Nature in the Front Yard: Evolution in the City

 

The voyage on H.M.S. Beagle that led to the theory of evolution took Charles Darwin to many remote places, most famously, the Galápagos Islands, 1000 km off the coast of Ecuador in the Pacific Ocean.

But whether on a Pacific island or in the middle of New York city, the forces of evolution are in operation because science assumes that the universe is a vast single system in which basic laws are consistent no matter where you look. (Quinn et al., 2013)

Actually urban areas are different in one important respect which is that the rapidity of evolutionary forces depends on the “strength of natural selection — the relative benefit that a particular characteristic bestows on its bearer — is strong.” Even a small difference can matter greatly, especially in an urban environment because it is about as extreme and stressful as it is possible to find with its temperatures (warmer than surrounding countryside); its noise (a constant and invasive din that drowns out the usual warning sounds); further the urban landscape is encased in concrete and other substances hostile to the gripping of claws or traction for paws.  Then there are lots of humans, with their tempting trash along with their deadly cats and dogs, their waste that pollutes water, air, and soil.  (Schilthuizen, 2016)

This means that as the world becomes increasingly urbanized, more and more organisms are either being engulfed by urban areas or are gravitating to opportunities found in them.

Biologists therefore are “beginning to realize that the expanding urban sprawl is perhaps not something to be depressed about but something very exciting, as entirely new forms of life are evolving” in them. (Schilthuizen, 2016)

Jason Munshi-South, the director of the Munshi-South “Evolution in the Anthropocene” lab at Fordham University sees New York city as not only one of humanity’s greatest accomplishments but also as the home to native wildlife that are “subject to a grand evolutionary experiment.” (Munshi-South, Ted Ed talk)

Four hundred years ago the territory that makes up modern New York was covered by forest and meadow and was the home to a huge population of white-footed mice.

Four hundred years later the forests and meadows have largely been replaced by city streets, office buildings, multi-storied apartment buildings, and lots and lots of people, with their dangerously fast moving automobiles, noise, food waste, and trash while the white-footed mice are now crowded into the small patches of forest and meadows of the city’s parks. For Munshi-South the mice provide a model of what happens when wild organisms are engulfed by an urban ecosystem.

Advances in genetics have made it possible to identify changes that have occurred in a species because an organism’s genome is a record of its genetic history as well as that of its ancestors.

Genes are short segments of DNA which carry the recipes for creating the amino acids which are the building blocks for the proteins that actually do the cell’s work: its metabolism, its immune response, its reproduction, and so on.

If it happens that a single base pair on a gene changes and the change leads to an advantage for the mouse, for example, more babies, then this change will spread through a population because it will provide the individuals possessing the trait with increased fitness in the competition for survival. (Munshi-South, 2012)

After the examination of several thousand snippets of DNA from the genomes of 191 individual mice taken from 23 sites representing samples of both urban and “wild” environments, and then comparing the results with computer models the investigators were able to trace the history of the population of white-footed mice living in the area around New York.

About 12,000 years ago (coincident with the end of the last North American ice age) when rising sea levels separated Manhattan from the mainland, the genomes of the mice on Manhattan began to diverge from those on the mainland. Then about 400 years ago when Europeans began the settlement that soon became New York, more genetic divergence began to appear as the green space gave way to urban development. As Stephan Harris, a postdoctoral evolutionary biology researcher at Columbia University said, “The exciting thing is that the times of the divergence that we inferred lined up with the arrival of Europeans in New York.” (Netburn, 2016)

In the relatively brief time that New York has been populated by humans, the once genetically similar population of white-footed mice have evolved into genetically distinct populations each inhabiting a different park. The mice in one park are distinctive enough that the home park of a randomly selected New York white-footed mouse can be identified by examining just 18 snippets from its genome.

More significantly, the mice in different parks have developed park-specific traits related to their response to infection, their metabolism, and even their tolerance for environmentally occurring heavy metals like chromium and lead. (Munshi-South, 2012)

You don’t need a berth on the H.M.S. Beagle that will take you around the world to find evolution in action.

There are lots of great opportunities for “citizen science” projects where you can study nature in your home and neighborhood by tracking your local cats or the microscopic mites (Demodox) that are at home in the pores of your skin (yes, yours and mine).

You can find more about these projects at the Your Wild Life website.

 

Resources:

 

Menninger, Holly & Rob Dunn. Your Wild Life: Exploring biodiversity in our daily lives.

Munshi-South, Jason (2017). Evolution in Anthropocene. Retrieved from http://nycevolution.org

 

Munshi-South, Jason (2012). TED Ed.  Evolution in the Big City, retrieved from http://ed.ted.com/lessons/evolution-in-a-big-city

 

Netburn, D. (2016c). Why the City Mouse and the Country Mouse Have Different Genes. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-city-mouse-20160415-story.html

 

Schilthuizen, Menno (2016). Evolution is Happening Faster Than We Thought.  New York Times, Sunday Review, July 23, 2016. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/24/opinion/sunday/evolution-is-happening-faster-than-we-thought.html?_r=0#st

 

Quinn, Helen R., Schweingruber, Heidi, Keller, Thomas, & others, A. A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas. Washington, DC: National Research Council of the National Academies. Retrieved from http://www.nap.edu

 

tags:

evolution, urban ecosystem, fitness, gene, genome, genetics, white-footed mouse, New York, natural selection, citizen science, project-based curriculum

 

 

