Education

Back in 2012 I helped create a flash version of a dynamic infographic called “Magnifying the Universe” for a website called Numbersleuth.org, which is now defunct (click here for its Web Archive record).

This infographic was essentially an updated interactive rendition of the old “Powers of Ten” video from the 1970s:

A YouTube video of this earlier flash version of Magnifying the Universe is available here:

The purpose of this post is to alert readers of a new version of this infographic: Magnifying the Universe, version 2.0, which is now available here:

https://academicinfluence.com/ie/mtu/

It’s a lot more powerful and portable than the earlier version. Besides some additional and updated images, users can click on items to get information about them as well as drag images for better viewing.

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni authored a book back in 2016 titled Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania. I was alerted to the book today because Amazon tracks my interests, which include rankings of colleges and universities.

So, presumably, I’m one of the people Bruni needs to convince, as his self-explanatory title makes clear, that getting into an ultra-elite school is overrated and that other factors can allow you to succeed spectacularly in life even without a degree from such a school.* As far as this goes, I would agree: I personally know people who have succeeded at the highest level of the academy and business who did not go to ultra-elite schools.

Still, it seems that Bruni may be the wrong messenger for this news. Bruni went to the Ivy League Columbia for graduate school (ranked #2 nationally by AcademicInfluence.com) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for his undergrad (ranked #26) [Read more…] about Frank Bruni’s Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be

My youngest child is off to college in the fall. So it was with interest that I watched this brief interview with Julie Lythcott-Haim, previously an admissions officer at Stanford. She’s been hammering on the problem of overparenting for some years now (see her book HOW TO RAISE AN ADULT), and she speaks to this problem in the interview.

But her comments about college rankings are worth underscoring (the interview that follows begins at the point where she addresses college rankings):

Back in the early 1980s, an organization called Light of the World Ministries put out a Bible memory course: Light of the World Scripture Memory Course.

The basic course consisted of five cassettes with 100 Bible verses. The advanced course consisted of fifteen cassettes with 300 Bible verses. The Bible verses were grouped into ten on a given topic, covering such topics as faith, healing, and prayer.

Memorization in this course occurred by repetition—as the old Latin saying goes, repetitio mater studiorum (repetition is the mother of studies). Yet the approach taken in this course was not one of mere rote repetition.

The idea was to hear ten Bible verses on a given topic, with a pause after each verse to give the listener time to review the verse in one’s mind or to say it out loud. Once all ten verses had been presented in this way, then the verses were hammered home by repeating them each three times, with no pauses.

While this approach is certainly useful for meditating on Scripture and internalizing its teaching, this is also an effective way to memorize Scripture. Further, this approach could be applied as a teaching tool for many other texts. [Read more…] about Light of the World Bible Memory Course

I have a special-needs son and often have to watch him outside, as when we go for a walk together or drive around in my pickup (he loves to go for car rides). As a result, I’m often listening to books from Audible on my iPhone when I’m with my son.

These books can be quite interesting, so I sometimes discuss them with friends and colleagues. When I’m in the middle of listening to such a book, I often tell the person I’m speaking with that I’m “reading” such-and-such a book. But am I really reading it? Would it be more accurate to say the I’m listening to the book on my iPhone?

Accuracy is fine as far as it goes, but I’m no fan of scrupulous accuracy. So I don’t feel any compunction when I tell people I’m reading a book when I’m listening to it being read. That said, the distinction between going through a book by listening to it versus actually running one’s eyes over the text and extracting the information from it that way is interesting and one I’d like to explore in this article briefly. [Read more…] about Is Listening the Same as Reading?