How great! Barbie is officially geeking out.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Computer Scientist won the popular vote for What career would you like Barbie to have next. The vote ultimately split between the under tweens and the adults. Adults pushed for Computer Scientist and the little girls pushed for Anchorwoman. Lots of little Katie Courics on the way.

Computer Scientist Barbie is black legging clad with dashes of bright pink. She is however wearing what appear to be jellies – flat shoes – this writer disapproves. Given Barbie’s natural propensity for heels this is not a match. Barbie is built for heels.

Actually, why is she wearing a handbag across her body, AND carrying a silver briefcase? Computer Scientist Barbie will have no trouble getting the rest of the lab to schlep her servers.

Apologies, that was terribly sexist of me.

I guess Mattel wants to convey an image that Computer Scientist Barbie is practical. You’re just as likely to see her at the Moscone Center for Apple World as you are to see her in Vegas for CES. I just can’t imagine her at an academic conference. Can you? The other speakers will be upstaged just because she walks in the room.

She glides between uber-geeks who live in labs and the rest of us who consume the products the lab rats conceive. She is the poster child for science. And it’s about time someone put a pretty face on computer science.

In 2008, women received only 18% of computer science degrees, down from 37% in 1985, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology.

At all ages we gravitate toward shiny, pretty things. If little girls play with a Comp Sci Barbie, perhaps they’ll be inspired to follow that path.

So the Big Question: MAC vs PC?

Who are we kidding?

Look at the way she is dressed. Bright green, Turquoise, splashes of hot pink . . . over black tights . . . pink shoes (though freakishly flat shoes) . . . this Barbie is a Mac.

If they had put her in a black turtleneck Jobs would’ve sued for trademark infringement.

Or she might’ve been confused for a ballerina.

Maybe the Ken doll will be PC.

What do you think about Computer Scientist Barbie?

Related posts:

1. Do Girls Suck at Math?

Did you know . . .

The fusiform facial area is a special area within the brain that processes facial images. This is apart from the processing of other spatial objects. The neurons literally light up in a different pattern depending on whether we are looking at a human face or a non-human object. It is even indicated that the brain can distinguish from a face that is actually in your presence and a face that is presented graphically (as in a picture or on a computer screen).

Pop, pop, pop!

This leads to different rates of cognition in general and contextual processing specifically.

Boldly taking the initiative with this recent research, Australia is conducting a national experiment by redesigning their classrooms. Reading some of the tactics they are employing in the redesigned classrooms, it is interesting to note that nonverbal influence in the classroom is first addressed through clutter reduction. Turns out we really do have trouble with understanding others if our environment is cluttered.

Which leads me to wonder about workplace productivity.

Studies bat back and forth concerning cluttered versus non-cluttered workspaces. Too clean versus too cluttered, and just what constitutes cluttered (your sandwich from yesterday = definitely too cluttered). I prefer a clean work space, but several colleagues seem to prefer and even claim better performance by having clutter around them. The “I know where everything is” syndrome. I even have students who bring seemingly every worldly possession they own to class so they can clutter the limited desk space. Do you really need to charge your phone, iPod and laptop while you are in class? At 9p on a Tuesday night?

Does it matter? What do you think?

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Rewriting the No Child Left Behind Law is in process. If you have children in school this may be important to you. If you are childless, it may seem unimportant.

That couldn’t be farther from the truth.

Whether or not you have children, if you plan to be living in 20 years, how our children are educated today will influence your quality of life. In 20 years, the children just starting school will be having their mid-20s crisis (did anyone have one of these prior to the baby boomers?). The children now finishing school will be leading major companies and entering the upper rungs of politics . . .

These kids are our future, literally.

So how are they doing?

Oh, #@$*@!

From what I can tell, they have a lot of self esteem. They feel good about themselves. Really, really, good about themselves. But, they don’t have any proof of earning that self esteem, and deep down, each child knows it.

Let’s take a quick look at our rankings in international tests. This chart demonstrates performance in problem solving – Math.

The reality check is that United States students performed well on some tests, not as well as might be expected on others, and very poorly on some.

There is a “counter myth” that the United States generally performed at or close to the international average in math and science. This is true, as far as it goes. However, some of the nations tested were decidedly disadvantaged compared to the United States, and the international average included the scores of those less favored nations. To say that the United States is near the international average largely means that our students fared better than students in some severely deprived countries. Many other advanced nations scored far above the average.  See the article with stats from the international tests.