Our Ever-Stranger Universe

For most of human history, we believed that what we saw, heard, and felt was all that made up the real world. This changed around the beginning of the 20th century when modern science began to make uncomfortable discoveries such as that by Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen whose discovery of X-Rays revealed that even more of a reality that was invisible and undetectable by our ordinary senses, or by our “common sense.”
Roentgen won the first Nobel Prize for physics in 1901. Subsequent Nobel Prizes have continued to show how our normal world is really composed of many strange new worlds as revealed by microscopes, telescopes, X-rays, and gravity waves.
What we once imagined as being strange (“goblins, ghosts, and things that go ‘bump’ in the night”) are nothing when compared to the strangeness that science has revealed. As the British evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane noted the universe is not only queer, “but even queerer than we can suppose.”
And now it turns out that “everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter,” represents only about 5 percent of reality. The remaining 95 percent is composed of something called Dark Matter and Dark Energy, which are undetectable except by their effects.
The road to this discovery began with a series of investations made in the 1970s by Vera Rubin, a researcher at the Carnegie Institute in Washington, DC.
Rubin’s work focused on the dynamics of stars within galaxies, how the gravity within galaxies affects the stars in the galaxy. She was measuring the speed of the stars in various parts in a spiral galaxy by examining the spectra of light emitted by the stars. A star that is moving away from the observer will show that its spectrum will shift toward the red end of the spectrum while one moving toward the observer will shift to the blue end. The shift will be proportional to the star’s speed. (The Doppler Effect: the change in frequency or wavelength of a wave (or other periodic event) for an observer moving relative to its source.)
According to our understanding of the effect of gravity on the motion of stars, those at the center of a spiral galaxy (where there is more mass) should rotate faster than those farther from the galaxy’s center. (The phenomenon is known as the “galactic rotational curve.”) Strangely Rubin’s measurements showed that stars farther from the center of the galaxy were rotating as fast as those nearer the center.
Rubin and a colleague checked their data by examing the motion of stars in 60 other spriral galaxies and found the same outcomes. The outcomes revealed that there was a “galaxy rotational problem.”
Rubin’s solved it by using the rotational speed of the stars she studied in order to calculate how much mass was needed to account for the gravity needed for the stars to attain their observed rotational speed.
Her calculations revealed that the galaxies must contain about 10 times more mass than could be accounted for by the visible stars, and concluded that 90 percent of the mass in the galaxies she tested was invisible. “What you see in a spiral galaxy is not what you get,” Rubin observed. (AMNH, 2000)
Rubin’s results were treated with skepticism until, when in the 1990s, astronomers began to calculate what they anticipated would be the deceleration of the Universe’s expansion. The surprise was that, the Universe appeared to be accelerating instead. Calculations of the total visible mass in the universe against the gravity that was holding galaxies and solar systems together revealed a “missing matter problem.”
Every mass in the universe attracts every other mass proportionally to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Calculations of the gravity needed to account for how objects are held in galaxies and galaxy clusters, reveals that the visible universe (“everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter”) accounts for only about 5 percent of the mass needed. (You can see the calculations required to support these conclusions here.)
The remaining “roughly 68%” of the universe is dark energy while 27% is dark matter. (NASA, Universe)
So the normal matter, what has been studied deeply is not actually normal. What is normal, the “dark” matter and “dark” energy interacts gravitationally just like ordinary matter does—clumping into galaxies and galaxy clusters. It is “dark” because it doesn’t interact in any way that we can so far detect with light. “It is not made up of atoms and doesn’t carry an electron charge.” (Randall, 2017)
This is science, so investigations continue.
Brian Koberlein, an astronomer at Oberlin College, explains the facts that support the Dark Matter/Dark Energy theory.
Since the 1920s discrepencies have been found that are explained by either that our understanding of gravity is wrong or that there is more mass in the universe than we can see.
But our current gravitational model does seem to work and alternatives that have been proposed have been disproved by observation, leading to the conclusion that the second clause in the previous sentence is true.
Next the proposition that there are examples of mass that only interacts weakly with light is true. Neutrinos have mass and weakly interact with light but there must be additional types of dark matter.
Koblein concludes with the statement that we “know…how much Dark Matter and Dark Energy. there is in the universe, as well as its distribution among the galaxies. “Dark Matter is not just a name we use to hide our ignorance.”

Resources:
Kobelein, Brian (2017). Dark Matter Works. Retrieved from https://briankoberlein.com/page/2/?s=dark+matter

NASA Universe. Dark Energy, Dark Matter. Retrieved from https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-is-dark-energy

Randall, Lisa (2017). “Why Vera Rubin Deserved a Nobel Prize
NASA (2017). Dark Energy, Dark Matter. Retrieved from https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-is-dark-energy

Vera Rubin (2000). Retrieved from http://www.amnh.org/education/resources/rfl/web/essaybooks/cosmic/p_rubin.htm

Tags:
dark matter, dark energy, Vera Rubin, gravity, strange universe, Nobel Prize, astronomy, cosmology

Changing the Relationship Between Knowledge and the Child

Robotics combines engineering, engineering design, and technology in ways that, in the words of Marina Bers of the Tufts DevTech group, “connects the T and the E of STEM” and certainly merits a prominent position in STEM education.
Robotics appears to fit into the STEM sequence as a subject for older students. At the Tufts DevTech research group however, robotics has been introduced successfully to pre-Kindergarten children reasoning that because interventions that begin early are, in the long run, less costly and also have greater impacts than those that begin later, robotics should be begun early
Watch this DevTech produced video clip that documents the robotics work of young children.
The spirited dancing of the children is accompanied by dance movements enacted by two-wheeled robots, which while less enthusiastic are more rhythmic and more disciplined than the children’s.
It is notable that although the robots are better at following the music’s rhythms, the robots’ movements were programmed by the same somewhat syncopated children. The video supports the case that young children are quite capable of engaging in robotics in non-trivial ways.
In their work with young children the DevTech research group uses a computer language called CHERP (Creative Hybrid Environment for Robotic Programming). The CHERP language substitutes a set of interlocking wooden blocks for typed in text. Each block is labeled with a graphic representing a command such as FORWARD, BACKWARD, BEGIN, or END. The program is “written” by assembling the commands by arranging the blocks. “The shape of the interlocking blocks and icons creates a physical syntax that prevents the creation of invalid programs and also eliminates the possibility of typographical errors,” notes Marina Bers. Once the blocks have been arranged to create a program for the robot to follow, a scanner on the robot is used to read the program into the robot’s memory.
The behavior of the robot will mimic the program developed by the child-programmer. Because the program is represented by the arrangement of blocks, children are able to make changes to the program by a rearrangement of the blocks. In addition, they can observe one another’s work and to see how other children have solved a particular problem (“how did you make the robot spin five times?”)
In a number of published studies Bers and her colleagues have collected evidence that
Robotics offers young children and teachers a new and exciting way to tangibly interact with traditional early childhood curricular themes. This study demonstrates that it is possible to teach Pre-Kindergarten children to program a robot with developmentally appropriate tools, and, in the process, children may not only learn about technology and engineering, but also practice foundational math, literacy, and arts concepts. While there are many challenges to overcome when implementing robotics in a busy Pre-Kindergarten classroom, our work provides preliminary evidence that teaching young children about and through computer programming and robotics using developmentally appropriate tools may be a powerful tool for educating children across multiple domains.
What is the reason that in addition to robotics and computer programming the “children may not only learn about technology and engineering, but also practice foundational math, literacy, and arts concepts?”
Seymour Papert who was a developer of the computer language LOGO in the 1970s asserted that a programming language like LOGO (or CHERP) changes the relationship between the child and knowledge.
He argued that most school instruction was based on “transmission” or the passing of “knowledge” from its possessor (the teacher) to the receiver (the student). When computers are used in schools, Papert’s argument continued, they are used to “program the child” in the same way that teachers program the child with the “required” knowledge.
The LOGO computer language was designed to enable the child to communicate with the computer. LOGO included a graphical Turtle that the computer’s user could move around on the screen. RIGHT would cause the Turtle to turn 90° to the right. FORWARD 10 would command the Turtle to move 10 paces ahead and so forth.
In the LOGO environment, the traditional relationship between the child and the knowledge was changed.
[t]he child, even at preschool ages, is in control: The child programs the computer. And in teaching the computer how to think, children embark on an exploration about how they themselves think. The experience can be heady: Thinking about thinking turns the child into an epistemologist, an experience not even shared by most adults. (Papert)
In addition, in the usual “teacher as source of knowledge,” model the child is placed in the “got it right/wrong” mode, and worse may not know either what was wrong or how to fix the error.
As Papert notes, when you learn to program, you seldom get it right the first time. “Learning to be a master programmer is learning to become highly skilled at isolating and correcting “bugs,”….
This is also the case with products of the intellect; they are usually neither “right” or “wrong” but are “buggy” works in progress.
If Papert is correct, changing the relationship between the child and knowing is fundamental to learning. Robotics with young children is perhaps a place to begin the change.
Resources:
Epistemologist: one who studies epistemology: the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion.
Marina Umaschi Bers, Safoura Seddighin, and Amanda Sullivan
Ready for Robotics: Bringing Together the T and E of STEM in Early Childhood Teacher Education Jl. of Technology and Teacher Education (2013) 21(3), 355-377

