Historically, women have not enjoyed educational equality. Indeed, Oxford only began awarding degrees to women in the 1920s.  Even today the number of women receiving degrees in mathematics is half that of men. In turn, this lack of access has seeded a widely held, but fallacious, view that men are inherently better skilled at numerate subjects. Despite many studies into sex difference in mathematical ability, the differences have been found to be insignificant. Moreover, studies have shown that reminding women that men are 'better' at mathematics actually causes them to underperform.  This would suggest that it is largely social factors which determine how attractive mathematics is to women; if there is a wide perception that women cannot be mathematicians then they will not become mathematicians. In order, therefore, to promote women in mathematics, it is extremely important to highlight the achievements of those who have bucked the historical trends. One such woman whose life and work should be championed is Emmy Noether.

That’s how I want to learn. Don’t give me a book; I don’t want a lecture, and I don’t want a list of topics to memorize. Give me ample reason to memorize them and a sandbox where I can safely play. Test me when I least expect it, shock me with the unknown, but make sure you’ve given me enough understanding and practice with my tools that I have a high chance of handling the unexpected.

Clifford J. Levy:

My three children once were among the coddled offspring of Park Slope, Brooklyn. But when I became a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, my wife and I decided that we wanted to immerse them in life abroad. No international schools where the instruction is in English. Ours would go to a local one, with real Russians. When we told friends in Brooklyn of our plans, they tended to say things like, Wow, you’re so brave. But we knew what they were really thinking: What are you, crazy? It was bad enough that we were abandoning beloved Park Slope, with its brownstones and organic coffee bars, for a country still often seen in the American imagination as callous and forbidding. To throw our kids into a Russian school — that seemed like child abuse.

Have fun and make games, or hack your homework using Ruby!
Just tell your parents or teachers you're learning Ruby programming... ;)
Free and works on any computer.

"Once you are Turing'd it is much easier to believe other occupations which we humans used to do uniquely, can be done by computers. You tend to be open to disruptive technology in all parts of your life."

Is there a new anti-intellectualism? I mean one that is advocated by Internet geeks and some of the digerati. I think so: more and more mavens of the Internet are coming out firmly against academic knowledge in all its forms. This might sound outrageous to say, but it is sadly true.

Project Euler, named for the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler, is popular (more than 150,000 users have submitted 2,630,835 solutions) precisely because Colin Hughes — and later, a team of eight or nine hand-picked helpers — crafted problems that lots of people get the itch to solve

Learning the subtleties of Helvetica and Garamond used to be a pain—but a sleek new app has made the process easier

> This guide is intended for use by all students of the London Philosophy degrees, BA, MA and its research degrees. It contains an entry for each of the papers currently available within the B.A. degree. For each of these you will find a number of general hints about studying for that particular paper, together with a number of central readings. These reading lists vary greatly in length, but no inferences should be made on this basis about the comparative difficulty of the papers. In every case these reading lists will be supplemented by others you will receive in lectures or tutorials, and there is no attempt here at comprehensive coverage.

If you’re interested in learning something new, this article is for you.  Broken down by subject and/or category, here are several top-notch self-education resources I have bookmarked online over the past few years.

Trying to convince a client not to squeeze everything above the fold? Is your whitespace filling up fast? We've collected a variety of articles on some sticky web subjects that might just help you make your point. Send your client to one of our topic pages for a quick intro, some links and a wee nudge in the right direction.

Although DiMaggio had been through a training process, he found himself tripped up as he began scoring the essays. What made the organization “good” as opposed to “excellent”? What happens when the kid doesn’t answer the question at all, but writes with excellent organization about whatever the hell he wants? Did it matter that it was insane for seventh-graders to think they’d be benching 200 pounds?

The Periodic Table of Videos is a collaboration between the University of Nottingham's School of Chemistry and video journalist Brady Haran.

We initially made videos about all 118 elements.

The story of the Arctic is about people and place. Explore this region and how it is changing with the help of the people who live and work there. Start by meeting Aaju, an Inuk lawyer. Listen to her greeting in the Inuit language, Innuktitut. Then journey across the top of the world with the help of your Arctic guides below, and discover more about this remote, cold, challenging and amazing wilderness!

Toggle views for properties, orbitals, isotopes etc. Select elements, groups and periods for Wikipedia summaries, photos, podcasts.

Award-winning statistician and political scientist Andrew Gelman says that uncertainty is an important part of life, and recognition of that uncertainty is itself an important step. This is where statistics can help us

Ed Dante is a pseudonym for a writer who lives on the East Coast. Through a literary agent, he approached The Chronicle wanting to tell the story of how he makes a living writing papers for a custom-essay company and to describe the extent of student cheating he has observed. In the course of editing his article, The Chronicle reviewed correspondence Dante had with clients and some of the papers he had been paid to write. In the article published here, some details of the assignment he describes have been altered to protect the identity of the student.

