David Moursund
Professor Emeritus, College of Education
University of Oregon
Student homelessness in the United States is a major problem. In the 2013-2014 school year, approximately 1.3 million students were classified as homeless for some part of the school year (Layton & Brown, 9/14/2015). The eight-minute video, Fighting Student Homelessness (Stark 2/17/2017) tells about student homelessness in a Kansas school district.
I created the non-profit company Information Age Education (IAE) in 2007. During the same year I wrote the IAE-pedia article, What the Future Is Bringing Us (2007). I am now making good progress in writing the eleventh yearly article (year 2017) of this series. You can access all of these “futures” articles in the IAE-pedia (Moursund, 2017). You may enjoy looking at “old” forecasts and comparing what actually happened with what was forecast.
My intent in this multi-year series is to focus on changes in technology, especially Information and Communication Technology (ICT), and how these changes could or perhaps should be affecting our educational systems.
College students in a teacher education program of study typically take one or more courses in psychology. An important reason for this is that an understanding of psychology helps one to understand people—in particular, one’s students, their parents, and fellow educators.
One of my favorite forms of self-education and entertainment is to view Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) Talks (TED, 2017). These videos are typically under 18 minutes in length and the speakers are well-qualified in their presentation areas.
Keith Devlin has long been a world class math educator. This IAE Blog entry discusses his recent article, All the Mathematical Methods I Learned in My University Math Degree Became Obsolete in My Lifetime (Devlin,
When I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from one of the most prestigious university mathematics programs in the world (Kings College London) in 1968, I had acquired a set of skills that guaranteed full employment, wherever I chose to go, for the then-foreseeable future—a state of affairs that had been in existence ever since modern mathematics began some three thousand years earlier. By the turn of the new Millennium, however, just over thirty years later, those skills were essentially worthless, having been very effectively outsourced to machines that did it faster and more reliably, and were made widely available with the onset of first desktop- and then cloud-computing. In a single lifetime, I experienced first-hand a dramatic change in the nature of mathematics and how it played a role in society. [Bold added for emphasis.]