Sullivan, A., Kazakoff, E. R., & Bers, M. U. (2013). The Wheels on the Bot go Round and Round: Robotics Curriculum in Pre-Kindergarten. Journal of Information Technology Education: Innovations in Practice, 12, 203-219. Retrieved from http://www.jite.org/documents/Vol12/JITEv12IIPp203-219Sullivan1257.pdf

Seymour Papert (1980). Mindstorms, Basic Books.

Inquiry: Earning the Right to Believe

Crazy belief or not?
“Ground up unicorn horn will detect the presence of poison.”
In early modern Europe, belief in unicorns and the virtue of their horns was widely accepted. As would be expected, people acted on their beliefs. Thus, a supposed unicorn horn was of course valuable because of its ability to detect poison. So one that belonged to the king of France was priced at £20,000 pounds in 1553. Mary Stuart (1542-87), Queen of Scotland bought a piece of unicorn’s horn and used it regularly to test for poison. (Jackson, 2004)
Of course, it is now well-known that what were believed to be unicorn horns are in fact the tusks of narwhals and that they have no special poison detecting properties. (Maynard, 2014)
We know this because investigators have inquired into the belief; that is, searched systematically for evidence that would give us the right to believe or not in the existence of unicorns.
While there are a variety of different ways that scientists conduct their investigations, at the core of all science is inquiry with its assumption that beliefs about the natural world must be earned by patient investigation. To the scientific mind it is wrong to “believe on insufficient evidence or to nourish belief by suppressing doubts and avoiding investigation.”(Clifford, 1876, p. 292)
The practical value of inquiry is that it provides “strategies with which to examine evidence systematically, interpret, and control our surroundings. Knowledge of science can enable us to think critically and frame productive questions. Without evidence that supports or refutes an idea we are wholly dependent on others as “experts.” With evidence, we are empowered to become participants rather than merely observers.” (Michaels and others, 2007, p. 2)
A vivid illustration of the importance of inquiry can be found in the case of Dr. Andrew Wakefield, a British physician and researcher.
Along with twelve colleagues, Wakefield published a research paper in the British medical journal Lancet in 1998 that “reported on 12 developmentally challenged children” who were diagnosed with “regressive”“autism as well as with “non-specific colitis.” The paper identified a “new syndrome” that linked brain (autism) and bowel disease” and which was caused by vaccination with the MMR vaccine. (Deer, 2011)
The MMR vaccine has been used successfully since 1971 to immunize infants against measles, mumps, and rubella, so naturally the news that MMR vaccine was connected to autism spread rapidly. The consequence of the news was a world-wide scare about the MMR vaccine as well as a reduction in the number of children who were immunized against measles, mumps, and rubella. In Britain the vaccination rate fell from 92% to 78.9%, for example.
Wakefield’s article also caused the development of a movement against all childhood vaccinations including, for example, the DTaP that protects children from diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis, or whooping cough.
Despite its publication in the Lancet, the experiment on which the conclusions were based seemed flawed. It was a study based on a sample of only 12 children; there was no control group; the data wasn’t analyzed as a whole but selectively; its conclusions were highly speculative (that MMR was related to autism) given the long history of the successful use of the MMR vaccine.
A more detailed inquiry by a journalist named Brian Deer by soon found significant problems in the research.
For example, some of the children’s problems were detected months before the child had received the MMR vaccine.
Even more revealing was Deer’s finding that Dr. Wakefield had been employed a lawyer and paid £400,000 by a lawyer working with a group of parents who were suing the pharmaceutical company that produced the MMR vaccine, and that his research was to create evidence to be used in the law suit.
Even the selection of the subjects for the study was facilitated by the lawyer for whom Wakefield worked. The lawyer solicited subjects for the study by specifying particular symptoms which meant that “the evidence that launched the vaccine scare — was bound to be found by the …clinicians because this was how the children were selected.” (Deer), 2011)
The sensational nature of the Wakefield conclusions spurred a flurry of investigations, none of which was able to confirm the Wakefield findings.
As the cascade of problems appeared, ten of the twelve co-authors of the article retracted their support for the MMR-autism connection because “no causal link was established between MMR vaccine and autism as the data were insufficient.” (Rao, and others 2011)
Ultimately, the British General Medical Council (GMC) investigated Dr. Wakefield’s possible misconduct. In January of 2010, a tribunal of the GMC found three dozen charges against Wakefield proved, including dishonesty and the abuse of developmentally challenged children. The tribunal found that Wakefield “had failed in his duties as a responsible consultant, acted both against the interests of his patients, and “dishonestly and irresponsibly”“in his published research.
The editor of the Lancet fully retracted the article and stated that the paper was utterly false and that the journal had been deceived. (See the notes in resources for the sources)
Despite the fact that inquiry from a variety of sources revealed that both Wakefield and his research to be fraudulent and was retracted from the medical literature in 2010, still in 2016 self-declared experts including celebrities and even some politicians continue to disseminate the fraudulent claim that vaccinations are the cause of autism, with the consequence that parents are led to withhold vaccination and thus protection against serious disease from their children.
There were outbreaks of measles attributed to lack of immunization in the UK in 2008 and 2009 as well as in the U.S. as well as outbreaks of pertussis (whooping cough) with 48,000 cases with fatal outcomes for 20 children. (CDC, http://www.cdc.gov/pertussis/outbreaks/trends.html)
These facts support Clifford’s warning that failure to work for the right to believe by rigorous inquiry has the result that we “all suffer severely from the maintenance and support of false beliefs and the fatally wrong actions which they lead to… . There is a danger to society that “is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them….” (Clifford, 1876, p. 294)
Resources:
Clifford, W.K. (1876). The Ethics of Belief, Contemporary Review (29) 1876.

Deer, Brian (2011). How the case against the MMR virus was fixed. BMJ 2011; 342 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.c5347 (Published 06 January 2011)

Jackson, William (2004). The use of unicorn horn in medicine. The Phamaceutical Journal, 18 December 2004.

