|
What Makes an ‘Extreme Learner’?
By Linda Flanagan/ JULY 8, 2014
When Mollie Cueva-Dabkoski was dissecting a sheep’s heart during an eighth-grade science class, she had an epiphany that changed her life. “That heart told the story of anatomy and physiology!” she said.
Realizing that science is best communicated through stories, Cueva-Dabkoski, now just 19 years old, went on to explore beetles in China. She’s now at Johns Hopkins University, and continues to do research during breaks.
Cueva-Dabkoski is considered an “Extreme Learner,” a designation applied to just 12 individuals by the Institute for the Future, for her radical and gutsy approach to learning. Extreme Learners are self-directed, wide-ranging in their interests, comfortable with technology, and adept at building communities around their interests.
“Extreme learners aren’t so different from everybody else,” said Milton Chen, a fellow at the Institute for the Future and advocate for education reform. “We picked people who are extreme in their passion for learning.” They are also willing to go their own way when traditional educational institutions interfere with their pursuits.
Thomas Hunt, for example, another designated “extreme learner,” dropped out of high school when he was 14 to work on cancer research. Always interested in science, he found high school stultifying and needlessly time-consuming. Kids of varied interests were thrown together and taught in “the cookie-cutter method,” he said. After he left, Hunt found like-minded learners when he became one of 20 Thiel Fellows, formerly known as “20 Under 20,” which paid him $100,000 to drop out of school for two years and pursue his studies. “For some kids who have a vision of what they’re interested in, high school is not for them,” he said.
“I’ve recognized that this is what makes me different: I may not know it, but I don’t see it has a barrier.”
This was also true for Marc Roth, another extreme learner who dropped out of high school three times and never finished his community college education. (He earned his high school equivalency degree in three weeks.) Today, Roth is the founder of the Learning Shelter, a 90-day training program that teaches homeless people high-tech manufacturing skills. Roth is 40, and his improbable path to the Learning Shelter included delivering pizzas, programming and consulting in IT, sailing the seas on a cruise ship, and starting his own business. When that business collapsed, and Roth’s net worth fell from $21 million to nothing, he moved to San Francisco and lived in his car. When his car was broken into, Roth decamped to a homeless shelter for five months.
Roth reversed his fortune — and earned his bona fides as an Extreme Learner — when he was broke and living in the shelter. He heard others talking about a nearby TechShop, and decided to scrape up the $59 membership fee and give it a try. TechShops are stand-alone buildings with staffs and million-dollar tools that train high-tech skills to anyone interested and able to afford the modest fee; set up with laser cutters and plastics labs, among other tools, they are meant to promote creativity and skill-development. Roth devoured the learning opportunities at the TechShop in San Francisco, starting with sewing and vinyl cutting, and within two months moved from pupil to teacher. “When I only had pennies to my name, I turned everything I had into education instead of comforts or niceties,” he said.
INSATIABLE NEED FOR LEARNING
It’s the hunger for learning rather than raw intellect that distinguishes Extreme Learners from the gifted. Intensely motivated and harboring a breadth of interests, they also consider ignorance a temporary and reparable condition.
Lenore Edman, for example, who along with her husband designs and produces robotic kits for their company Evil Mad Scientist, is motivated by what she doesn’t know. “I’ve recognized that this is what makes me different: I may not know it, but I don’t see it has a barrier,” she said, reflecting the premise behind the growth mindset disposition. “The most extreme thing is not being afraid to learn new things,” she added.
In her work, Edman erases boundaries between math and food, electricity and paper crafts. Recently, she sewed what she called a “missile command skirt,” styled after a vintage video game, and built a “circuitry snack” out of candy. “It was a fun project because we got to eat the candy at the end,” she said. She’s most interested in what happens when different fields intersect, and looks for ways to take the tools of one field and apply them to another.
What’s the lesson here for schools? In short, standardization, repetition, and rigidity are deadly for the curious. “Nothing bores me more than seeing a list of redundant facts I have to memorize,” Mollie Cueva-Dabkoski said. Biology class dragged for Thomas Hunt, but the school turned him down when he tried to replace a few classes with work in a lab outside school. “High school is a big day care system,” Roth said.
