EBlogger

Today the Wisconsin Center for Education Research posts a brief history of Britannica’s Mathematics in Context.

With all the talk lately about the new net revolution, Web 2.0, and all of that (e.g., point and counter-point), it is interesting to throw some actual research into the mix. Lowell Monke’s recent article in Orion Magazine does just that.

[R]ecent research, including a University of Munich study of 174,000 students in thirty-one countries, indicates that students who frequently use computers perform worse academically than those who use them rarely or not at all.

As the Arts & Letters Daily post put it, “and it gets worse” from there.

[via Arts & Letters Daily]

Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide note the remarkable educational history of Mortimer Adler:

He dropped out of high school at age 14 and began working as a copy boy at the New York Sun. Taking night classes, he became impressed by reading that John Stuart Mill (tutored by his dad) could read the dialogues of Plato in Greek at the age of 5. So at age 14, he bought a set of Plato and was hooked. John Cuddily would refer to him later as the “the only Ph.D. in America with no B.A., no M.A., not even a high school diploma.” […]

Who was this? This was of course Mortimer Adler, University of Chicago professor, founder of the Great Books of the Western World program, American educator, philosopher and author or editor of more than 50 books including the Encyclopedia Britannica and How to Read a Book.

[Via Eide Neurolearning Blog]