Maynard, James (2014) Narwhal tusk – Scientists finally solve its real purpose. TechTimes retrieved http://www.techtimes.com/articles/4589/20140320/narwhal-tusk-scientists-finally-solve-real-purpose.htm

Michaels, and others (2007). Ready, Set, Science! (National Research Council, Washington, DC)

Rao, Saythyanarayana and Chittaranjan Andrade (2011). The MMR vaccine and autism: Sensation, refutation, retraction, and fraud. Indian Journal of Psychiatry 2011 Apr-Jun; 53(2): 96-96. doi: 10.4103/0019-5545.82529

Notes on the Wakefield Case:
“MMR-row doctor failed in his duties”. Yorkshire Evening Post. 28 January 2010. Archived from the original on 30 January 2010. Retrieved 28 January 2010.

Triggle, Nick (28 January 2010). “MMR scare doctor ‘acted unethically’, panel finds”. BBC News. Archived from the original on 28 January 2010. Retrieved 28 January 2010.

Boseley, Sarah (28 January 2010). “Andrew Wakefield found ‘irresponsible’ by GMC over MMR vaccine scare”. The Guardian. London. Archived from the original on 14 February 2011. Retrieved 9 January 2011.

Tags:
Inquiry, W.K. Clifford, The Ethics of Belief, the right to believe, Andrew Wakefield, The Lancet, measles, mumps, rubella, MMR vaccine

“I really hope it works:” Digital Technology for Instruction

 

There are many classrooms like English teacher Amy Furman’s featured in a 2011 article Classroom of the Future: Stagnant Scores.

Amy’s thirty-one students are studying Shakespeare’s As You Like It, taking advantage of 21^st century digital technology.

Amy is not “giving the students notes” but is circulating among her students observing, offering comments and suggestions as her laptop-equipped students engage themselves with the play in very nontraditional ways.

In the place of an essay on the play’s plot, the students are blogging, or creating Facebook pages for the characters, while others are writing about why the love-smitten Silvius would like a particular rap by Kanye West.

Amy expressed her pleasure with what is going on in her “very dynamic classroom” adding “I really hope it works.”(Richtel, 2011)

This technology-rich classroom is one outcome of a 2005 referendum in which the voters passed a bond referendum that gave the Kyrene School District in Arizona $45 million to “transform the very nature of the classroom, turning the teacher into a guide for students who will learn at their own pace on Internet-connected devices.”

The high cost of the technology needed for the transformation makes the question whether it works a matter of concern.

In 2011, as now, the evidence that such investment in digital technology has been at best ambiguous. Overall, the data that supports the use of technology is “pretty weak” according to Tom Vander Ark, former executive director for education and an investor in educational technology companies.(Richtel, 2011)

In the eleven years after it passed its technology referendum and five years since Amy Furman expressed both the pleasure of teaching in a technology-rich classroom as well as her “hope” that it works, Kyrene School District remains a technology-rich school system. The students in its nineteen elementary and middle schools perform above average, earning an “A” ranking in the Arizona school accountability system.

Its 2016 Website cites the district’s “technology enhanced curriculum” and the fact that

Throughout the entire district, every classroom is enhanced with a variety of technology tools: wireless laptop computers; many with multi-touch display, a projector, a document camera, and iPads, so that students have hands-on access to technology as part of their everyday instruction and learning. Elementary classrooms also have interactive whiteboards. Students use industry-standard word processor and spread sheet programs, specialized graphics and education software, and web-based applications and information sources. Teachers participate in regular staff development and mentoring programs to help them to better use these incredible tools. (Kyrene School District)

Is Kyrene’s success the result of its rich technology or because in it also has both technology along with a well-developed system of instructional support for its teachers: academic coaches and educational technology specials for all subjects?

In education there are no “silver bullets” whether educational technology, textbooks or curriculum.   “One-to-one laptop programs may simply amplify what’s already occurring—for better or worse—in classrooms, schools, and districts. (Goodman, 2011)

If Kyrene is a positive example of the implementation of educational technology, what happened with the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Instructional Technology Initiative (ITI) is a negative one.

The debacle began in 2013 with a district investment of $1.3 billion that was to put an Apple iPad loaded with instructional software from educational giant Pearson in the hands of every child in every school. But by 2015 the district wanted out of the deal claiming that the software didn’t work and that the iPads had fatal security holes.

An observer noted that if one of the largest school districts in the nation, one of the largest educational publisher and the largest technology company couldn’t successfully integrate instructional technology into classrooms, who could? (Lapowski, 2015)

The answer lies up the coast from Los Angeles,  where the Milpitas Unified School District also has made a significant investment in personal technology and has successfully used blended learning to create personalized instruction for its students.

The contrast between the two school districts in how their instructional technology programs came about is instructive.

In Los Angeles, the Instructional Technology Initiative began at the top as did the Milpitas project. However, in Milpitas, Cary Matsuoka, the superintendent began by asking his principals the question: “If you could design the school of the future, what would it look like?”

His goal was to “give principals and teachers the autonomy to determine what would work best for their schools.” Mandating from the top, he reflected, and you “get compliance, where people go through the motions.”

The answers also got him and his district to the understanding that one-to-one wasn’t needed because the principals proposed a “rotation model” in which students would  use the devices in shifts.

The district chose Chromebooks; they are less expensive than iPads because they are cloud based, central management and updating are less of a hassle.

As a departing Board of Education recalled about his eight years on the Board”We went through both academic and sport renewal and modernization, implemented blended learning and common core, build a high-tech infrastructure and new athletic facilities.… For the past eight years, we saw student achievement improved significantly, we are also financially solid.” (Mohammed, 2016)

The contrasting examples provided by Kyrene and Milpitas versus the LAUSD debacle support the contention that educational technology if it is implemented based on a shared vision that include the identification of the actual problem to be solved, if the school and district leadership supports all aspects of the implementation. Implementation requires the development of a technology infrastructure and a culture of professional learning that includes the community, parents and guardians, all school personnel, and the development of a coaching/mentoring model. This last is important because the technology will be a catalyst for changing the connections between learning and instruction.

Resources:

Greaves, T., Hayes, J., Wilson, L., Gielniak, M., & Peterson, R. Project Red: Revolutionizing Education: Nine Keys to Student Achievement and Cost Effectivenss. Retrieved from https://www.k12blueprint.com/sites/default/files/Project-RED-Technolgy-Factor.pdf

Goodman, B. (2011). Research Says…/One-to-One Laptop Programs Are No Silver Bullet. EdLeadership, 68), 78-79. Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational_leadership/feb11/vol68/num05/One-to-One_Laptop_Programs_Are_No_Silver_Bullet.aspx

Lapowski, I. (2015). What Schools Must Learn From LA’s IPad Debacle. Wired. Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/2015/05/los-angeles-edtech/

Mohammed, Aliyah (2016). Milpitas: School boar names permanent MUSD superintendent. The Mercury News, November 17, 2016. Retrieved from http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/11/17/milpitas-school-board-names-permanent-musd-superintendent/

Richtel, M. (2011c). In Classroom of Future, Stagnant Scores. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/technology/technology-in-schools-faces-questions-on-value.html

Seymour Papert: Innovative Technologies

 

In 1944, President Roosevelt attributed the coming victory over the Axis to America’s scientific leadership in the development and application of innovative technologies to war. He envisioned that it was important that the same efforts should continue during the coming peace.  The vision was that American institutions like schools would improve their practices by the implementation of innovative technologies.

