NETUCATION Blog

Category: Blog

Blog posts and news articles we published on a weekly basis

  • Myths About Reading

    Myths about Reading by Janet Dorman

    Children learning to readMyth # 1 Children who learn to read before they go to school will be bored when they go to school

    This is not a myth.

    Children who learn to read before they go to school will be bored when they go to school. But so will the kids who did not learn to read before they went to school. All kids are bored when they get to school.

    This is because school is boring.

    They enter school thrilled to be there and full of anticipation but unfortunately what awaits them is not what they expect. Once the thrill of the new backpack and the school bus has worn off most first graders settle down to the reality that school is boring. They are rarely given a choice whether they want to go to school or not so they learn to accept the fact that they spend many hours each day waiting for recess, waiting for lunch and thrilled when they can at last return home.

    The question is not who will be bored but rather who will handle the boredom the best. Very sharp first grade teachers often give the child who can read the opportunity to go to the library and read while the teachers teach all the rest of the kids to read. This is a wonderful thing for the child who can read. Even brighter teachers enlist the help of the six-year-old who can read to help teach the other kids especially the children who will be struggling to learn even a few words. This is a superb chance for our little reader to really make a difference and to strengthen his own ability along the way.

    The children who cannot read when they get to school will suffer through – some of them learning to read a few hundred words by the end of the year. 35 % will not master those few hundred words and will range from frustrated to crushed and demoralized by the experience.

    It is good, not bad, to be able to read when you get to school. It helps the child to be “school-proof”.

    Myth #2 Teaching a child to read before school will make him a nasty little genius

    Teach your child how to readWell, at least this myth acknowledges that children who learn to read when they are young will gain information and, as a result, have increased intellectual growth as compared with a child who is not given this opportunity. This is true.

    When a child is given the ability to read he can explore the world through books. He is no longer completely dependent on adults and can make his explorations all by himself.

    Yes, he gains a lot of knowledge this way as any good reader does. He also gains confidence in his own ability to learn.

    Yes, he will take that knowledge into school with him. However, this myth assumes (incorrectly) that knowledge leads to nastiness.

    The good news is that it does not.

    Children are not naturally nasty. Children are naturally kind and generous unless a nasty adult spends a lot of time being nasty to them and teaching them to be nasty to others.

    Those children who have spent a lot of time nose-to-nose with mother or father at home learning to read also gain a great deal from this experience socially.

    They are confident and happy with themselves. It is our experience over half a century that these children are much more likely to be the peacemakers in school. They are the ones befriending the kid that others are picking on. The bullies are those children who do not feel confident and happy. It is a simple as that.

    Teaching children readingMyth # 3 Very young children cannot learn to read because they have a short attention span

    Look carefully at an 18-month-old and see what he does. Often he drives everyone crazy.

    Why?

    Because the tiny child will not stop being curious. Little children cannot be dissuaded or disciplined out of their desire to learn – no matter how hard we try. The child wants to learn about the lamp, and the coffee cup, and the electric socket, and the newspaper and everything else in the room which means that the lamp gets knocked over, the coffee gets spilled and the newspaper gets shredded. We conclude that the tiny child is hyperactive and unable to pay attention.

    But the truth is that the child pays attention to everything.

    There are only five pathways into the brain. We can see, hear, feel, taste and smell. The very young child will use all of these pathways in learning about the world. The child will not ask to leave a room until he has checked out everything in that room that is new. He will look at things that are out of reach, he may listen to an object if he can, he will certainly touch any item that he is permitted to touch and he may even taste or smell things that seem to merit such inspection.

    We adults watch this impressive display of curiosity and experimentation. What do we conclude? We often conclude that the child has a short attention span when in fact the child is paying attention (real attention) to everything in the room. Tiny children have superb attention, interest and enthusiasm to learn. When we offer reading words to the tiny child he will gobble them up at a rate that is truly astonishing.

    source: The Institute for the Achievement of Human Potential

  • Education costs rises double that of inflation

    by Deneesha Pillay

    Statistics SA figures on the cost of education indicate consumers who have children will come under financial pressure.

    The cost of education rose by 9.3% in March compared to March last year. This is 5.3% higher than the headline inflation figure of 4% year-on-year for the same month, according to the statistics SA data. The data was based on fees charged by schools and tertiary institutions.

    Education inflation consistently outstripped inflation, said statistics SA. It said: “South African households will have to make more room in their budgets to pay for rising tuition fees.”

    Old Mutual estimated that if a child started Grade R this year, a complete education — including primary school, high school and three years of university — would cost just less than R1m for public school tuition or R2.2m for private school tuition (in nominal terms).

