books all in digital format plus 10,000 audio books and 150 databases. Its contents will be accessible to all Cypriots.

My first thought was that the library will hold 600,000 books in digital format and that the new building is being constructed to accommodate that storage. I thought that was a bit excessive. After all, I used to have an e-book library of more than a 1,000 titles and they were living nicely on a single hard disk. Digital storage is cheap these days and the size of drives keep growing. How much space does one need to store 600,000 books in digital form? – I thought.

The size of books in my collection are somewhere between 500 kilobytes to a couple of megabytes. Let’s assume 1 megabyte for an average book. How much space is there on a modern hard drive? I’ll assume 2 TB (terabytes). How many average books can we store on such a disk? 2 TB / 1 MB = 2,000,000,000,000 / 1,000,000 = 2,000,000. I know, I’m approximating things a lot with terabytes, megabytes, and average book sizes. But with a single 2 TB disk holding 2,000,000 books, give or take, I don’t think a new building is in order. 3 TB and 4 TB hard disks exist already. By September 2014 we’ll probably have way more than that. Even a few of those connected together for backups, “150 databases” and such will provide a lot of storage, while being the size of a device that is easy to hide at home. New building? Really?

Of course, once I re-read the paragraph a few times, I realized that I’m on a totally wrong foot here. It read more like:

600,000 books (print)
30,000 magazines and 40,000 books (digital)
10,000 audio books (digital)
150 databases (digital?)

While the digital part of that library will easily fit on one or two hard drives, the 600,000 printed books collection does indeed need some storage space.

I am all for knowledge and education, and I’m glad that this effort is being taken and that all these books will be available to all Cypriots. But if I was to express a wish, I’d say : please push for digitizing all those books and make them available on-line. Cyprus is good, but why not share with the rest of the world? Especially now that we do have the technology.

Constructive lies

Being a pathological liar myself, I often hear people saying how bad lies are and how lies are only making things worse. Of course, there are counter examples of telling a lie to prevent hurting people and such. But there weren’t so many examples of constructive, useful lies. Here is one such example of lies used by an educator to assist students with a boring course.

The topic of Corporate Finance/Capital Markets is, even within the world of the Dismal Science, (Economics) an exceptionally dry and boring subject matter, encumbered by complex mathematic models and obscure economic theory.

What made Dr. K memorable was a gimmick he employed that began with his introduction at the beginning of his first class:

“Now I know some of you have already heard of me, but for the benefit of those who are unfamiliar, let me explain how I teach. Between today until the class right before finals, it is my intention to work into each of my lectures … one lie. Your job, as students, among other things, is to try and catch me in the Lie of the Day.”

Read the whole story – it’s pretty fascinating.