But history has shown that institutions like schools are prone to adopt potentially innovative technologies, not to innovate, but to continue to do traditional work only more efficiently.

When computers entered education its adopters were quick to use the “innovative” technology to serve the traditional purposes of schools—the transmission of knowledge from teacher/computer to student.

In the 1960s a Stanford University collaboration with IBM led to the introduction of “computer-aided [or assisted] instruction (CAI) into some elementary schools. A mainframe computer delivered “a linear presentation of information with drill and practice sessions.” (Arnold, 2000)

Even when the personal computer was introduced in the late 1970s the idea that in addition to their usefulness in playing games, entertainment, keeping recipes, and banking, they could also play a role in schools.

In place of the live teacher there would a computer program that would dole out information to the students. It would even automate the checks for “understanding” by administering quizzes and tests. Learning was defined as a change in behavior; learning was correctly choosing the right answer to the given question. A correct choice would elicit a pleasant chime; a wrong one would result in a harsh buzz.

On the other hand, there were factors that pushed institutions to rethink the uses of innovative technologies.

The advent of the computer itself was a catalyst for change.

In 1940 Alan Turing had created “Colossus” a computer that made it possible for the British to read the German military’s “unreadable” Enigma code. If reading secret code by a computer was possible, could they learn to do other human-like tasks?

Searching for answers to this question drove changes in computer science, linguistics, anthropology and psychology, and led to the development of the new field of cognitive science.

The launch of Sputnik in 1957 by the Soviets motivated Americans to look critically at the business as usual in science and mathematics instruction, leading to a flowering of innovative mathematics and science curriculum that was published during the decades following.

The new curriculum materials added “critical thinking” and problem-solving” to the traditional school agenda.  This focus got educators to begin looking seriously at the previously ignored work of Jean Piaget on how the minds of very young children matured in response to the environments in which they lived.

The currents that supported changing how schools worked: the cognitive revolution, child development, computational technologies, and reform curriculum come together in the person of Seymour Papert.

Two doctoral degrees in mathematics, four years of work with Piaget in Geneva, an engineering professorship at MIT, work with Marvin Minsky at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, extensive work with children in Brookline, Massachusetts, and his own personality grounded his views that a computer could be a learning tool for children who would program it rather than a teaching machine that would program children. (Stager, 2016)

A technology is embodied knowledge. A pry bar used to lift a rock is the physical embodiment of the ratio of output forces to input forces.

This means that you can “deconstruct” the action of the pry bar back to the science behind it.

In an autobiographical reflection Seymour Papert tells about his early childhood fascination with the differential gearbox of a car. His playful turning of one gear made another turn in a different direction. He saw how a small gear would need to turn many times in order for a larger gear to turn once.  Later, when he was in elementary school and met the multiplication tables he thought to himself that they were simply “my gears” in a different form.  A small gear with nine teeth turns a larger gear with thirty-six teeth. The little gear will need to turn four times in order for the large gear to turn once so that each of the nine teeth contact each of the thirty-six teeth. His affection for the gears now included the multiplication tables. (Papert, 1980, p.2)

When he discovered that “some adults—even most adults—did not understand or even care about the magic of gears, he wondered why what was “so simple for him to be incomprehensible to other people?” He rejected his father’s suggestion that the difference was “being clever.”

“Slowly I began to formulate what I consider the fundamental fact about learning: Anything is easy if you can assimilate it to your collection of models. If you can’t, anything can be painfully difficult.” (Papert, 1980)

Children’s learning is supported by an environment that is rich resources from which children can build models.

It was for this reason that he and colleagues developed the LOGO language in 1967 at MIT. It was designed to provide tools to help children construct their own models and elaborate others on their own.

Using the LOGO language even young children can create models that they can use to assimilate new understandings with older ones, just as young Seymour assimilated his gears with the multiplication tables. In place an “empty model” like the verbal definition of a square, the child can “walk” the square along with the turtle he directs with LOGO.

“The effect of work with Turtle geometry on some components of school math is primarily relational or affective: Many children have come to the LOGO lab hating numbers as alien objects and have left loving them. In other cases, work with the Turtle provides specific intuitive models for complex mathematical concepts most children find difficult. The use of numbers to measure angles is a simple example.” (Papert, 1980, p. 32)

Seymour Papert passed away on July 31, 2016, at age 88.

 

Resources:

Arnold, D. N. (2000). Computer-Aided Instruction. Retrieved from http://encarta.msn.com

Bilikstein, P. Seymour Papert’s Legacy: Thinking About Learning, and Learning About Thinkinig. Retrieved from https://tltl.stanford.edu/content/seymour-papert-s-legacy-thinking-about-learning-and-learning-about-thinking

Novak, M. (2012). Predictions for Educational TV in the 1930s. Retrieved from http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/predictions-for-educational-tv-in-the-1930s-107574983/?no-ist

 

Papert, Seymour (1980). Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas. Retrieved from http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/mindstorms.pdf

 

Stager, G. S. (2016). Seymour Papert (1928-2016). Nature, 537(7620), 308. doi:Obituary

 

Tags:

personal computers, LOGO, Jean Piaget, Marvin Minsky, Sputnik, child development, cogntive science, Artificial Intelligence

 

 

 

¹ Commodore PET, Radio Shack TRS-80, and Apple ][ all appeared in 1977

ESSA, Measuring the Benefits of School Improvement: And How To Do It

Even by the crudest measures, education benefits the individual in terms of earnings and the economy as a whole in more productive workers. The longer an educational system holds on to students, the better for both the individual and economy. The years of education is a measure is called “educational attainment.”

Dissatisfaction with the number of years of schooling as a measure of economic impact led Eric A. Hanushek and two international colleagues to develop a measure that better captures what students have actually learned during their years in school. As Hanushek, et. al. describe educational attainment: “…it hardly matters how long one sits at a school desk if one learns little while occupying the seat.” (Hanushek, Ruhose, & Woessmann, 2016)

The model developed by Hanushek, et. al. uses a measure which they call “knowledge capital” which is a state’s NAEP mathematics scores over time. This measure,  added to traditional measures provides a way to document the long-term impact of student-achievement levels on economic growth, as well as the value of the monetary return for school improvement efforts, state by state[1].

By measuring the growth of each of the fifty U.S. states for the period 1970-2010, the authors show that a state’s knowledge capital is related to the state growth in per-capita GDP.

