Half of Cambridge students admit cheating (TimesOnLine)

"...The results of an anonymous online poll of more than 1,000 students conducted by the student newspaper Varsity found that 49 per cent of undergraduates pass other people’s work off as their own at some point during their university career..."

Gifted poor pupils 'need advice' (BBC)"...In particular, it warns that those most likely to miss out on fulfilling their potential are high-ability children from poorer backgrounds, where there is no family advice available about higher education..."


Pattern Literacy/Symbolic Literacy
(Roxanne Swentzell) on YouTube

More videos. A whole catalog[?] from University of Washington.
Music in American Culture
Earth Science
CSE colloquia
Washington's Future
Brainworks
Dust in Time (NASA 's stardust mission)
Molecular Medicine
Faculty Lectures
Inside Access ( patient/staff relationships)
...and...
Consciousness, Creativity and the Brain (1hr, 29min)
...in which here about The David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace among other things

One of my all-time favorite talks (video) about education. It is by Sir Ken Robinson. It is titled: Do Schools Kill Creativity? and was presented at the 2006 ted conference. Two quotes that always stand out: "we have got to radically rethink our view of intelligence", and, "creativity is as important as literacy". He makes many other good points as well. Especially about valuing our children.
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Here is another video from the ted conference, 2004, also about creativity. It is by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and titled: Creativity, fulfillment and flow.

I am not enamored with the talk entirely but at about the 15 minute mark he displays a diagram. "Flow" is highlighted. That flow lies between "arousal" and "control" is what drew my attention. In the diagram, this area is represented by a triangular wedge. It reminded me of Vygotsky's zone of proximal development.

I imagined flow as "learning". Then to one side lies arousal (curiosity) and to the other side lies control (ability). To me illustrating that the best place for learning is when curiosity is high but we also feel somewhat in control. That is, we are stretching but we also have the ability/means to interact with the present environment (whatever it may be). In other words, being on the edge but still having a toe or two on the ground.

The perfect place for a student.

I suppose the opposite is when you don't know how to spell a word, you ask and the teacher's response is just tell you to go look it up in a dictionary.

Also germane I thought was his point about the mind only being able to process so much stimulation. If one is too bored, or one is too overloaded ... not much good is going to come from it.

And that lead me thinking about Universal Design -- everywhere. "...equal access to learning, not simply equal access to information. Universal Design allows the student to control the method of accessing information". (Universal Instruction Design, and here, and here, and here, and here, and ....)

Just curious about all this. Coming from the perspective of a perpetual student with quirky learning differences and someone that is interested in learning differences generally -- for instance, helping other people and working with their differences.

I have always had trouble with arithmetic -- the pencil and paper of math. Today I was reading about Golomb ruler's. Looking at the tables, the "rulers", I realized how much trouble I have understanding the "distances" between numbers.

For instance, I understand that the technical distance between "0" and "1" is infinite. But that aside, what is the distance between, say, "4" and "9"? To me it is 4 (5, 6, 7, and 8). Arithmetically though, it is 5.

That may seem very simple, but for whatever reason, even though I "know" the difference, I can't get away from the 4 unless I take a long time to work the details. Then I can get confused.

If I follow my intuition and include the infinite distance between "4" and "5" and count that as 1 then take the same between "8" and "9" (to be politely symmetrical) and count that as 1 I get: 1 + 1 + 4 = 6. Arithmetically. But the distance between "4" and "9" is not 6. It is supposed to 5. Right?

Imagine doing that every time simple math comes up. Then try to pass college algebra.

In the mix is knowing about different number basses (from computer programming -- 2, 8, 16, 32, 64, etc...). About the "distance" between ASCII "4" and ASCII "9". And the computer memory distance between two variable with the respective values of 4 and 9 as: "characters", longs, ints, floats and doubles, etc.....

Imagine the numbers 4 and 9 written out in six bits, in binary (000100, 001001). Think of the pattern differences here. And what about rotating each "0" and "1" by, say, four bits to the left. It is still the accumulations of 1's and 0's, same just different patterns. And so on...... (Yes, I know about base-to-base conversions -- the value of place, so to speak)

What about all the different distances between any particular 4 and any particular 9 in, say, any given set of 10 books.

That all is not meant to be a play of semantics or whatever. It is actually what happens when I have to deal with numbers. For real. All the time.

Now imagine trying to teach simple arithmetic to someone looking at a "4" and a "9" on a page of math lessons. One difference, for example, being that they see those numbers in relation to all the other numbers on the page/s or things in the room. In other words, they see the numbers in their broader context's -- different pages of different lessons on different days at different times in different places. Essentially, for them, totally different numbers.

Where do you go with that?