[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7LI_7L_eM0[/youtube]

Dear Commons Community,

The Huffington Post is reporting that NASA is planning for a robotic spaceship to lasso a small asteroid and park it near the moon for astronauts to explore.

The ship would capture a 500-ton, 25-foot asteroid in 2019. Then using an Orion space capsule, a crew of about four astronauts would nuzzle up next to the rock in 2021 for spacewalking exploration, according to a government document obtained by The Associated Press.

Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., said the plan would speed up by four years the existing mission to land astronauts on an asteroid by bringing the space rock closer to Earth.

Nelson, who is chairman of the Senate science and space subcommittee, said Friday that President Barack Obama is putting $100 million in planning money for the accelerated asteroid mission in the 2014 budget that comes out next week. The money would be used to find the right small asteroid.

“It really is a clever concept,” Nelson said in a press conference in Orlando. “Go find your ideal candidate for an asteroid. Go get it robotically and bring it back.”

This would be the first time ever humanity has manipulated a space object in such a grand scale, like what it does on Earth, said Robert Braun, a Georgia Institute of Technology aerospace engineering professor who used to be NASA’s chief technology officer.

“It’s a great combination of our robotic and human capabilities to do the kind of thing that NASA should be doing in this century,” Braun said.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

David Brooks comments today on online learning and its influence on higher education.  Specifically he separates technical knowledge and practical knowledge and posits that the blended/hybrid learning environments are moving us to the “practical university”.   For example:

“My own [Brooks] stab at an answer would be that universities are places where young people acquire two sorts of knowledge, what the philosopher Michael Oakeshott called technical knowledge and practical knowledge. Technical knowledge is the sort of knowledge you need to understand a task — the statistical knowledge you need to understand what market researchers do, the biological knowledge you need to grasp the basics of what nurses do.

Technical knowledge is like the recipes in a cookbook. It is formulas telling you roughly what is to be done. It is reducible to rules and directions. It’s the sort of knowledge that can be captured in lectures and bullet points and memorized by rote.

Right now, online and hybrid offerings seem to be as good as standard lectures at transmitting this kind of knowledge, and, in the years ahead, they are bound to get better — more imaginatively curated, more interactive and with better assessments.

The problem is that as online education becomes more pervasive, universities can no longer primarily be in the business of transmitting technical knowledge. Online offerings from distant, star professors will just be too efficient. As Ben Nelson of Minerva University points out, a school cannot charge students $40,000 and then turn around and offer them online courses that they can get free or nearly free. That business model simply does not work. There will be no such thing as a MOOC university.

Nelson believes that universities will end up effectively telling students: “Take the following online courses over the summer or over a certain period, and then, when you’re done, you will come to campus and that’s when our job will begin.” If Nelson is right,then universities in the future will spend much less time transmitting technical knowledge and much more time transmitting practical knowledge.”

We can poke holes in Brooks’ position.  For instance, his examples assume that presently all college courses use a lecture model.  This is not the case.  Surely, many professors employ dialectic techniques, collaborative work, role playing, lab work, practicums, etc.  Furthermore, there are many college courses designed not to simply impart content or technical knowledge but to build skills in writing, critical thinking, and problem solving.  Regardless, Brooks raises legitimate issues and provides a rationale  for the blended/hybrid model of instruction.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

There has been growing interest in essay-grading software in the past several years.  A number of products are available that have proven to be at least marginally effective including IntelliMetric by Vantage, Intelligent Essay Assessor by Pearson Knowledge Technologies, SAGrader from Qualrus, and Criterion from ETS.   EdX, the nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to offer online courses on the Internet, has just announced that it will make its essay-grading software available free on the Web to any institution that wants to use it. The software uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers, freeing professors for other tasks.  The New York Times has a featured article this morning reviewing the issues associated with essay-grading software focusing on the EdX service.

“The new service will bring the educational consortium into a growing conflict over the role of automation in education. Although automated grading systems for multiple-choice and true-false tests are now widespread, the use of artificial intelligence technology to grade essay answers has not yet received widespread endorsement by educators and has many critics.

Anant Agarwal, an electrical engineer who is president of EdX, predicted that the instant-grading software would be a useful pedagogical tool, enabling students to take tests and write essays over and over and improve the quality of their answers. He said the technology would offer distinct advantages over the traditional classroom system, where students often wait days or weeks for grades.

“There is a huge value in learning with instant feedback,” Dr. Agarwal said. “Students are telling us they learn much better with instant feedback.”

But skeptics say the automated system is no match for live teachers. One longtime critic, Les Perelman, has drawn national attention several times for putting together nonsense essays that have fooled software grading programs into giving high marks. He has also been highly critical of studies that purport to show that the software compares well to human graders.

“My first and greatest objection to the research is that they did not have any valid statistical test comparing the software directly to human graders,” said Mr. Perelman, a retired director of writing and a current researcher at M.I.T.

He is among a group of educators who last month began circulating a petition opposing automated assessment software. The group, which calls itself Professionals Against Machine Scoring of Student Essays in High-Stakes Assessment, has collected nearly 2,000 signatures, including some from luminaries like Noam Chomsky.

“Let’s face the realities of automatic essay scoring,” the group’s statement reads in part. “Computers cannot ‘read.’ They cannot measure the essentials of effective written communication: accuracy, reasoning, adequacy of evidence, good sense, ethical stance, convincing argument, meaningful organization, clarity, and veracity, among others.”

