Views You Can
Use
Vol. IV No. 6
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In this monthly briefing memo, which you have requested, my colleagues at the International Center and I share information on trends and technologies that will have an impact on education.
All
of us at the Sincerely, Bill Daggett
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Biotechnology Brain
Scientists Able to Follow the Pathway of Thought Scientists
have developed a real-time scanning technique to track the path of a
thought as it travels through the brain. The discovery has far
reaching implications for both the medical and education fields. For
example, the technique will allow doctors to monitor how well stroke
patients are responding to rehabilitation, identify critical parts
of the brain to avoid during surgery, and show exactly what is
happening during an epileptic seizure. The technology has potential
to extend into education as well by showing how students are
processing and retaining new concepts. It is believed this new
scanning technique will be widely available within five years. Source:
“Scientists Track Footprints of Thoughts,” ABC
News Online, November 29, 2004. http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200411/s1253666.htm
Engineered
Brain Simulates Flight Twenty-five
thousand neurons extracted from a lab rat’s brain and arranged
with electrodes in a Petri dish make up what is, essentially, a
living computer. Biomedical engineers at the Source:
“Brain in a Dish Flies Flight Simulator,” CNN.com,
November 4, 2004. http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/11/02/brain.dish/index.html
While
working at the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Songtao Shi
discovered that colonies of stem cells exist inside the teeth of
adults. This prompted Dr. Shi to investigate a tooth discarded by
his six-year-old daughter. He was surprised to find that the baby
tooth contained potentially more versatile stem cells than an
adult’s tooth. At the Australian Stem Cell Scientific Conference
held in Sydney last October, many delegates were optimistic that
baby tooth stem cells hold more potential than embryonic stem cell
extractions, and is a more ethically acceptable means of harvesting
the valuable cells.
“Parents
will want to store the stem cells found in the pulp inside these
juvenile teeth in liquid nitrogen” says Dr. Stan Gronthos, a
hematologist at the Hanson Institute in Source:
Ben Sandilands, “Baby Teeth Provide Life-Giving Stem Cells,” The
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?ObjectID=9001636
Information
Technology Launching
New Telecommunications Tools Technologists
at Sanswire Networks in Source:
“Not Quite Out of this World,” The Economist, December 2, 2004. Nanotechnology Not
Just Another Brick in the Wall “Pervasive
computing” describes the widespread use of computing devices in
objects other than computers. For example, for every 150 million
microchips that go into computers, another eight billion go into
other devices, such as cars and TV sets. Low-cost radio frequency
identifier (RFID) microchips are providing a wide array of objects
with “smart” technology. According to scientists at the Center
for Pervasive Computing at Denmark’s University of Aarhus, such
digital tags could be manufactured into objects as commonplace as
bricks — so designers can “see” an image of a building under
construction —or milk cartons — so retailers and homeowners know
when its shelf life is about to expire. Source:
Simon Hooper, “The Rise of the Machines,” CNN.com,
November 9, 2004. http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/11/09/pervasive.computing/index.html The
U.S. fared poorly overall, coming in 21st among 29 member
countries in math and 24th in problem solving, with an
overall average of 483 (versus the survey average of 500). This
study supports what we have been finding for over a decade: Sources:
Cox News Service in the Dec. 7, 2004; Special
Education Institute Larry
Gloeckler, Executive Director of our Special Education Institute,
recommends visiting the National
Research Center on Learning Disabilities (NRCLD) website www.nrcld.org
for information on Responsiveness
to Intervention (RTI). Larry is a member of the Technical
Advisory Board at NRCLD, which is spearheading much of the research
on RTI. Reauthorization
of Individuals with
Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) allows for strategies such as
RTI to be used in improving the accuracy of identification of
students with learning disabilities. Reading
Proficiency for All.
One of the key aspects of school improvement that was noted in our
2004 high school study is attention to the reading needs of
students. Goal-setting looked at not just the reading proficiency
needed to pass state tests, but also reading requirements of
citizenship, consumerism, postsecondary education, and employment.
Schools as varied as Source:
The
By the Numbers:
As
you finish your holiday shopping, consider how the nation’s top
retailers, like the nation’s top schools, use data to drive
improvement-focused decision making. Number
of Wal-Mart stores in the Number
of weekly Wal-Mart customers: 100,000,000 Estimated
product and customer data stored in Wal-Mart’s database: 460
terabytes Estimated
amount of data available on the Internet: less than 230 terabytes. 1
terabyte = about 1 trillion bytes or 2 to the 40th power Source: “Sunday Business,” New York Times, November 14, 2004 |
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