But some schools have figured out how to engage their inquisitive students. Mollie Cueva-Dabkoski attended Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts, an arts-based school that rewarded exploration and free choice. “We were given a ridiculous amount of time to read and explore,” she said, which allowed her to discover her genuine interests. The school also encouraged creativity through arts, which Cueva-Dabkoski credits with stimulating her enthusiasm for the Brazilian arts. Outside school, she joined an Afro-Brazilian dance troupe and taught dance to kids in Oakland.
“Of all the places in school, in art kids can create exactly what they want,” she said. And in a conflict between depth and breadth of learning, the school rewarded depth. Rather than memorize the dates and key figures in World War II, for example, students were encouraged to go deep on one particular person or event. Time, freedom, and space to make art crystalized for Cueva-Dabkoski, who is scurrying to publish her extracurricular research on beetles before the summer ends and Johns Hopkins beckons.
“If you put the pieces together, you see a movement,” Chen said. Along with MakerLabs, Maker Faires, and TechShops, all of which foster independent learning and creativity, Extreme Learners have indulged their intellectual passions in their own time and on their own terms. Formal educational institutions have little to do with it.
“The main takeaway for teachers is, give students more flexibility and choice over what they’re working on,” Milton Chen said. “Give kids the tools to identify their interests and gather information. And help them find like-minded people to work with.”
Article source : http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/07/08/what-makes-an-extreme-learner/
<Questions>
Q1. What is the extreme learner?
Q2. According to an article, Extreme Learners are self-directed, wide-ranging in their interests, comfortable with technology, and adept at building communities around their interests. In this perspective, are you an extreme leaner?
Q3. Extreme learners have a tendency to be intensely motivated and harboring a breadth of interests, they also consider ignorance a temporary and reparable condition. Assuming that you are an extreme leaner by this definition, do you have any area you want to challenge or expand your knowledge?
Q4. What is the pursuit of traditional educational institution? Why do we need those education systems?
Q5. What is the merits and demerits of the traditional education system?
Q6. Article said that standardization, repetition, and rigidity of traditional school system are deadly for the curious. Do you agree with this sentence?
Q7. From this article, Roth founded the Learning Shelter, a 90-day training program that teaches homeless people high-tech manufacturing skills. They teach delivering pizzas, programming and consulting in IT, sailing the seas on a cruise ship, and starting his own business. If learning shelter is opened in your region, which subject would you like to take?
Q8. One day, you feel like to take some lessons related to newly developed conceptual field. However, you can not find anywhere you can take lessons. Then how do you deal with those situations? Have you ever experienced those situations?
Topic 2. The Value of Rankings and the Meaning of Livability
http://www.livablecities.org/blog/value-rankings-and-meaning-livability
Since first using the term “livable cities” back in the 1980s to describe quality of life and the characteristics of cities that make them livable, IMCL has seen the term used in countless ways to describe standard of living, rather than quality of life. Every city wants to be considered the “most livable,” a title that can attract new business and investments, boost local economies and real estate markets, and foster community involvement and pride. The term has become so widely, if not overly used, that its meaning is becoming lost.
Now, numerous rankings of "most livable cities" exist, the most renowned being those from the Economist, Forbes.com, and more recently, Monocle. The Economist and Forbes base their rankings primarily on data from the Mercer consulting company, which annually measures "quality of living" standards, using data such as crime rates, health statistics, sanitation standards, and expenditures on city services. Their primary clients, government and corporations, are interested in assessing "the degree to which expatriates enjoy the potential standard of living in the host location. Quality of living also reflects the interaction of political, socio-economic and environmental factors in the host location." Mercer pride themselves on using criteria that are "objective, neutral and unbiased". Such rankings can be a powerful tool for economic development, and there is cutthroat competition and lobbying by world cities to be ranked high.