States like Alabama, Mississippi, Nevada, and Utah suffered from both low math achievement and low economic growth, while states like North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and Virginia had both high levels of math achievement along with higher levels of economic growth.

While there are exceptions to the general findings, the authors conclude that “achievement levels that are 1 standard deviation higher — for example having the average worker in a state achieve at the 69^th  percentile rather than the 31^st   percentile of the overall distribution of cognitive skills — yield an average annual growth that is 1.4 percentage points higher.” (Hanushek, Ruhose, & Woessmann, 2016)

The article includes a an interactive map that can be used to project future gains in GDP growth under four different reform scenarios.

For example, first scenario describes what would happen if all the states were able to take actions that would increase the knowledge capital to the level of Minnesota (the best in the U.S.). Under that scenario “the overall gains would equal, in 2015 dollars, $76 trillion, or more than four times the current GDP of the United States.”

South Carolina ranks 40^th  in terms of growth 1970-2010. Its per-capita DGP is $31,819 and has grown 1.99% over the period.  Under the “all states to the U.S. best” scenario, the value of South Carolina reform efforts would be $992 billion which equals 485% of the state’s current per-capita GDP and would increase the state’s GDP by 41% by 2095.

Hanushek and his colleagues are careful to point out that school reform is a long-term project. They assume that it takes a decade of effort before a reform is fully implemented, with student skills steadily improving over that time.

The message from Hanushek, et. al, is that the recently passed Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) gives state and local educators a great deal of flexibility to take decisive action that will improve their state’s knowledge capital.  Given the potential of large gains for taking the right actions, the question becomes what kinds of action would help the state build its knowledge capital?

Massachusetts underwent a serious reform effort that began in the late 1980s. Its example suggests the necessary conditions for sustained and successful reform.

The success of reform in Massachusetts is supported by the fact that if it were an independent nation it would rank among the top ten nations in student learning. Its eighth graders rank number two in science and sixth in mathematics. Low-income children of color do much better than their peers in other U.S. states.

It wasn’t always that way.

In a 1991 report authored by the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education it was reported that the state faced a crisis because “the public education system is failing to provide its students with the knowledge and skills necessary for them to be productive, informed citizens in coming decades…The inability of many public school students/graduates to qualify for entry-level jobs or to compete successfully with their counterparts from other industrialized countries is a clear signal that the education system needs to undergo dramatic improvements soon.”(MBAE, 1991, pp.  ES-1)

Noting that Massachusetts over the past two decades has been consistently near the top of any list of states with the most successful school reforms (it ranks 2^nd  in the Hanushek, et. al. analysis), Achieve.org looked at the decisions Massachusetts made beginning more than 20 years ago and which resulted in sustained improvement in the state’s knowledge capital.

In the Achieve analysis, there are six “key strategies” identified. It seems to me that two of these stand out because they are the most difficult to do but seem to the ones that set the Massachusetts reform apart from those in other states.

What stands out in Massachusetts was what was termed the “grand bargain” are two factors: equitable funding and the political will to stick to the plan.

First, a change in how the schools were funded began in 1993 with the promise that within seven years, all of the town and city school departments would have the resources to carry out the goal of student mastery of the state standards. “In our poorest communities in particular, [state] aid is the lifeline that brings a high quality education within reach of children and frequently supports more than 80 percent of the total expenditures of in the neediest districts.”(Chester, 2014, p.  6)

The second remarkable aspect has been the consistent support from state’s leadership,  governors, business leaders, and legislature. The support helped maintain the reform even “during the highest levels of political opposition to the reforms. Governor Jane Swift never blinked on the MCAS high school graduation requirement. Governor Romney also kept the momentum going by sustaining the foundation budget for the K-12 public education.”(Achieve.org, 2009, p.  9)

Note: Schools in New England states are generally departments of the town or city they serve. Instead of a school district, the schools are a department of the town. So it is the school department rather than the school district.

Resources:

Achieve.org. (2009). Taking Root: Massachusetts Lessons for Sustaining the College and Career-Ready Agenda. Achieve: American Diploma Project Network. Retrieved from http://achieve.org/files/Texas-SustainabilityCaseStudy_0.pdf

Chester, M. D. (2014). Building on 20 Years of Massachusetts Education Reform. Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

Hanushek, E. A., Ruhose, J., & Woessmann, L. (2016). It Pays to Improve School Quality. Education Next, 16(3). Retrieved from http://educationnext.org/pays-improve-school-quality-student-achievement-economic-gain/

MBAE. (1991). Every Child A Winner. Retrieved from http://www.mbae.org/uploads/13102003114120EveryChildAWinner.pdf

Tags:

Every Student Succeeds Act, education, economy, knowledge capital, school reform, Massachusetts

[1] The analysis used data from the U.S. census to make adjustments for the migration of workers in and out of each state. While workers move from state to state, 87% of students receive their K-12 education in their birth state.

Two STEAM Examples

We present two real world examples of ways that STEM and the arts can be connected.

In the first, art museum professionals partner with medical educators to improve medical practice.

In the second, art gallery visitors are guided through an exhibition by A.I. (artificial intelligence technology).

Examining Art to Improve the Medical Examination.

In June of 2016 Bonnie Pitman recently retired as the Director of the Dallas Museum of Art, convened a major conference entitled “The Art of Examination: Art Museum and Medical School Partnerships.  Participants represented sixty art museums and their partner medical schools at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Partnership between art museums and medical schools are part of an emerging field called medical humanities, an interdisciplinary field in which knowledge from the arts makes contributions to medical education and practice.

The conference served as a platform that “provided a sound overview of the fields’ best practices, goals, history, terminology, evaluation, and future directions.” Such partnerships at major art and medical institutions in the U.S. and abroad are advocates for such programs and build a bridge between the arts and sciences.” (Pitman, 2016)

Careful examination of the history, composition, themes presented by an art object marks the work of the art critic or art educator.

Similarly, a physician begins her work with an examination of the patient’s various physical and affective characteristics, some of which may be important to the diagnosis while others are not. The ability to discriminate between the meaningful from the inconsequential is therefore an important skill shared by the art educator and the physician.

The first such art museum-medical school partnerships was created in 1999 when Dr. Irwin Braverman (Yale Medical School) and Linda Friedlaender, (Yale’s British Art Collection) began to work together to develop the observational skills of medical students by training them to use the techniques and language of art criticism as they learned how to examine their patients. (Pitman, 2016)

The connections between art and medical practice have led to at least one hundred such partnerships currently. There were sixty at the conference from U.S. Canada, England, and Italy. Forty more were on a waiting list for the conference.

A growing body of research literature published in medical journals also attests to the power of the intersection of where art museum and art professionals work with medical educators to the benefit of both health care professionals as well as to the community at large.

Going to the Tate Britain with an (artificially) Intelligent computer program named Recognition

You can visit the Tate Britain in London in person or online to both see and interact with the exhibition called Recognition. (Do not delay: Recognition closes on November 27)

The development of the exhibition was stimulated by the offer of the 2016 IK Prize that offers incentives to promote the use of digital technology in the arts.