But EdX expects its software to be adopted widely by schools and universities. EdX offers free online classes from Harvard, M.I.T. and the University of California, Berkeley; this fall, it will add classes from Wellesley, Georgetown and the University of Texas. In all, 12 universities participate in EdX, which offers certificates for course completion and has said that it plans to continue to expand next year, including adding international schools.”

We shall see!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Last week, the city of Atlanta was rocked when a 65-count indictment was announced by prosecutors alleging that 35 educators were involved in a conspiracy to inflate students’ test scores within the Atlanta public schools.    To be honest, this was not totally unexpected since the investigation has been reported on for the past several years.

Now we are faced with the question:  Who is responsible for this sad state of affairs?   If convicted, those indicted including the former school superintendent, Beverly Hall, share the major blame and should be punished to the full extent of the law.   Randi Weingarten, President of the United Federation of Teachers, in a press release yesterday states that some of the blame rests with the test-crazed systems in which many of our public schools are operating and especially in our large urban school districts:

“Tragically, the Atlanta cheating scandal harmed our children and it crystallizes the unintended consequences of our test-crazed policies. Standardized tests have a role in accountability, but today they dominate everything else and too often don’t even correlate to what students need to know to succeed.

No amount of testing will replace what works to improve teaching and learning: giving teachers the resources and tools they need to be great teachers and providing students with a rich and well-rounded curriculum. Covering up kids’ academic deficiencies cheats students out of the targeted help they deserve.

It is outrageous that schools in some states are spending up to 100 days a year doing test-prep or actual testing. We have to re-order our priorities and move our schools from a test-based culture to one that is deeply rooted in instruction and learning, so that our kids can become engaged participants in the knowledge economy and our democracy.

School districts in Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere placed enormous pressure on teachers to show improved scores, but the hard truth is that cheating on high-stakes testing doesn’t fix public schools or help kids. And even with this intense pressure, the vast majority of teachers do everything they can to help kids and never succumb to cheating. They know there are no shortcuts to success. Moving the needle requires a balanced approach that focuses on high-quality instruction; a rich curriculum; appropriate and useful assessments; and additional help and other resources like tutoring, after-school activities and social services to enable teachers and students to be successful.”

Amen to Ms. Weingarten!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Elaine and I spent the past week traveling in Turkey.  While we spent most of our time in Istanbul, we also managed a 700-mile side trip to Cappadocia in central Turkey.  For the entire trip, we logged in approximately  12,000 miles of travel.  I posted the highlights with photos most days as best I could given some Internet connection issues.  Below is a recap of those posts and our visit.

Without a doubt, Turkey has a lot to offer travelers interested in history, culture, geography and geology.

Tony

Arrive in Istanbul

Istanbul:  Mosques, Obelisks and The Cistern

Cappadocia, Kayseri, Devrent and Pasabag Valleys

Cappadocia and Goreme

Topkapi Palace

Istanbul’s Archeological Museums

Night Cruise on the Bosphorus

Dear Commons Community,

Last night we took a cruise on the Bosphorus, a little cool but comfortable enough to remain outdoors and enjoy the beautiful evening sights and lights.  Many of the major landmarks and bridges in Istanbul are highlighted in traditional or laser light.

While sitting in the moonlight of the open top deck, we chatted with several people, all of  whom were international tourists like ourselves. (According to one brochure, Istanbul is the fifth most popular international tourist destination in the world after places like New York, London and Paris.)

There was a young couple from Nuremburg, Germany, another couple from Toronto via Kenya, and a family (father, mother, teenage daughter, and son) from Munich. We learned that Istanbul is a favorite destination of Germans on vacation in the spring and summer. The couple from Toronto was getting ready to move to Baltimore so that he could do a residency for his M.D.  The wife of the couple from Nuremburg spoke four languages fluently (German, English, French and Spanish) and worked for an export company.  The father of the family from Munich worked for BMW and had had two tours for the company in New York, once living only a few miles from our home.

When the boat docked we said our good-byes, not likely to ever see each other again, but for three hours we were great companions.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

We spent Sunday afternoon at the Istanbul Archeological Museums, founded in 1891 to house the significant archeological finds of the 1880’s in Sidon (Lebanon).  The especially impressive Sarcophagi Wing contains an extensive collection from antiquity, including the Alexander Sarcophagus pictured below. It is considered one of the most important artifacts in the İstanbul Archaeological Museums, found in the Royal Necropolis in Sidon in 1887. Though it is called the Alexander Sarcophagus, in fact, it does not belong to Alexander the Great. It is thought to be the sarcophagus of Abdalonymus, the king of Sidon.

Another most interesting collection was from The Ishtar Gate built during the era of Nebuchadnezzar II, of the Neo-Babylonian Era, in late 6th century BC.  Reliefs formed from terracotta and glazed and embossed bricks are remarkably well-preserved.

The Museums also house fragments of the Treaty of Kadesh, the earliest known peace treaty, concluded between two major political and military powers in the 13th century BC. The clay tablet containing the text of this treaty is sealed by Hattusili III, the king of the Hittite empire and the Egyptian Pharaoh Rameses II. It was found during excavations in 1906.

All of the pictures in this post, except the Treaty of Kadesh, were taken somewhere within the Istanbul Archeological Museums.  Due to picture taking limitations, the photo of the Treaty of Kadesh fragments are taken from the Museums’ website.

Tony

Alexander Sarcophagus

Relief from The Ishtar Gate

Fragment from The Treaty of Kadesh