But, surely there are ways to counter this information, right? The standard excuses that we educate all of our population so a comparison of our students is broader than in other countries . . . not true. How about the idea that our best students outperform the best students in other countries – again, that our average is pulled down by the lower end of students . . . again, not true. US best students ranked second to last of the 20 advanced nations. How about . . . our students are more attuned to cretive thinking whereas these other countries are drilling facts and using rote memorization?

It is true the other countries lean on heavy drills, memorization and other (apparently) seeming barbaric learning mechanisms. Guess what?

American students were dead last of the advanced countries and well below average for all countries in ability to apply knowledge through creative problem solving.

Perhaps rote memorization serves a purpose….

As a nation, we’ve been punked. Our children are learning to feel good, but they aren’t learning to read, write, add/subtract/multiply and divide. How can you feel good as an adult if you can’t cover the basic functions and then apply them. We are creating a nation of zombies.

When you cannot contribute to the vibrant, productive fabric of this country you are more likely to have problems with substance abuse and depression. Those are expensive problems for society….

Are there any bright spots?

Our 4th graders have often done well, especially in reading. Our 8th graders have done exceptionally well in civics.

Well that’s something. At least until you read the conclusion. Emphasis is mine.

However, American students have not generally performed as well as our national advantages would lead one to expect. Between 1995 and 2003 our students made good strides in factual learning in science and some improvement in factual learning in mathematics. They deteriorated in application of knowledge in all subjects between 2000 and 2003. They did very poorly in tests of original, creative, logical thinking. Most of the excuses for low American performance fail the reality test. Quibbles about sample participation and the age of students tested are specious and cannot explain away the obvious defects in US students’ performance.

The harder a student works, the more he will struggle with concepts, the more he will own those concepts once he gets them. Upon mastery of a concept, the child will develop a security that he knows something. That’s the beauty of it, he will know something. This leads to self esteem.

Self-esteem can not be taught, it must be earned.

The Secretary of Education is coming to your state by the end of December, look here for his schedule – then go give your input!

Related posts:

1. Education Issues – Teacher Signaling
2. Education Issues: Quantity, Quality?
3. Education Stimulus Money Establishes Test Standards, Can’t Fix Test Problems

In the Education Leadership post a few days ago Rob commented that teaching attracts liberals. So let’s dissect. Is it true that teaching attracts liberals or is there something more going on?

There are a few ways to go through this. Let’s start with the premise that teaching attracts liberals. That premise is either true or not true. How do we decide, scientifically? We have to identify the population of teachers as liberal or not liberal versus the same in the overall population.

If it is true that teaching attracts liberals disproportionally, what is it about teaching or liberalness that brings the two together?

Could it be that Teacher Unions somehow block non-liberals? Or matriculation for conservative PhD students is somehow blocked by liberal faculty….

If it is false, how did the profession get the reputation? Better yet, has it always been this way?

So let’s tackle these one at a time (1999 data from the North American Academic Study Survey):

By their own description, 72 percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges are liberal and 15 percent are conservative, says the study being published this week (April 2005). The imbalance is almost as striking in partisan terms, with 50 percent of the faculty members surveyed identifying themselves as Democrats and 11 percent as Republicans….

“What’s most striking is how few conservatives there are in any field,” said Robert Lichter, a professor at George Mason University and a co-author of the study. “There was no field we studied in which there were more conservatives than liberals or more Republicans than Democrats. It’s a very homogenous environment, not just in the places you’d expect to be dominated by liberals.”

In contrast with the finding that nearly three-quarters of college faculty are liberal, a Harris Poll of the general public last year found that 33 percent describe themselves as conservative and 18 percent as liberal.

Hmmmm.

The evidence I have for liberal professors blocking the advancement of conservative students is painful and anecdotal, so give me a few days to dig for the science to support or deny this – look for that next week.

Has it always been this way?

In the last major survey of college faculty, by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 1984, 39 percent identified themselves as liberal.

Well then.

What is perhaps more troubling is the ripple effect it is having throughout the education system. I have no beef with college professors who fly left of the spectrum. That’s your gig. And, yes, I will defend your right to have those opinions no matter how much I disagree with them.

But what about our primary and secondary education system? By the time a child reaches college he or she should be able to think critically and has been molded by mom and dad. When you are 5 years old, you take everything said to you at face value.