I wrote this article about what a four-year-old should know many years ago but it continues to be the most popular page on the Magical Childhood site.  I don’t think a week has passed in the past eight or so years when I have not received a letter from a parent, grandparent or teacher about it.  Parents and principals especially have said they wish more parents realized these things.

It’s the 21st century. Knowing how to read a novel, craft an essay, and derive the slope of a tangent isn’t enough anymore. You need to know how to swim through the data deluge, optimize your prose for Twitter, and expose statistics that lie. In the following pages, you’ll find our updated core curriculum, which fills in the gaps of your 20th-century education with the tools you need now. Call it the neoliberal arts: higher learning for highly evolved humans.

This is a web site (still under construction) for young students - and anyone else - who are (like me) thrilled by the challenges posed by real science, and who are - like me - determined to use their brains to discover new things about the physical world that we are living in. In short, it is for all those who decided to study theoretical physics, in their own time.

In this day and age, why would I do a PhD?Where is the wisdom and philosophy in today's Doctorate of Philosophy? What defense might the status have against commodified certification, credential inflation, and otherwise collaborative and crowd sourced knowledge? How might an autodidact approach a PhD with integrity? Would they?These are open questions looking for the heart and meaning of a PhD in today's context. Leigh will explain his approach to developing in-depth knowledge, and invite challenges, suggestions and responses to it...

We are accustomed to thinking of learning as good in and of itself. But as environmental educator David Orr reminds us, our education up till now has in some ways created a monster. This essay is adapted from his commencement address to the graduating class of 1990 at Arkansas College. It prompted many in our office to wonder why such speeches are made at the end, rather than the beginning, of the collegiate experience.

Typography belongs to the people. Typography does not belong to graphic designers. Visual communication, like verbal communication belongs to all. Just as we are all free to speak, we should all be allowed to communicate graphically. Trained designers are not the only ones who have earned the right to do so. Designers who stand in opposition to such “untrained” communication stand in the way of democracy and the right to speak our minds.

The finding undermines the common assumption that intensive immersion is the best way to really master a particular genre, or type of creative work, said Nate Kornell, a psychologist at Williams College and the lead author of the study. “What seems to be happening in this case is that the brain is picking up deeper patterns when seeing assortments of paintings; it’s picking up what’s similar and what’s different about them,” often subconsciously.

I remember clearly the day I first found out that you could see page view statistics for Wikipedia articles. I came into class and asked the students if they had any idea how many people were reading their work. Instead of the usual assignment of an exam or term paper read by exactly one person, their professor, they were now writing for a real public. 
They were shocked to find out (for example), that the Gabriel García Márquez article that they were rewriting was read by something like 1,500 people a day: 62,000 a month, or close to three-quarters of a million people a year. That really gave them a sense that what they were doing mattered in some way.

His idea goes like this: Assign each student a single, specific topic, which he or she will study over and over again, from every possible angle, from early elementary school through high school. Egan, a professor of education at Canada's Simon Fraser University, hopes that by the time such students finish high school, they will be world-class experts on their topics - as well as more effective citizens and better people.

"Even now (I’m twenty-four), people ask me what my days were like, as an unschooler. What did I do? How did I learn? And the truth is—I’m not exactly sure. Because they were almost never the same. There were some textbooks along the way. Maybe two. I was supposed to complete a certain amount of lessons a week from them. I did a lot of them on Fridays, when I remembered. I remember reading all the time. And writing all the time. And painting. And playing music. I did these things because I loved them. I loved them in a way that I sometimes think people have forgotten they can be loved by children and young adults. Because these activities weren’t school, or work, or homework, or a requirement. They were me. And when you love something enough to do it constantly, it will always lead to other things, and you will always get better at it. It sounds so simple. People want more of an answer…"

Dervishaj’s entire grade 7 math class has been outfitted with “smart pens” made by Livescribe, a start-up based in Oakland, Calif. The pens perform an interesting trick: when Dervishaj and her classmates write in their notebooks, the pen records audio of whatever is going on around it and links the audio to the handwritten words. If her written notes are inadequate, she can tap the pen on a sentence or word, and the pen plays what the teacher was saying at that precise point.

Easily incorporate computational thinking into your curriculum with these classroom-ready lessons, examples, and programs. For more resources, including discussion forums and news, visit our ECT Discussion Forums.

For information to have power, it needs to be held asymmetrically. Preferably very very asymmetrically. Someone who knows something that others do not know can do something potentially useful and profitable with that information.

