Are Schools Worth the Cost?

Ethiopian Children Teach Themselves

Indian Children Teach Themselves

Children Teach Themselves to Read

Kids Learn Math Easily When They Control Their Own Learning

Recommended Reading 2

Here are some more thought-provoking websites concerned with education and learning:

Freedom to Learn MindShift UnCollege

Edupunks' Guide Casting Out Nines Computing Education Blog

Featured Quote - Doyle

"I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."

-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet)

LEARNING PHYSICS AND MUSIC IN MIDDLE AGE

Carleen Hutchins (1911-2009) was both a dedicated scientist and innovative luthier. She studied how violins produce their distinctive sound, and in the process she became a sought-after viola maker. Over the years she encountered criticism for being a woman and bringing scientific inquiry into an esoteric discipline. But the quality of her instruments gradually earned the respect and admiration of many luthiers and players. In scientific circles she was known for her extensive work in acoustics research. All this she did after age forty! In her school days she had no idea how prolific her life would some day be.

As a child, Carleen Hutchins raised silkworms, joined the Girl Scouts, and enjoyed woodworking. When Hutchins entered college she studied entomology, but by the time of graduation she was interested in becoming a doctor. Because of little money and gender-based discouragement, she decided to become a high school science teacher. It was not until she was in her forties that Hutchins got involved with string instruments. She played trumpet in an amateur chamber music group during the late 1940s, but the group decided a viola would sound better. So she give up the trumpet and bought a cheap viola. Dissatisfied with her poor quality instrument, Hutchins set about to make her own. In 1949, after two years of work, her first viola was ready to play. It was around this time that she stopped teaching to start raising a family with her husband, Morton. That same year she began a six-year study with luthier Karl Berger. With his advice Hutchins made over twenty violas, four violins, and one cello. Also in 1949, Hutchins met Harvard physicist Frederick Saunders who had an active interest in acoustics. He wanted to experiment with the structures of string instruments, but luthiers and players do not like holes drilled in their expensive violins. Hutchins agreed to make “boxes” (unfinished but playable instruments) for the sake of science. Eventually she would turn her own basement into an acoustics laboratory filled with various instruments and electronic equipment. And so it was that she spent the 1950s learning both the art of violin making and the science of sound from two qualified mentors.

In her collaboration with Saunders, Hutchins made a collection of string instruments that underwent hundreds of experiments. Most of those instruments did not survive to the present day, but much was learned and many papers were published. Hutchins' skill in instrument making reached such a level that some of her instruments were being purchased by professional players. Over the years she devised a surprisingly visual method of analyzing the front and back “plates” of a violin. The setup involves holding the plate over a loudspeaker by placing foam blocks under its corners. Some glitter is sprinkled over the plate, and the speaker is activated with a frequency generator. The operator slowly changes the frequency while watching the glitter. At certain tones, the glitter will astonishingly move into definite patterns on the violin plate. These patterns are called Chladni patterns, and they indicate how the plate naturally vibrates. By observing these patterns and the frequencies at which they occur, a luthier can refine the shape and thickness of the plate for optimal tuning.

As Hutchins' knowledge of wood grew, so did her resourcefulness in finding quality materials. She obtained wood from such unconventional sources as wine crates and polo balls. One memorable story even tells of Hutchins and the famous doctor, Virginia Apgar, taking a shelf from a payphone booth under the cover of night. The shelf became the back plate of a viola and was replaced by a replica shelf of lesser-quality wood.

Once she had enough technical experience in acoustics, Hutchins felt the need to connect with other researchers and promote the sharing of information. To that end, the Catgut Acoustical Society was founded in the 1960s—bringing isolated minds into a group for studying musical instruments. The society's membership would grow to 800 in less than twenty years.

