Emerging Technology

Explore the Airwaves with Weekend Projects →

This is the future of education in the world. We are going back to the time when we use to get our hand dirty after sputnik. We need to wake up in this country and teach our students how to inquire  about the nature of reality. This is a phenomenal project. All the theory of electrodynamics and Maxwell’s Equations are embedded in this simple project.

Posted 7 months ago from bookmarklet

Science quotes of the day

“How wonderfull that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.”

—

Niels Bohr

Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

— Albert Einstein

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”

— Isaac Asimov

Posted 1 year ago

War: Teacher vs. Technology →

albertlaporte:

This is a must read article. Johnny, you need to read it twice. :)

I created a downloadable pdf file. I could not get the link for it. 

What are your thoughts?

Yo Bro! This article is way out man. It’s just the nature of the beast. As you know, in this day and age, we are raising idiot savants. That’s just the way it is. Those who can not balance the technology and use it constructively will have to beg for bread in the not too distant future. Think of it this way, they are similar to the kids who used to throw spit ball and paper in class. You will always have the few bad apples who spoil a whole bunch. The best approach to this problem is to start educating the kids about appropriate use of technology start in PreK-on. Albert you can rest assure at least I am doing that so you won’t have to worry about my kids misusing technology in your class in the not too distant future. LOL. I know you get my point bro. I guess we have a great deal of work to do. The funny thing about all these technologies is that people don’t even care to know how all this magic works. They just use these technologies blindly. I guess we are really in the cloud these days when in come to technology. To me that’s the real danger. We are moving toward a world where people are back to the stone ages when it come to knowledge. The just want to consume information.

Reblogged 1 year ago from albertlaporte 2 notes View comments
What Drives Life is a little current from the sun-that’s the truth Maverick Educators Check this one out. Your Virtual Buddy Johnny Humanity uses about 15 TW of power. (That’s 15,000,000,000,000 watts. TW means terawatt, which is a trillion watts.) By comparison 120,000 TW of sunlight falls on the Earth. Ideally, this means one hour of sunlight could power us for one year. Practically, the top end of what we could collect would be around 600 TW, which is still a huge number. In other words, solar power could solve a lot of problems. Solar cells like those you have probably seen work by using sunlight to make electrons move in a circuit, which is electricity. The most common design is made of layers of n- and p-type semiconductors. Light separates an electron and a hole, and the semiconductor layers make them go different directions to recombine. You cleverly make the electron go through a circuit and you get electricity. The challenges to widespread use of solar cells are cost and intermittency. This is a good problem for scientists and engineers.

What Drives Life is a little current from the sun-that’s the truth Maverick Educators Check this one out.

Your Virtual Buddy

Johnny

Humanity uses about 15 TW of power. (That’s 15,000,000,000,000 watts. TW means terawatt, which is a trillion watts.) By comparison 120,000 TW of sunlight falls on the Earth. Ideally, this means one hour of sunlight could power us for one year. Practically, the top end of what we could collect would be around 600 TW, which is still a huge number. In other words, solar power could solve a lot of problems.

Solar cells like those you have probably seen work by using sunlight to make electrons move in a circuit, which is electricity. The most common design is made of layers of n- and p-type semiconductors. Light separates an electron and a hole, and the semiconductor layers make them go different directions to recombine. You cleverly make the electron go through a circuit and you get electricity.

The challenges to widespread use of solar cells are cost and intermittency. This is a good problem for scientists and engineers.

Posted 1 year ago

Intrinsic Motivation in an Information Overload World

It’s interesting to know that some people learn because they truly have a natural love for learning new things without any external rewards. The interesting thing about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is that it’s still a very hot topic in educational research. I think Shirky has done an elegant job identifying the two types of intrinsic motivation-autonomous & competent. We as educators know how difficult it is to motivate students challenging concepts and ideas. 

Although we are swimming in a world of information in this day and age, we have to always keep in mind that Albert Einstein’s point is wise “information is not knowledge.” This is a fact that is self evident in the physical and biological sciences. You can have all the information in the world; however, if you can’t synthesize knowledge, you are just fooling yourself. For example, I know many educators who send kids to find information on a topic and have the kids create a poster presentation based on the information they have collected. Quite frankly, the kids haven’t learn anything. If you ask them basic questions on the topic chances are they might not be able to explain what they have learned. I have observe this phenomenon with my own students. I am saying all this just to establish the point that information is not knowledge.

On the other hand, like I have stated earlier, I am glad that Google, and the Free information movement are making it possible for us to have “fingertip knowledge” or should I say fingertip information. We can use the information to construct knowledge but the information is not knowledge. Quite frankly, I  think Bonk has done a phenomenal job on this E-book movement. Nevertheless, we as educators have a serious job to do. We have to find a away to help kids construct there knowledge schema using the overwhelming amount of data that’s out there.

# dcs dcs861j

Posted 2 years ago