IAE Blog

Recently I was browsing some of my “older” writings and I came across a paper, Me–A Course of Study, that I wrote nearly 12 years ago (Moursund, November, 2004). It represented some of my guesses and hopes for what our educational system would look like in 2014.

The paper is a scenario—a view of education as seen through the eyes of a student just about to graduate from high school in 2014. The scenario presents a number of potential educational improvements that I thought would be well integrated into our educational system over the coming decade (2004-2014). The student intends to go to college and become a teacher.

I recently published an IAE-pedia document titled, What You Can Do (Moursund, 2016). The title comes from the What You Can Do section found in each of the hundreds of IAE Blogs that I have written.

The essence of this new document is summarized by two quotations at the beginning:

As best as I can tell, the term Computer Literacy was first used in two different publications published at about the same time in 1972 (Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences, April, 1972; Luehrmann, Spring, 1972). By then computers had been commercially available for about 20 years and were beginning to have a significant impact on the world (Moursund, 2016).

Quoting from Arthur Luehrmann (Spring, 1972):

During my teaching days at the University of Oregon I taught in the Mathematics Department, the Computer Science Department, and the College of Education. The last 20 years or so of my career was in the College of Education where I taught courses about computers in education.

Currently I am associated with a group of approximately 35 University of Oregon faculty members who are concerned about what the UO and/or their particular departments are doing in terms of adequately preparing students for the effective use of computer technology.

For many students, math word problems are the bane of their existence. High school math teachers tell me that a number of their students just refuse to even try to solve such problems—perhaps because of years of failure and unwillingness to subject themselves to further failure. Many other students manage to “get by” through memorization of rules of thumb such as “of” means “times” while “and” often means “plus.” They have little understanding of what they are doing, or how it relates to solving “real world” problems.

I have recently revised and updated my 27-page IAE-pedia document on Math Word Problems (Moursund, 2016a). My target audience is K-12 teachers and parents of students in these grade levels. Unfortunately for struggling students, there is no “magical solution” to solving word problems in this document. However, it contains considerable useful information.

"Nothing can be more absurd than the practice that prevails in our country of men and women not following the same pursuits with all their strengths and with one mind, for thus, the state instead of being whole is reduced to half." (Plato; Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the western world; 428/427 BC–348/347 BC.)

In the United States, March is women’s History Month (U.S. Library of Congress, 2016). This IAE Blog entry is a contribution to the celebration of women.

Graph images from Erica Manfield (2/18/2015)

I am 79 years old. So, when I see an article about “aging brains,” it tends to catch my eye. I have just read an article by Michael Tortorello, Is Donald Trump Too Old to be President? (Tortorello, 2/28/2016.) While the title uses the name Donald Trump to attract attention, the coverage and information is much broader.

I have recently substantially revised and updated my IAE-pedia entry, Information Underload and Overload (Moursund, 2016a). This has proven to be a popular article, with more than 50,000 hits to date. Since I first wrote this document in 2009, the total amount of information available on the Web and from other sources has grown remarkably. Indeed, quoting from the new version of the entry:

Reading, writing, and arithmetic (math) became formal subjects in schools more than 5,000 years ago. Since then there has been a steady increase in the accumulated knowledge of the human race. The pace of this increase has been increasing. Quoting from the article, Knowledge Doubling Every 12 Months, Soon to be Every 12 Hours (Schilling, 4/19/2016):

"Once you have learned how to ask relevant and appropriate
questions, you have learned how to learn and no one can keep
you from learning whatever you want or need to know." Neil
Postman and Charles Weingartner. Teaching as a Subversive
Activity.

Recently I viewed Stuart Firestein’s TED Talk, The Pursuit of Ignorance (Feinstein, February, 2013). Firestein is a cognitive neuroscience at Columbia University whose speciality is how the brain processes smells.

I have discussed Quality of Life (QoL) in two previous IAE Blog entries, (Moursund, 2/5/2016; Moursund, 12/24/2014).