    Statistics SA acknowledged — as has been said by unions calling for free tertiary education — that rising costs were a barrier to education.

    The agency’s latest General Household Survey shows that 33% of individuals up to the age of 24 cited a lack of money as the reason for not attending an educational institution.

    Broken down by province, the figure was 45% in KwaZulu-Natal and as low as 21% in the Western Cape. Although the Northern Cape exhibited a 59% increase in education costs between 2010 and this year, only 22% of those aged 5–24 indicated a lack of money as a barrier to education.

    The weak rand was identified as a factor that increased the cost of imported books and materials.

    Statistics SA’s report on the financial status of higher education institutions showed expenses increased 12% in 2013 compared with 2012, increasing from R41.4bn to R46.2bn.

    source: The Herald / Business Day

  • How To Get The Best Service On The Phone

    And, While You’re at It, Make Someone’s Day

    Leil Lowndes - How To Talk To AnyoneWhen talking to customer service, call centers, tech support, secretaries or sales reps on the phone, you’re at their mercy on what they’ll do for you–and how fast. Here are tiny tips for getting the best, speediest and most pleasant service he/she has to give.

    First thing, give YOUR name. That personalizes it and, who knows, she may think you’re a VIP whose name she’s supposed to know.

    When he barks, “Please hold,” don’t just grumble “okay.” Say “Of course, take your time.” (He’ll be shocked and want to come back much sooner!)

    If you’re a little slow giving information she needs, say, “You must have tremendous patience to do this job.” (She appreciates the rare compliment and now wants to help you all the more.)

    Ask his name so he feels responsible. Be sure to preface your request with “You’re great. May I ask your name?” to assuage paranoia about being reported. And, now that you know his name, he’s more anxious to solve your problem. His job—and a good employee’s pride–often depends on it.
    End your conversation with, “Great service!” Or “Thanks for your excellent help.” Now you’ve made his/her day in a tough often thankless job.

    by Leil Lowndes, author of How To Talk To Anyone

  • Improvements to Amazon Kindle book samples

    Amazon KindleWe recently received this message from Amazon.com:

    We are pleased to let you know about some improvements that we made to Kindle book samples:
    – Samples that you download from the Kindle book store will now be saved in the cloud so that you can access and read them on any supported Amazon device or Kindle reading app.
    – You can delete your samples from the cloud on any supported devices or Kindle reading apps, or from Manage Your Content and Devices. (http://www.amazon.com/mycd ).

    Amazon devices and free Kindle reading apps that support these sample improvements are: Fire HDX, Fire HD, Kindle Fire HDX, Kindle Fire HD (2nd Generation), Kindle Voyage, Kindle Paperwhite (2nd Generation), Kindle (7th Generation), Fire phone, Kindle for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch version 4.5 or greater, and Kindle for Android version 4.7 or greater.

    To learn more about these improvements, visit our help page:
    https://www.amazon.com/help/kindle/samples

    Thank you for choosing Kindle.

    Sincerely,
    Amazon Kindle Support

  • Toastmasters Reveals 2014 International Convention Speakers

    California, July 16, 2014 – Toastmasters announced the featured speakers for its upcoming 2014 International Convention. The lineup of presenters is highlighted by former Head of Development at BBC Television, Robin Sieger and Malaysian media CEO Rohana Rozhan.

    Toastmasters International“We have an impressive and diverse group of speakers who represent the excellence that Toastmasters speakers are known for,” says George Yen, Toastmasters 2013-14 International President. “In addition to an exceptional schedule of events, convention attendees will hear presentations that reinforce Toastmasters’ commitment to communication and leadership skills development.”

    For the first time in its 90-year history, Toastmasters is holding its International Convention outside of North America at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre in Malaysia, Aug. 20-23.

    Robin Sieger will deliver the keynote presentation during the Opening Ceremonies on Wednesday, Aug. 20. A former television executive and comedy writer, Sieger is a popular author and motivational speaker from Scotland who speaks about innovation to Fortune 100 companies around the world.

