Some great blog car­ni­vals this week; visit them if you want to read good blog posts on the fol­low­ing topics:

- Update 1: great edi­tion of the Philoso­phers’ Car­ni­val.

- Update 2: Encephalon #40: all top­ics neu­ro­science and psychology.

- Grand Rounds last week and this week: on health and medicine.

- Car­ni­val of Edu­ca­tion #160: on edu­ca­tional issues.

- Car­ni­val of Math­e­mat­ics #27.: great col­lec­tion of math-related resources.

Joanne Jacobs, edu­ca­tor, blog­ger and author of Our School: The Inspir­ing Story of Two Teach­ers, One Big Idea and the Char­ter School That Beat the Odds, par­tic­i­pates today in our Author Speaks Series with an excel­lent arti­cle on how “Schools won’t improve until admin­is­tra­tors and teach­ers can admit the prob­lems, ana­lyze what’s going wrong and try new strate­gies. Stu­dents won’t improve if they think they’re “spe­cial” just the way they are.” Enjoy, and feel free to add your com­ment to engage in a stim­u­lat­ing conversation.

Today we host a very stim­u­lat­ing essay on the impor­tance of problem-solving and encour­ag­ing com­plex game-playing for children’s com­plete “cog­ni­tive nutri­tion”. Enjoy!

——————–

Children’s Com­plex Thinking

– By Tom O’Brien and Chris­tine Wallach

Pop over to your neigh­bor­hood school and visit some class­rooms. Is what’s hap­pen­ing cog­ni­tively nutri­tive? That is, does it sat­isfy present needs and pro­vide nour­ish­ment for the future health and devel­op­ment of children’s thinking?

Or is it puni­tive, with lit­tle con­cern for present nour­ish­ment and future health and development?

The Genevan psy­chol­o­gist and researcher Her­mina Sin­clair said, Read the rest of this entry »

That is the goal of Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity Media X: to fos­ter deep col­lab­o­ra­tions between indus­try and acad­e­mia, as high­lighted in Busi­ness Week’s recent arti­cle The Vir­tual Meet­ing Room. The 5th Annual Media X Con­fer­ence on Research, Col­lab­o­ra­tion, Inno­va­tion and Pro­duc­tiv­ity served its pur­pose well for the last cou­ple of days: very fun and insight­ful pre­sen­ta­tions by Stan­ford researchers (and a few exter­nal experts) and a great list of par­tic­i­pants to get to know.

No doubt, a great source of men­tal stim­u­la­tion for all of us. Charles House, Media X’s Exec­u­tive Direc­tor, framed the dia­logue as an effort to gen­er­ate the right ques­tions and then engage the best minds in answer­ing them.

Some of (my) main take-aways

• “The world does not come to us as neat dis­ci­pli­nary prob­lems, but as com­plex inter­dis­ci­pli­nary chal­lenges” (great quote by Dean John Hen­nessy)
• Per­sonal Robot­ics is poised to explode soon-and soft­ware will be key (pre­dicted by Paul Saffo)
• An incon­ve­nient truth: Al Gore had to be con­vinced to bring his pre­sen­ta­tion into a movie, since he was very attached to each and every of his X hun­dred slides. We are happy it happened!
• Neu­ro­sci­en­tists know what pat­terns in the brain indi­cate cer­tain intentions-and are start­ing to use tech­nolo­gies to help immo­bi­lized patients com­mu­ni­cate with exter­nal devices based merely on their thoughts
• We need to learn to embrace change– a lot of it is coming!

Now, some key points from sev­eral pre­sen­ta­tions (there were more than these, but I couldn’t attend all). I encour­age you to visit the web­site of each pre­sen­ter if you are inter­ested in learn­ing more about that topic.

a. Paul Saffo on Inno­va­tion

• It usu­ally takes 20 years since basic sci­ence until appli­ca­tions reach inflec­tion point and take the world by storm
• Next big thing: per­sonal robot­ics. Indi­ca­tors: Read the rest of this entry »