I have a very strong opposition to politics in the classroom for those who are not even the age of reason.

Give the lack of understanding for the basics (reading, writing, arithmetic) I see in adult graduate level students, there is no time for political shenanigans in the primary classroom. Get back to math, reading and writing. Science, critical thinking, scientific method – how to conduct an unbiased experiment and scientifically assess the results… those have a solid place in late elementary school and middle school. Being told smart cars are “better” in kindergarten, no place. No thank you.

So let’s leave this politicing aside and look at something perhaps more important, teacher qualifications. If teachers are qualified to teach our children how to think and to love learning, then perhaps the right/left (rather left/far left) leanings become less relevant . . ..

Oh dear.

According to the “Meeting Highly Qualified Teachers Challenge” report published in 2003, 28 of 29 states where the same standardized teaching tests are used, a teacher may be below the national overall (teaching and non-teaching populations) average in mathematics and still be a teacher. 29 of 29 for reading . . . and in some states you may perform in the bottom quarter (i.e. with more than 75% of the population performing better than you did) and still meet the requirements to become a teacher.

What?!

Yet, from my personal experience it is next to impossible to pursue the very low pay, grueling hours of teaching due to the certification process. Thanks, I’ll stick with private education.

As large donors to the Democratic party, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association have an agenda, but it doesn’t seem to be educating our young ones.

Want more? A site dedicated to information on teachers’ unions.

Related posts:

1. Cost of Education
2. Education Issues – Teacher Signaling
3. Education Issues: Quantity, Quality?

Leadership in Education is a big concern. The influence teachers have on our kids is immense and immediately powerful. I remember hearing one of my little sisters read her paper on the Iraq war circa 2004 at age 12 . . . it is safe to say she did not get those opinions from my parent’s house. Turns out her teacher had particularly strong feelings about the subject and decided to teach a current events lesson.

What is going on with education in the US? My family has been teaching for generations, elementary school through PhD. Most have been/are teachers, and a few have been administrators. Several have also been business owners . . . both teachers and business owners.

Is education now at a crossroads?

The internet has fundamentally changed both our access to information and our individual ability to provide information. If you wanted to share your thoughts on particle physics, 20 years ago you’d be lucky to find 3 people in your city who want to listen to you.

Now, you can find forums, blogs and social networking communities who want to hear what you have to say. Well, or at least they will put up with you.

This expands opportunities for learning across the broadest spectrum of subjects, yes?

We have the ability to have to increase interaction in education, but are we learning or just talking?

What is the value of education now available?

Looking at college courses you can now choose to attend college formally – as in, show up in person, or you can choose to attend class online. PhoenixOnline dwarfed all educational institutions last year and the year before and … and it made it a tidy profit. PhoenixOnline pays their teachers next to nothing so it isn’t attracting super stars though they do seem to require a PhD to teach. I calculated the pay for one class I was considering teaching and determined it to be $8-$12 and hour when you factor in the requirements on the teachers.

What’s the difference?

With Stanford making classes available online for free, is there any reason to use PhoenixOnline? I wouldn’t expect to get a higher quality product from Phoenix, but Phoenix has one thing Stanford does not. Degree granting accreditation.

So if you want your bachelor degree, you watch the PhoenixOnline version. The courses you watch at Stanford won’t earn you a degree from Stanford. You still have to show up and pay Stanford’s tuition if you want a degree. But you can get the degree much less expensively from PhoenixOnline.

Stanford can afford to offer the courses online because degree-seeking students have already paid to fill the classroom. The marginal cost to provide access to educationally motivated individuals is next to zero $.

We have two extremes. Inexpensive, essentially free education and very expensive education like MBA prep courses and top tier business schools.

From Seth Godin: The newly easy access to the education marketplace (you used to need a big campus and a spot in the guidance office) means that both the free and expensive options are going to be experimented with, because the number of people in the education business is going to explode (then implode)….

Just because something is free doesn’t meant there isn’t money to be made. Someone could charge, for example, for custom curricula, or focused tutoring, or for a certified (scarce) degree. When a million people are taking your course, you only need 1% to pay you to be happy indeed.

What he presents as options in the second paragraph is nothing new. Until you get to the 1% of people paying you. How do you feel about 1% of the people demonstrating a value for your labor?