    Astro Malaysia Holdings’ CEO Rohana Rozhan will be honored as the recipient of the nonprofit organization’s 2014 Golden Gavel award. The prestigious award is presented annually to an individual distinguished in the fields of communication and leadership. Rohana joins an illustrious list of Golden Gavel honorees, including Walter Cronkite, Stephen Covey, Deepak Chopra, Anthony Robbins and Zig Ziglar. Another Malaysian celebrity, Datuk John Lau, who served as Toastmasters International President in 2012-13 will give an introductory speech at the event. He is the owner and chief executive officer of the Acme Group of Companies in Sarawak, Malaysia

    Other expert presenters include:

    • Jana Barnhill, Accredited Speaker and Toastmasters 2008-2009 International President from Lubbock, Texas. She is a five-time winner of the District 44 International Speech Contest, and has placed second and third in the Toastmasters World Championship of Public Speaking.
    • Mark Brown, 1995 Toastmasters World Champion of Public Speaking. Originally from Kingston, Jamaica, Mark now lives in the U.S., in Lizelle, Georgia. He is a member of the National Speakers Association and delivers more than 200 presentations per year.
    • Douglas Kruger, Author, motivational speaker and presentation skills coach based in Johannesburg, South Africa. He delivers motivational presentations and training seminars for large organizations, including Old Mutual, Caltex and Vodacom.
    • Lance Miller, 2005 World Champion of Public Speaking. A resident of Glendale, California, he is a former executive for Nestle and Anheuser-Busch. Miller engages his audience with a unique mix of talent and life experience that bring his messages to life.
    • Florian Mueck, A speaker, coach and author based in Barcelona, Spain, who speaks three languages (English, German and Spanish). In 2010, he gave a talk for TEDxBarcelona titled “Europe: How to Unleash a Common Spirit.”
    • Rory Vaden, Entrepreneur, consultant and author from Nashville, Tennessee who speaks to audiences about how to say no to things that don’t matter, and yes to things that do. At age 23, he placed second in the 2007 World Championship of Public Speaking.

    To learn more about the 2014 International Convention, Aug. 20-23, and obtain a complete schedule of events, including the Opening Ceremonies, Education Sessions and the Toastmasters World Championship of Public Speaking. The public is welcome to attend.

    About Toastmasters International

    Toastmasters International is a nonprofit educational organization that teaches public speaking and leadership skills through a worldwide network of meeting locations. Headquartered in Rancho Santa Margarita, California, the organization’s membership exceeds 292,000 in more than 14,350 clubs in 122 countries. Since 1924, Toastmasters International has helped people of all backgrounds become more confident in front of an audience. For information about local Toastmasters clubs, visit www.toastmasters.org. Follow @Toastmasters on Twitter.

    source: Yahoo News

  • Logic and illogic in education

    This week’s guest blog is by Jon Rappoport. I’ve engaged with Jon Rappoport since 2012 and studied his material on imagination. I’m confident this course in logic is worth the investment.

     

    In two of my collections, The Matrix Revealed and Power Outside The Matrix, I include training in the art of logic and critical analysis.

    The basic fact is: students in schools are rarely taught how to follow a line of reasoning from beginning to end. Nor do they practice analyzing half-formed, specious reasoning.

    Who teaches young students, these days, how to distinguish between a polemic and a formal argument?

    Teachers spend little or no time discussing hidden premises or assumptions, which color subsequent arguments.

    Increasingly, people are “learning” from watching videos. Some videos are well done; many others intentionally omit vital data and make inferences based on “shocking images.”

    A focused study of logic can illuminate a range of subjects and disciplines. It can suddenly bring perspective to fields of inquiry that were formerly mysterious and impenetrable.

    Logic is the parent of knowledge. It contains the principles and methods common to all investigation.

    Being able to spot and understand logical flaws and fallacies embedded in an article, essay, book immediately lifts the intelligence level.

    Logic isn’t a prison; one isn’t forced to obey its rules. But the ability to deploy it, versus not understanding what it is, is like the difference between randomly hammering at a keyboard and typing coherent paragraphs. It’s the difference between, “I agree with what he’s writing,” and “I know exactly how he’s making his argument.”

    In the West, the tradition of logic was codified by Aristotle. Before him, Plato, in the Socratic Dialogues, employed it to confound Socrates’ opponents.

    Reading the Dialogues today, one can see, transparently, where Plato’s Socrates made questionable assumptions, which he then successfully foisted on those opponents. It’s quite instructive to go back and chart Socrates’ clever steps. You see logic and illogic at work.

    High schools today don’t teach logic for two reasons. The teachers don’t understand the subject, and logic as a separate discipline has been deleted because students, armed with it, would become authentically independent. The goal of education rejects independent minds, despite assurances to the contrary.

    Logic and critical analysis should be taught in phases, with each phase encompassing more complex passages of text offered for scrutiny.

    Eventually, students would delve into thorny circumstantial arguments, which make up a great deal of modern investigation and research, and which need to be assessed on the basis of degrees of probable validity and truth.

    It’s like a climbing a mountain. The lower paths are relatively easy, if the map is clear. At higher elevation, more elements come into play, and a greater degree of skill and experience is required.

    My college logic teacher introduced his subject to the class this way: Once you’ve finished this semester, you’ll know when you know, and you’ll know when you don’t know.