Perhaps Hutchins' most memorable contribution to violin making is her New Violin Family, also known as the violin octet. Composer Henry Brant came to Hutchins with a challenge in 1957. He wanted her to create seven new string instruments centered around the violin. Each instrument was to be tuned half an octave apart with the highest-pitched instrument tuned one octave above the violin. While certain members of this family are similar to the viola, cello, and double bass, they are designed as large violins, not mere copies of their conventional counterparts. The intention is a group of instruments that sing together in perfect harmony and with amazing clarity. With funding from the Guggenheim Foundation, Hutchins and her many collaborators had a complete octet ready for concert testing by the mid-1960s. The new family was impressive, but Hutchins would spend decades refining each violin for an ever-improving sound. In the end she made eight instruments—slightly modifying the traditional violin design. The members of this family are named the treble, soprano, mezzo, alto, tenor, baritone, small bass, and contrabass violins. The mezzo violin is tuned just like a traditional violin, but its body is longer. The alto violin is tuned like a viola, but it has an endpin and is played upright like a cello. Hutchins traveled the world on lecture tours to spread awareness of the violin octet. She was met with both admiration for her innovation and enmity for trying to change the classical orchestra. Because of this controversy, it took some time for the Metropolitan Museum of Art to display an octet. Nevertheless, the quality of the octet's sound is undeniable, and musicians are catching on to it. Yo-Yo Ma has made recordings using an alto violin, and the instrument has also been favored by William Berman and Randall Vemer.

HOW TO DRAW COMICS

Comic books have been around since the Great Depression, inspiring young minds and even entertaining soldiers overseas. They have been everything from treasured works of art to feared abominations of popular culture. Today everybody knows them for superheroes in colorful costumes, but in decades past they were also known for westerns, dramas, and even horror stories. In recent years comics have served as source material for numerous movies, television shows, and video games. To produce a mainstream comic book, many people and skills are needed. Writers, pencilers, inkers, colorists, letterers, editors, marketers, printers, and more all collaborate to create a single product. Individual artists and small teams of collaborators can find success as well. Independent publishing has been around for decades, and webcomics are now a popular (and frugal) outlet of artistic talent. If you want to create your own comic books, below are a few helpful sources. Some commonly used tools include: bristol paper, lead holder, kneaded eraser, plastic eraser, technical pens, quill pens, Copic markers, scanner, and Photoshop.

Patrick Shettlesworth is a video game concept artist. He has a website with many step-by-step art tutorials ranging from drawing the human figure to coloring with Photoshop.

• Polykarbon Tutorials

Scott McCloud is a comics theorist who has written several books about how sequential images convey information to a reader. These books illustrate the process of telling a story with pictures, the ways in which technology affects the medium, and how to start drawing your own narratives.

Understanding Comics	Reinventing Comics	Making Comics

David Yardin is an Australian artist who works for Marvel Comics. He posted videos of his entire process for creating a comic book page to YouTube. The time-lapsed footage adds up to over two hours of drawing with the artist's commentary.

• Creating a Comic Book Page

Brad Krause is an animator and illustrator working for Radiance Media in Wisconsin. He has several YouTube videos about drawing and inking comic book art.

• Comic Book Inking

Featured Quote - Byron

“There is the moral of all human tales:
’Tis but the same rehearsal of the past,
First Freedom, and then Glory - when that fails,
Wealth, vice, corruption - barbarism at last.
And History, with all her volumes vast,
Hath but one page . . .”

-Lord Byron (Childe Harold's Pilgrimage)

Featured Quote - Rickover

"Success teaches us nothing; only failure teaches."

-Hyman G. Rickover

HISTORY OF CHINA AT HARVARD

This course is titled “China: Traditions and Transformations,” and it is taught by Professors Peter Bol and William Kirby. Provided by Harvard's Open Learning Initiative, the lecture videos are free to watch, but college credit will not be given. If you want credits, then you will have to pay tuition. Why study China? Its rapid growth and development are making it a new superpower in global politics and economics. Countless businesses import or export goods and services from China, often taking advantage of notoriously cheap labor. China's relationships with countries such as Japan, Tibet, and North Korea also make this nation extremely influential and worth watching as events unfold. Studying the history, political, and philosophical aspects of this country can provide insights into how its people think and how the government makes decisions.

China: Traditions and Transformations (Harvard)

Featured Quote

“Reward and punishment is the lowest form of education.”

-Chuang Tzu

LEARNING HOW TO USE ILLUSTRATOR

Whereas Photoshop is used for editing photos, Adobe Illustrator is great for graphic art and abstract art. This program creates and edits vector images, pictures that maintain clarity no matter how much you zoom in on them. Using vector format allows one to print both an advertising flyer and a billboard sign using the same file. With Illustrator, there are no blocky or blurred edges. Listed below are a few websites for learning how to use vector editing software, especially Illustrator.