Fascinating. David Foster Wallace's Literary Interpretation syllabus from Spring '05: http://bit.ly/9nSA7d (via @rogre)

Access to knowledge, for the first time in history, is largely unimpeded for the middle class. Without effort or expense, it's possible to become informed if you choose. For less than your cable TV bill, you can buy and read an important book every week. Share the buying with six friends and it costs far less than coffee.

In both the United States and England, if you go far back enough, colleges were essentially religious institutions. They assumed that a big part of what they did was the ethical and religious training of the students who went there. Now they’re secular, but one result of that is that questions of ‘Why should I live?’ or ‘How should I live?’ are no longer addressed.

RT @rob_schmitt: How do I learn to program? http://t.co/1rkOOce via @37signals

“Can we not devise a system of liberal education which shall find its foundations in the best things of the here and now? Literature and art are all about us; science and faith offer their daily contributions; history is in the making to-day; industry pours forth its wares; and children, no less than adults, are sharing in the dynamic activities of contemporary social life . Not in the things of the past, but in those of the present, should liberal education find its beginnings as well as its results.”

— David Snedden, “What Of Liberal Education?” The Atlantic Monthly, 1912

Online degrees and video courses from leading universities.

Just as an IQ test tracks intelligence, the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking measures your CQ: how well you think creatively. Usually a 90-minute series of discrete tasks administered by a psychologist, the Torrance Test is not a perfect measure of creativity. But it has proven remarkably accurate in predicting creative accomplishments. We asked a group of ordinary children and adults to try their hands at several drawing tests: everyone was presented with incomplete line drawings and was given five minutes to turn them into pictures. We then sent a selection of the results to two well-known creativity scholars.

@rogre I can't overstate just how fantastic this post is: http://bit.ly/9r0tQa I've been reading each link over last few days. Thank you.

Anonymous asked: What advice would you give to a graphic design student?

In the past, daydreaming was often considered a failure of mental discipline, or worse. Freud labeled it infantile and neurotic. Psychology textbooks warned it could lead to psychosis. Neuroscientists complained that the rogue bursts of activity on brain scans kept interfering with their studies of more important mental functions.

But now that researchers have been analyzing those stray thoughts, they’ve found daydreaming to be remarkably common — and often quite useful. A wandering mind can protect you from immediate perils and keep you on course toward long-term goals. Sometimes daydreaming is counterproductive, but sometimes it fosters creativity and helps you solve problems.

Jordan Kavoosi built an empire of fake term papers. Now the writers want their cut.

Reading mathematics too quickly results in frustration.  A half hour of concentration in a novel might net the average reader 20-60 pages with full comprehension, depending on the novel and the experience of the reader.  The same half hour in a math article buys you 0-10 lines depending on the article and how experienced you are at reading mathematics. There is no substitute for work and time.  You can speed up your math reading skill by practicing, but be careful.  Like any skill, trying too much too fast can set you back and kill your motivation.  Imagine trying to do an hour of high-energy aerobics if you have not worked out in two years.  You may make it through the first class, but you are not likely to come back.  The frustration from seeing the experienced class members effortlessly do twice as much as you, while you moan the whole next day from soreness, is too much to take.

“What’s the one thing I need to know?” she asked.

I made her wait, of course, so that I could explain the premise of the book. It turns out the vast majority in the United States and other nations believe that the way to get ahead is to focus on your weaknesses and try to fix them. That’s wrong, Buckingham says.

Times piece on students & plagiarism: http://nyti.ms/cFxs0C / My guess? Plagiarism as common as ever, just now much easier to catch
– Karl Steel (KarlSteel) http://twitter.com/KarlSteel/statuses/20135080442

Screw it: what if academia/colleges were organized more like Star Fleet? i.e. young bucks do research, old hands teach? http://j.mp/rjJg6
– Tim Carmody (tcarmody) http://twitter.com/tcarmody/statuses/20079826065

A further examination of the five-hundred pages of files, which now reside in the Harvard Archives, along with old yearbooks, freshman-student reports, and 25th- and 50th- anniversary class reports, tell a fascinating, tragic story about gay life at Harvard in 1920 and the administration’s ferocious response to the discovery of homosexual “degenerates” on its campus.

"A 2007 scholarly review of hypertext experiments concluded that jumping between digital documents impedes understanding. And if links are bad for concentration and comprehension, it shouldn’t be surprising that more recent research suggests that links surrounded by images, videos, and advertisements could be even worse."