The Economist, focusing on economic and business issues, places five Australian cities, three Canadian cities and two European cities in their most recent top ten, the first three being Vancouver, BC, Melbourne and Vienna. By contrast, Forbes includes only American cities, and appears to have a more practical agenda by giving a boost to cities on the mend including Pittsburgh, PA and Trenton, NJ. Their criteria focus on "unemployment, crime, income growth, the cost of living, and artistic and cultural opportunities."
As a lifestyle magazine, Monocle's focus is on "the top 25 cities to call home". Their criteria include social and economic circumstances for residents, public health, infrastructure, and ease and availability of local transport. They define their highest ranked cities as "places that are benchmarks for urban renaissance and rigorous reinvention in everything from environmental policy to transport." Their top cities in 2010 were Munich, Copenhagen and Zurich.
Instead of ranking cities for the livability standards they have already achieved, the Philips Livable Cities Award, the most recent contest in livability, will reward the best ideas for improving sustainability and standard of living in urbanized, and economically challenged locations around the world. Joining the ranks of other corporations flexing their Corporate Social Responsibility muscles, Philips says the contest is designed to generate creative and feasible ideas “for improving the health and well-being of people living in cities.” The contest (comprised of open voting supervised by an international panel of experts) will award monetary grants for modest initiatives such as rainwater storage in Sana’a Yemen, where water is scarce during nearly 6 months of the year; installing lighting to keep sports facilities open longer in New York; or teaching sign language to deaf children in Embu, Kenya. These are not particularly new or glamorous ideas, but they certainly address very real challenges.
What does it mean to be ranked by Mercer the “most livable” city? These rankings are measuring standard of living, not quality of life. As Mercer themselves admit, "One may live in the highest ranked city in terms of quality of living [standards] and still have a very bad quality of life because of unfortunate personal circumstances (illness, unemployment or loneliness, etc)." It is precisely these quality of life issues that IMCL seeks to address, and evidence is now mounting that the way we shape our cities profoundly affects our quality of life - our physical and mental health, our opportunities for having friends and neighbors, and even how likely we are to find, and hold a job.
Once fundamental health and safety is achieved, standard of living issues are not directly correlated with happiness, with a sense that life is meaningful, that we are of value to others, and that there is much to be discovered and celebrated in the human and physical world around us. These are important aspects of quality of life and are profoundly influenced by the built environment - by a city's livability. The issues come more clearly into focus when we consider the needs of our most vulnerable members of society, children, elders, those who are economically or socially marginalized.
The question that spurred the International Making Cities Livable quest was "how do children become fully human, caring and responsible adults, committed to the welfare of others, whether familiars or strangers; how do some children grow up capable of experiencing beauty, joy and laughter, and other children become adults capable of aggression and brutality, without joy or interest in their fellow human beings? And what are the circumstances, the kinds of social, familial and physical environments that produce one or the other human being?" (From: The Forgotten Child)
The role of the built environment in shaping children's lives, facilitating their positive health and development is not easily measured in economic terms but it can be understood. The built environment influences how people relate to each other, the opportunity for community to form, and the depth of our social networks. It regulates how much incidental exercise is possible through walking and biking. Buildings and streets contribute to reducing crime when buildings support eyes on the street, and shops and services put a functioning community in control of the public realm. Pattern, complexity, and harmony in the built environment can stimulate curiosity, dicovery, and a sense that the world is meaningful. Beauty in nature, architecture and public places can lift spirits, raise endorphin levels, and improve physical and emotional health. These are just a few of the ways in which IMCL encourages a city to increase livability for all. The Mercer data provides valuable benchmark statistics, but a city may have to aim higher than to be placed top in these rankings to be truly "livable".
Questions:
1. Where do you think is the most livable city?
2. In what way can our built environment influence people and their lives?
3. Are you satisfied with living in Cheongju? Why or why not?
4. What factor do you think is the most important in selecting the most livable city among unemployment, crime, income growth, the cost of living, and artistic and cultural opportunities, etc.?
스칼렛, 시에나님 토픽 감사합니다:) |
|