N.Design Studio

Vectortuts+

Tutvid Illustrator

LEARNING HOW TO USE PHOTOSHOP

Adobe Photoshop is a very powerful and versatile program. The possible uses range from removing red-eye on family photos to creating lightsaber effects. There are so many tools and effects available to the user! But Photoshop's strength is also its weakness. Having so many features (for over $600 it ought to have lots of features) can cause bewilderment for new users (and even experienced ones!). Fortunately there are plenty of helpful tutorials to be found that can illuminate the method of creating whatever effect you want. Below are a few websites worth visiting if you want learn how to use this impressive software. If Photoshop CS5 is too expensive, then Photoshop Elements is a good alternative. It has many of the same features but wears a much friendlier price tag.

Psdtuts+

Photoshop Essentials

Photoshop Lady

Tutvid Photoshop

FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL—GOT TECH?

Today is the first of many in the new school year. As Eric Schmidt has recently pointed out, many schools have yet to fully integrate computer science into their curricula. Technology has the potential to greatly improve students' education, and computer literacy is an increasingly common job requirement. It seems that students must take the initiative in making technology part of their education. A technology progress checklist and list of ideas are provided at Dangerously Irrelevant. Students can now use software to take notes. There is an iPhone app for keeping track of homework assignments. There is even a planner/agenda app that is designed by students. A website can also manage class schedules. As demonstrated in a new commercial, the iPad can facilitate a highly interactive learning experience. Textbooks are much less of a burden when carried in PDF format. In these ways and many more, technology can improve students' learning experiences. 

 

Featured Quote

“An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it. Truth stands, even if there be no public support. It is self sustained.”

-Mahatma Gandhi

UK DOESN'T VALUE COMPUTER SCIENCE?

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt is in for some backlash. While giving a speech in Edinburgh, Scotland, he talked about the unsatisfactory job the United Kingdom is doing in teaching its youth about computer science. He talked about how innovative the island nation has been in the past, like inventing television and computers. Schmidt seems to think that Silicon Valley should have more competition from across the pond.

Rather than a swarm of controversy, Schmidt was probably hoping to cause a wake-up call for Britons. Being at the heart of Google, and seeing the power of computer science firsthand, it is understandable that he is disappointed with his view of Britain's progress in the field of information technology. A person in his position gets to see just how wonderful the internet can be. He understands the benefits of fluency in computer programming. School administrators, however, might not have the same perspective. They deal with laws, regulations, disciplinary matters, and budgets. Admittedly “impolite,” Schmidt is concerned that UK schools focus too much on humanities and not enough on technical subjects. Ewan McIntosh asserts that the education system of Scotland and that of England are two very different matters. Perhaps Schmidt is only dissatisfied with England, and he is applying his observations to the whole island.

LISTENING TO MUSIC AT YALE

This course is called “Listening to Music” and is taught by Professor Craig Wright at Yale. While this course is focused on classical music, there are occasional references to modern styles such as hip-hop. The goal is to give the student “aural skills” necessary to understand and appreciate composition of music in the West. If you are interested in writing music, playing an instrument, or having an intellectual discussion over a glass of wine, this is a good place to start.

This course includes the following topics: musical genres, rhythm, melody, notes, scales, harmony, chords, sonata-allegro form, fugue, Benedictine chant, Baroque music, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler, Ravel, opera, and musical style.

Listening to Music (Yale)

Featured Quote

“What we find in books is like the fire in our hearths. We fetch it from our neighbors, we kindle it at home, we communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.”

-Voltaire

DOES THE BRAIN USE PROCEDURAL GENERATION?

Have you ever been surprised by a scent that suddenly brings back a long lost memory? It can be astounding how detailed memories are recalled just because of a single stimulus. The fragrance of a home-cooked meal can trigger a barrage of childhood memories. Looking at an apple, you can imagine what it tastes and smells like, perhaps remembering cold cider quenching your thirst on a summer afternoon. Someone recovering from mental trauma might hear a loud noise and be instantly returned to whatever calamity they suffered in the past. How does this process of remembering past events and scenes work? Nobody knows for sure. The brain is a complicated organ, and it is possible we may never fully understand its inner workings. But the process is reminiscent of procedural generation.

In case you have never heard of it before, procedural generation is a way of creating lots of detail in a virtual object without taking up a lot of computer memory. Fractals are good examples of this. Take a look at the “Koch snowflake” at right for a rough understanding of this concept. First, you start with a triangle. You might call this starting point the “seed” or “input.” The “procedure,” or “algorithm,” involves adding smaller triangles to the sides of the original one. Once you have repeated the procedure an infinite number of times, you have then “generated” the Koch snowflake. In its finished form, the snowflake has infinite detail and a perimeter of infinite length. Now imagine trying to save a perfect Koch snowflake in JPEG format. Since the perimeter is infinitely long, it would take an infinite number of pixels to represent the outline alone. But computers have finite/limited memory capacity. However, if you write some computer code to generate an image of the snowflake in real time, as you are viewing it, that code can be saved on a hard drive. You can zoom in as much as you want, and the code could keep generating just enough detail to fit on the screen.