Some thoughts on empathy and its place in education as experienced at @tcslj: http://bit.ly/d9o8iQ /cc @DanielPink
– Roberto Greco (rogre) http://twitter.com/rogre/statuses/15060238888

Tom Henderson is the self-described 'mathpunk'. He argues that the world is stacked against the general public's lack of mathematical understanding. He tries to get students interested in maths and foster real understanding and awareness rather than memorisation of formulae: 'the steps'.

He discusses mathematics in the context of things that humans are likely to be interested in: social conflict, sex and beauty.

Doug Lemov strives to improve the education of children in the US by using data-driven programs to identify outstanding teachers. Will incentives such as substantial financial benefits help attract and retain the most talented individuals?

He finds that many teachers understand 2 of the main pillars of their career: their main subject(s) themselves, and 'foundations', the history and philosophy of educations. What is often missing is 'methods'; literally, how to teach.

Can a series of 49 techniques ('What To Do') help?

Is txt spk necessarily a bad thing? Young people are communicating using the written word more than ever, and they are almost always writing for a specific audience - skill that previous generations did not always learn at such a young age.

"A realization has been dawning on me as of late, one that I’ve always known, but that is easy to forget, easy to misplace, easy to neglect. The best way to learn anything is to do it, to struggle through, to forge on, to fight and gnash teeth and curse at. There is no knowledge as highly regarded as that which you have to work for."

"This tale of two boys, and of the millions of kids just like them, embodies the most stunning finding to come out of education research in the past decade: more than any other variable in education—more than schools or curriculum—teachers matter. Put concretely, if Mr. Taylor’s student continued to learn at the same level for a few more years, his test scores would be no different from those of his more affluent peers in Northwest D.C. And if these two boys were to keep their respective teachers for three years, their lives would likely diverge forever. By high school, the compounded effects of the strong teacher—or the weak one—would become too great."

"With all that in mind, its questionable how far you can get just by book learning. Before my first child was born, I read all the How To books, and still felt like a clueless novice. 30 Months later, when my second child was due, did I go back to the books for a refresher? No. Instead, I relied on my personal experience, which turned out to be far more useful and reassuring to me than the thousands of pages written by experts."

"The OpenLearn website gives free access to Open University course materials. This is the LearningSpace, where you'll find hundreds of free study units, each with a discussion forum. Study independently at your own pace or join a group and use the free learning tools to work with others."

"On a hot afternoon in August, a mother, father, and son climbed into their car and set out for the Qihang Salvation Training Camp in rural China. The facility was only a half hour from their hotel in Nanning, but the drive felt much longer to Deng Fei and Zhou Juan. In the backseat, their son, Deng Senshan, said almost nothing the entire way. He wore a sickish look as he gazed at the whizzing tableau of warehouses, unfinished buildings, and open fields of southern China’s Guangxi province. He didn’t want to go to the camp — who would? — but his parents felt they had no choice."

"Barack Obama’s decisive defeat of John McCain is the most important victory of a Democratic candidate since 1932. It brings to a close another conservative era, one that rose amid the ashes of the New Deal coalition in the late sixties, consolidated its power with the election of Ronald Reagan, in 1980, and immolated itself during the Presidency of George W. Bush. Obama will enter the White House at a moment of economic crisis worse than anything the nation has seen since the Great Depression; the old assumptions of free-market fundamentalism have, like a charlatan’s incantations, failed to work, and the need for some “new machinery” is painfully obvious. But what philosophy of government will characterize it?"

"We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth."

"You've always wanted to learn how to build software yourself—or just whip up an occasional script—but never knew where to start. Luckily, the web is full of free resources that can turn you into a programmer in no time."

"The Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition postulates that when individuals acquire a skill through external instruction, they normally pass through five stages. This model, first proposed by Stuart Dreyfus and Hubert Dreyfus in 1980 proposes that the five stages of skill acquisition are: Novice, Advanced beginner, Competent, Proficient and Expert."

"I decided to explore the idea of freelancing when several people from the office complimented my writing one after the other. My problem was that I had no idea what I wanted to do exactly. Yes, it was going to involve writing of some sorts. I discovered I had a knack for words (my boss even trusted me to write a press release about a new product we were launching — not bad for someone 6 months out of university!) but I had never been specifically hired and paid by others just to 'write stuff.'"

"Learning on Sesame Street, as in school, means learning Right Answers, and as in school, Right Answers come from grown-ups. We see children figuring things out. As in school, we hear children responding, without much animation or imagination, to leading questions put by adults. But we rarely see them figuring things out; in fact, we rarely see children doing anything."

"In November, I posted about an alternative MBA program that I was going to launch. Unaccredited, residential, free and six months long. A new way to learn about a new way of doing business. We’re almost done, and it has exceeded every expectation I had for it, and I think there are some broader lessons worth sharing."