The Tate Britain’s “mission is to increase the public’s enjoyment and understanding of British art from the 16^th century to the present day…” as well as to increase the numbers of people who come to view the art; particularly young millennials whom it is hoped will become the next generation of art lovers.

However, Tony Guillan of the Tate recognized that looking at art and seeing art are not necessarily the same, the difference being that looking is simple discrimination, “that’s a painting,” while seeing connects the art to reality.

The successful quest for the IK prize began with the insight that the project would use A.I. technology, “…because getting machines to do what humans can do is one of the most exciting frontiers in technology…Is there anything more human than looking at art?” (Dobrzynski, 2016)

To compete, Tate Britain enlisted a number of partners: Microsoft, JoliBrain, a French A.I. company, and  Fabrica, an Italian communication research company. Fabrica would lead the development of Tate’s entry.

The team at Fabrica began with the question: “What if we could link our everyday lives to the Tate’s collection to illuminate similarities between the present and the past?” They developed the idea that the goal could be met by allowing the viewers to “see the world through two different lenses,” how the world has been represented historically by artists and how the world is represented today, through the news media.  (Dobrzynski, 2016)

Under Fabrica’s leadership, the partners began to work: Microsoft provided programming support, JoliBrain  contributed their DeepDetect API (application programming interface, a set of routines, protocols, etc. that makes it easier to develop programs) as well as DeepDetect server where the program would be run.

Fabrica put a variety of artificial intelligence technologies together, “including computer vision capabilities, such as object recognition, facial recognition, colour and composition analysis; and natural language analysis; and natural language processing of text associated with images, allowing it to analyze context and subject matter and produce written description of the images comparisons.” (Tate.org.uk)

As Recognition (or [re] [cognition]) works it creates a virtual collection of images by matching works from the Tate Britain collection with contemporary news photos from the news agency Reuters. The matches are based on similarities of objects, faces, composition, theme that the A.I. finds as it views images.

The human viewer can click to stop the process in order to examine any of the matches in the virtual gallery in order to give Recognition feedback by responding to the prompt: “what makes this an interesting match?”

A.I. has been used in health care and transportation but A.I. in art is “uncharted space” according to Microsoft’s Eric Horovitz which is why Microsoft was interested in working with the project. It is an opportunity to see how A.I. can be “creative and make mistakes and meander.” (Dobrzynski, 2016)

The humanities and science and technology are often seen as separate worlds; the one supposedly subjective, intuitive, vague; the other, objective, precise fact-filled.

But perhaps not. A medical student constructing her examination of a patient using language and insights from art criticism; Science? Art?

Human art gallery visitors are given a tour by an A.I. program that shows works from the gallery matched with news photos.

The humans are asked for their assessment of the match. The program uses the human generated assessments to refine its matches.

Humans and machine learn from one another. Humanities? Art? Technology? Science?

Time to reasses our categories.

 

Resources:

 

Dobrzynski, J. H. (2016c). Artificial Intelligence as a Bridge for Art and Reality. New York Times, p. 18. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/30/arts/design/artificial-intelligence-as-a-bridge-for-art-and-reality.html

Sheets, H. M. (2016c). How an Aesthete’s Eye Can Help a Doctor’s Hand

New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/30/arts/design/how-an-aesthetes-eye-can-help-a-doctors-hand.html?

 

Pitman, B. (2016). The Art of Examination: Art Museum and Medical School Parnerships. Proceedings from The Art of Examination: Art Museum and Medical School Parnerships, New York and Dallas.

Tags:

STEM, STEAM, art museum-medical school partnerships, clinical practice, A.I., Tate Britain, human assessment, A.I. and art

The (Phylogenetic) Tree of Life

 

In the new issue of Nature Microbiology, a team of scientists has published a graphical representation of the evolution of organisms, a new tree of life.

The new tree shows that “bacteria make up most of life’s branches. And [the team] found that much of that diversity has been waiting in plain sight to be discovered, dwelling in river mud and meadow soils….’It is a momentous discovery — an entire continent of life forms.’”(Zimmer, 2016)

The quest to represent all of life on Earth has a long history. Aristotle’s works are filled with facts about natural history and Pliny the Elder composed a huge encyclopedia of what the Romans believed they knew about nature.

In 1859, Charles Darwin suggested that it is possible to show how the “affinities of all the beings of the same class” could be represented by a “great tree.” (Darwin, p. 203)

How Darwin’s “great tree” was made possible is in part the story of the work of a biophysicist named Carl Woese whose work created the first tree of life, one that was actually based on evolutionary principles.

The modern story of the quest for  begins with the Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné (Linnaeus) who published his Systema Naturae in 1735. The Systema was Linné’s answer to the question of how to organize the huge mass of living organisms so that it is possible to see how all the different individuals and groups fit together.

But which individuals get included in a particular class?

Both birds and bats eat insects and use their ability to fly to snatch insect food out of the air.

Do bats and birds make up a “class of beings?”

Linné’s solution was  to create a system of classification that grouped organisms by their physical traits. So plants whose flowers had similar numbers of stamens in the same grouping, or animals that got their food by predation were grouped together.

After Darwin, biologists used Linné’s system of classification (that is, grouping organisms according to their visible traits) to describe the branches on the tree of life, and by the first half of the 20^th century there were five main branches: Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Protista, and Monera.

In the 1960s biophysicist Carl Woese found this to be a highly unsatisfactory approach.

For Woese “the morphology-metabolism approach was like trying to create a genealogical history using only photographs and drawings. Are people with dimples on their right cheeks and long ring fingers all members of the same family? Maybe, but probably not.” (Arnold, 2014)

Woese observed that the “biologist has customarily structured his world in terms of…dichotomies. Classically, what was not plant was animal.” But the discovery that bacteria did not fit into the dichotomy (they resembled both plants and animals ) forced biologists to reconsider the question.  (Woese & Fox, 1977, p. 5088)

Early in his career Woese had done research on the newly discovered genetic code at the Pasteur Institute in Paris; and genes, of course, are intimately connected to evolution.  This led Woese to see that a “tree of life” could be constructed using genetic data in order to actually show the evolutionary relationships among organisms.

The creation of a tree of life defined by evolutionary connections rather than by physical similarities was what Woese had in mind when he arrived at the University of Illinois as a young professor in 1964.

“To create his evolutionary tree of life…Woese would need to choose a gene that was present in every known organism, one that was copied from generation to generation…and [which] mutated slowly…. ‘This would let him make a direct measure of evolutionary history….By tracking these gene sequences…he could calculate evolutionary distance between two organisms and make a map of how life on Earth many have evolved.”

The gene he chose is one found n the ribosome, a structure present in all living cells and which is the site of biological protein synthesis. He selected the gene labeled 16S rRNA.