If I work very hard for 5 years, I earn my PhD in esoteric topic X. If I struggle, stumble and fall gazillion times while launching a company, that may take me 4-5 years as well. Should I, should you, share the fruits of those labors for nothing with the vast majority of consumers? If you do, why would the 1% who might be willing to pay pay?

But, more importantly, from what you have noticed about human behavior, will any of those who do not pay value what I teach?

Related posts:

1. Education Issues: Performance Pay’s Effect is Weak?
2. Cost of Education
3. How to Fix Education — the Greatest National Security Crisis

Think you have mastered all that you are able to master and that life and learning are about to pass you by? Has your dream of challenging Eric Clapton to a little strumming vanished? Think that you are too old to pick up the violin?

There is hope!

Many adults consider themselves over-the-hill and not likely to learn new skills after a certain age. The good news and bad news:

It’s just not true!

In a study of budding musicians, researchers discovered that perception of self as a musician was a better predictor of learning and success with an instrument than amount of practice. See the details: Causing Cognition – Getting Great!

You might want to fantasize about becoming a world class guitarist now. Go do it.

Related posts:

1. Excellence versus Mastery

What is the major influence that turns children into little prodigies? Mind-blowing research in Neurology points us in a new direction.

Is it amount of practice? Is it in-born talent? Is it high-income parents – or other privileged access to resources?

No, no, no.

The driving factor that influences a child to be a prodigy is his self-perception. Now, before you race off to propose more self-esteem building exercises, know that self-perception is not the same thing as self-esteem.

Self esteem is concerned with how you feel about yourself. Do you feel capable? Do you feel pretty? Those kinds of questions are the ones associated with self-esteem.

In what may seem like a minor difference self-perception is about WHO you are. How you identify yourself as a whole person.

Are you an athlete, an academic or an actor? That is self-perception.

The students who did best are not simply the ones who practice the most, despite many theories. New work in neurology and psychology have determined a far better determinant of success: self-perception.

Students who see themselves as a musician before they even pick up an instrument are far more likely to develop into musical talents than those students who see themselves as “playing an instrument” even if the students who only see themselves as playing an instrument practice for more than twice as long. See the actual data outcome: Causing Cognition – Getting Great.

How will this change the way we approach training ourselves and our students for greatness?

Related posts:

1. Contextual Cues Influence Learning

Try, try, try again and one day you’ll get it . . . heard that one before? Turns out that may not be so helpful after all. Save some time and get a better result by utilizing this short cut.

New research coming out of the clever folks at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory including professor Earl Miller indicates that our ability to process information is actually enhanced by doing something successfully just before the new information is introduced. The research is introduced in an article in Neuron, the July 30th issue.

The abstract states, “Learning from experience requires knowing whether a past action resulted in a desired outcome. The prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia are thought to play key roles in such learning of arbitrary stimulus-response associations. Previous studies have found neural activity in these areas, similar to dopaminergic neurons’ signals, that transiently reflect whether a response is correct or incorrect. However, it is unclear how this transient activity, which fades in under a second, influences actions that occur much later. Here, we report that single neurons in both areas show sustained, persistent outcome-related responses. Moreover, single behavioral outcomes influence future neural activity and behavior: behavioral responses are more often correct and single neurons more accurately discriminate between the possible responses when the previous response was correct. These long-lasting signals about trial outcome provide a way to link one action to the next and may allow reward signals to be combined over time to implement successful learning.”

This absolutely jives with what I have seen in my ManhattanGMAT students. When student warms up with an easy problem she is more likely to get the next question of any level correct.

Tests were arranged using monkeys (is that what they call graduate students now??). The monkeys were rewarded if they responded correctly. Researchers found a lingering signal within certain brain cells when the monkey responded correctly.

What is perhaps more interesting is that they did not find a lingering signal after an incorrect answer. “But after an error there was no improvement. In other words, only after successes, not failures, did brain processing and the monkey’s [learning] behavior improve.”

This certainly gives me ideas of how to improve my private course materials and team facilitation exercises. If we are to maximize an individual’s performance, a series of building successes seems appropriate. But, is there a way to circumvent the process? I continue to dig ways to expedite the learning process and maximize cognition.

P.S. To find the article you’ll have to hunt down a copy of Neuron. Your best bet is to find a medical school library. Even very large, well funded public libraries do not carry it.

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