Perhaps human memory works in a similar manner. Try as we might, the majority of humans cannot recall scenes with perfect detail. If you create a mental image of your kitchen, and focus on it, the level of detail is pitiful when compared to a high-resolution photograph of the same room. You can focus on smaller areas of the mental image, but the resolution of the overall picture is quite limited. This is quite similar to the fractal situation mentioned above. The brain only remembers detail in parts of a picture on which it is focusing. Humans (at least, most of us) cannot store the same amount of information with the same reliability that a computer can. It seems unlikely that we would store images pixel by pixel like digital photos. Maybe the brain takes in simple stimuli, such as smells or symbols, performs some complex procedure, and generates rich memories on the fly.

On this framework, memories are not stored data, but rather impromptu experiences generated when stimuli are processed through intricate neural pathways. The brain might only store basic building blocks of experience that constitute any and all memories. For instance, the colors we remember might be stored for future use like a painter's pallet. While flavors, aromas, sensations, and words might be kept for instant access within the brain, their combinations only exist in the transient experience of remembering a scene from one's life. When someone mentions “sunset,” you can instantly imagine a red and pink horizon with the orange sun sinking beyond the edge of the world. Maybe such a picture only exists in your brain for the few seconds that you imagine it. What the brain actually stores is some algorithm for recognizing the word “sunset” and pulling together the right colors and shapes to recreate a familiar picture.

Neuroplasticity is a well-known phenomena in which the brain “rewires” itself as part of the learning process and in reaction to incoming stimuli. Around the clock, your brain's neurons are changing their connections to one another: strengthening some connections, cutting off others, generally improving the neural network to perform whatever functions are needed. If you practice pitching a baseball often and long enough, your brain will organize itself to control your arms better for the purpose of throwing the ball. As you learn a second language, your brain is changing its own microscopic structure to process the additional vocabulary. What if this rewiring is a way of tweaking the algorithms that generate memories? Say an aviation enthusiast takes a flight that goes horribly wrong. The plane crashes and the enthusiast barely survives. Before the flight, the individual associated planes with positive emotions and aspirations of soaring like a bird. Saying “airplane” to this person before the accident might have triggered memories of the Wright brothers or looking at the ground from high up. After the crash, the individual's brain has rewired itself. Now, saying “airplane” might trigger memories of the crash and struggling to stay alive, accompanied by negative emotions like fear. Did the individual forget about the Wright brothers? Certainly not. The “algorithm” (that is, the pathways in the brain) has been altered so that the same stimulus,or “seed” (the word “airplane”), is processed differently than before, generating different memories.

MORE CALCULUS AT MIT

If you have gained competence in single variable calculus, and want to learn more, then you might try studying “Multivariable Calculus” from MIT. This course is taught by Professor Denis Auroux. The main focus here is on vector calculus and working with multiple variables. As is usual, you have access to transcripts, lecture notes, exams, and assignments in addition to the lecture videos.

This course includes the following topics: dot products, determinants, matrices, parametric equations, Kepler's Second Law, partial derivatives, least squares, second derivative test, chain rule, Lagrange Multipliers, partial differential equations, polar coordinates, change of variables, vector fields, path independence, flux, spherical coordinates, divergence theorem, line integrals, Stokes' Theorem, and Maxwell's Equations.

Multivariable Calculus (MIT)

CALCULUS AT MIT

This free course is called “Single Variable Calculus” and is taught by Professor David Jerison. It introduces students to differentiation of a single variable and integration. In addition to lecture videos there are transcripts, lecture notes, exams, and assignments available.

This course includes the following topics: rate of change, slope, limits, derivatives, chain rule, implicit differentiation, exponents, logarithms, hyperbolic functions, approximations, maxima, minima, Newton's Method, Mean Value Theorem, differential equations, definite integrals, fundamental theorems, work, probability, substitution, polar coordinates, infinite series, and Taylor series.

Single Variable Calculus (MIT)

Featured Quote

"Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn."

-Winston Churchill