The cliché is a fifty-year-old asking some ten year old student for help in making the computer work. Having trouble making working with your device or your software? Just grab one of those digital natives to handle it for you!
What makes this worse is that students believe they are experts because adults have been telling them that they are. I’ve had the conversation with several students about why they shouldn’t be force-quitting the appson their iPhones, and the looks I get range from, “Cool, I didn’t know that” to “I don’t believe you, I’m going to still force-quit apps”.
Son won’t turn off his video game? Daughter obsessed with “likes” on Instagram? It may not be entirely their fault. Like the high-octane sugar in a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and that irresistible chemical spice in Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, the ingredients in social media, video games, apps, and other digital products are carefully engineered…
More than 40 years before women gained the right to vote, female “computers” at Harvard College Observatory were making major astronomical discoveries. Between 1885 and 1927, the observatory employed about 80 women who studied glass plate photographs of the stars. They found galaxies and nebulas and created methods to measure distance in space. They were…
Step into any college lecture hall and you are likely to find a sea of students typing away at open, glowing laptops as the professor speaks. But you won’t see that when I’m teaching. Though I make a few exceptions, I generally ban electronics, including laptops, in my classes and research seminars. That may seem…
The future impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) on society and the labour force have been studied and reported extensively. In a recent book, AI Superpowers, Kai-Fu Lee, former president of Google China, wrote that 40 to 50 per cent of current jobs will be technically and economically viable with AI and automation over the next…
Manufacturing jobs were a huge part of America’s post-World War II economic miracle. In the early 1980’s, 20 million Americans worked in factories, assembling consumer products like cars and appliances. Well, what happened after that? Source: Those jobs are gone forever. Let’s gear up for what’s next If you are wondering about manufacturing jobs and what’s…
I was recently at a conference about the social and emotional needs of children today. While much of what I heard reinforced what we were already seeing as a campus, it was fascinating – the idea many children today are unaware of how to communicate effectively, show and understand empathy, understand their feelings regarding shame,…