In the 1960s gene sequencing was done by hand, separating genetic material using electrophoresis and then using a magnifying glass and a light box to examine the resulting bands of RNA. Woese and his colleague George Fox entered the sequences onto IBM 80 column punch cards and used them in a program that matched sequences and which allowed them to identify evolutionary connections among organisms.

It took Woese and his colleague George Fox a full ten years of work sequencing 16S rRNA in a variety of different organisms.  (Arnold, 2014)

The hard work paid off when Woese was working on a group of prokaryotes called a methanogenes. They expected to find that the group was related to the bacteria. “When they finally analyzed its fingerprint,..it looking nothing like any of the other bacteria Woese and Fox had previously analyzed…To fellow microbiologist Ralph Wolfe, Woese announced, ‘I don’t even think these are bacteria.’” (Arnold, 2014)

This discovery overturned the previous view that all life on Earth belonged to either the eukaryotes (animals, plants, fungi, and some single-celled animals) or the prokaryotes, organisms whose cells lack a nucleus.

In 1977,  Woese and Fox published their findings in an article entitled “Phylogenetic structure of the prokaryotic domain: The primary kingdoms.” The article was groundbreaking enough to merit a New York Times article on June 19, 1978, “Scientists Identify More Members of The ‘Third Kingdom of Life….”

In their publication, Woese and Fox made three principle points: (1) That the tree of life had three main branches, not two or five; bacteria, eucaryotes (eucarya), and archaea; (2)“An organism’s genome seems to be the ultimate record of its evolutionary history”;  and (3) “the comparative analysis of molecular sequences has become a powerful approach to determining evolutionary relationships.” (Woese & Fox, 1977)

The new tree of life is a descendant of the one constructed by Woese and Fox nearly four decades ago. By taking advantage of new understandings (molecular biology) and techniques (gene sequencing) Woese demonstrated that the prokaryote-eukaryote model (what I learned in biology a half century ago) was erroneous. By looking at organisms at the molecular level, the real evolutionary history was uncovered.

Resources:

Arnold, C. (2014). The Man Who Rewrote the Tree of Life. Retrieved from http: www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/evolution/carl-woese/

Darwin, C. (2016). The Origin of Species. iBooks. https://itun.es/us/2L2Kx.l

Hug, L. A., Baker, B. J., Anantharaman, K., Brown, C. T., Probst, A. J., Castelle, C. J., . . . Banfield, J. F. (2016). A new view of the tree of life. Nature Microbiography, 16048. Retrieved from http://www.nature.com/articles/nmicrobiol201648#f1

Woese, C. R., & Fox, G. E. (1977). Phylogenetic structure of the prokaryotic domain: The Primary Kingdoms. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 74(11), 5088-5090.

Woese, C. R., Kandler, O., & Wheelis, M. L. (1990). Towards a natural system of organisms: Proposals for the domains Archae, Bacteria, and Eucarya. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 87, 4576-4579. Retrieved from http://www.pnas.org/content/87/12/4576.full.pdf

Zimmer, C. (2016). Scientists Unveil New ‘Tree of Life’. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/12/science/scientists-unveil-new-tree-of-life.html

Tags:

evolution, Carl Woese, phylogeny, tree of life, Archaea, Eucary, Bacteria, prokaryotes, eukaryotes

Raising Bébé Part 1

It is easy to acquire the illusion that how you think and do things is how others think and do things. Things that are done in one country as a matter of course sometimes appear strange or undoable from the perspective of people in other countries.

So when I saw a book called Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting, I was curious. After all there is a renewed interest in the importance of early childhood education in relationship to later school success. What does it look like in France?

The author, Pamela Druckerman, by profession a reporter and a New Yorker, moved to Paris as a consequence of marrying Simon, a Briton and also a reporter (speciality: Dutch football). So far in their French life, they have had three children, a girl, “Bean^[1]” and twins, Joel and Leo, all born and so far brought up in France.

Pamela is a reporter of the investigative type. When she sees a mystery, she must investigate. “What is going on here?” is her reflex response.

What is the puzzle? When she and Simon went on a holiday to the shore why were the French children in sharp contrast to their child “sitting contentedly in their high chairs, waiting for their food, or eating fish, and even vegetables. There’s no shrieking or whining. Everyone is having one course at a time. And there’s no debris around the table.” (Druckerman, p. 2)

Her book is does not offer a new theory of child rearing; instead, it is her attempt to resolve a question about children and education.

”I haven’t got a theory. What I do have, spread out in front of me, is a fully functioning society of good little sleepers, gourmet eaters, and reasonably relaxed parents. I’m starting with that outcome and working backward to figure out how the French got there.” (Druckerman, pp. 7-8)

I will leave you to read the book if you choose to see what you think about her conclusions.^[2]

The section of the book I was most interested in was how the French approach 4K type programs.

When Simon and Pamela’s daughter turned 3 she entered the local école maternelle, a four day, thirty-six week school for children aged 3 to 6. Participation in l’école maternelle is optional but most parents send their children.

The école maternelle is usually housed in a building purpose-built to be an infant school instead of being located in a handed down elementary school or a church basement since the institution of the école maternelle has been functioning in France since 1881.

There are two interesting comparisons between the French approach to the 4K education and ours.

First, the programs in South Carolina have a variety of providers: school districts, private contractors, and faith based groups and also a variety of supervisors. The SC Department of Education oversees the programs conducted by the school districts while FirstSteps oversees the contractors and faith-based programs. There are also a variety of curriculums: High/Scope, Montessori, Creative Curriculum, and an option for another program.

The design of the program in the école maternelle is much more specific. ”The objective of the école maternelle is to help each child become autonomous and to gain for itself knowledge and competence.” The focus of the knowledge and competence is the acquisition of “oral language, rich, organized, and understandable by others.”

The implementation of the program is up to the individual school, the director and the école’s teachers. And the teachers show the other comparison. Candidates for a teaching position an école maternelle must have the French equivalent of a bachelor’s degree in a specific subject. The candidate then must compete for a seat in university based Institut Universitaire de Formation des Maîtres, leading to the equivalent of a master’s degree in early childhood and elementary education. The teachers have the same wages and benefits as teachers in French elementary and secondary schools, in stark contrast to their Americans cousins who work in early childhood programs where qualifications and pay are low.

In Part 2 we will look at what goes on inside the école maternelle.

Resources

Druckerman, Pamela (2012). Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting (New York: Penguin)

Shanny Peer, and Burbank, John (2004). Early Education: Lessons from French Écoles Maternelles. Seattle, Washington.

French Ministry of Education (2014). Guide practique pour parents: Mon Enfant à l’école maternelle.

French Ministry of Education (2014). La présentation des programmes à l’école maternelle

^[1]Immediately after her birth, a beanie was put on her head; hence the nickname. Her name is Leyla.

^[2] Sort of a spoiler alert: What she found was that you don’t need a different theory of parenting. “You need a very different view of what a child actually is.”