    The second part of his statement has great value. It enables real research beyond egotistical concerns, beyond self-serving presumptions, beyond secretly assuming what you’re pretending to prove.

    read the complete article on the Jon Rappoport blog…

  • Coca-Cola laptop theft could have compromised info for 74,000: WSJ

    You might be interested in a recent high profile data breach which could have been prevented!

    Coca-Cola said on Friday that personal information on as many as 74,000 employees, contractors and suppliers were on laptops that it said were temporarily stolen from its Atlanta headquarters.

    The beverage giant told its U.S. and Canadian employees the data on the laptops, which wasn’t encrypted, included names, Social Security numbers and addresses, as well as details like financial compensation and ethnicity.

    The company is sending letters to about 18,000 individuals whose names and Social Security numbers were found on the laptops. It also is notifying another 56,000 individuals who had other personal information, primarily driver’s license numbers, stored on the laptops.

    A Coca-Cola spokeswoman said the laptops were stolen by a former employee who had been assigned to maintain or dispose of equipment. She didn’t identify the person or say whether that person was an employee when the laptops were transferred.

    Coke said company policy requires laptops to be encrypted, but the stolen computers hadn’t yet been encrypted. It didn’t explain the lapse in a memo sent Friday to employees, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal (WSJ). WSJ published this story on 24th January 2014, please read the full story here.

    iStorage manufacture the world’s most secure portable data storage devices with 256-bit AES military grade encryption.

  • Cell phones and brain cancer – more reason to worry

    This piece is taken from BizNews.com written by Marika Sboros

    Should your cell phone technology worry about brain cancer from talking on your cell phone? Well, yes – but only if you are a very heavy user, say French scientists.

    The team, from the Universite Bordeaux Segalen, led by Dr Gaelle Coureau, gives this sobering message in their latest study, published in the journal, Occupational and Environmental Medicine. It shows that the heaviest cell phone users may be at higher risk than average users of being diagnosed with brain tumours.

    Heaviest use in this case was defined as people who used their mobile phone for more than 15 hours each month over five years. They were shown on average to have between two and three times greater risk of developing glioma and meningioma tumours, compared with people who used their phone for a whole lot less time.

    Mobile phones are known to emit radiofrequency energy, a form of non-ionising electromagnetic radiation, which can be absorbed by bodily tissue closest to where the phone is held, and can be carcinogenic (cancer-causing), according to the US National Cancer Institute. The amount of radiofrequency energy a cell phone user is exposed to depends on the technology of the phone, the distance between the phone’s antenna and the user, the extent and type of use, and the user’s distance from cell phone towers, the Institute says.

    The French study is the latest in a vast body of research spanning years, and is not the first to point to a brain tumour risk from heavy mobile phone use. Overall, though, the Institute says studies thus far have “not shown a consistent link between cell phone use and cancers of the brain, nerves, or other tissues of the head or neck”.

    In a Reuters news report, Coureau’s team makes the point too, that even for heavy users, it is “difficult to define a level of risk, if any”, because mobile phone technology is “constantly evolving”. Add to that, “the rapid evolution of technology has led to a considerable increase in the use of mobile phones and a parallel decrease of (radiowave intensity) emitted by the phones”, the researchers say.

    The Reuters report also quotes US neuroscientist Dr L Dade Lunsford saying these kinds of studies “rely on people to recall how much they have used cell phones in the past with no indication of their actual use”.

    Lunsford, a distinguished professor of neurosurgery specialising in brain tumour management at the University of Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the French research, tells Reuters the new results found “no difference between regular cell users and non-users, which suggests that if there is a link, it is only applicable for people who claim to use their cell phone the most”.

    Another expert quoted in the Reuters report is Dr Seung-Kwon Myung of South Korea’s National Cancer Centre, who has done extensive research into cell phone use and brain tumours, and is similarly reassuring: he says mobile phone users shouldn’t worry too much about (brain cancer) until larger, better studies have been done, and those will take at least another 10 years.

    Lunsford makes the salient point in the Reuters report that the new French study will “not affect the world’s conversion to mobile phone use, which has saved more lives across the world than probably any other technology in the last 100 years”.

    “The ability to communicate without land line access to report illness, injury, impending weather disasters, to access 911, fire, police has undoubtedly saved more lives than any conceivable risk of the late and as yet unverified risk of exposure to non-ionising radiation from mobile phones,” Lunsford tells Reuters.

    Click here to read the 5 Tips offered to prevent cancer from cellphones on BizNews.

  • The higher-education bubble

    Education is a bubble in a classic sense. To call something a bubble, it must be overpriced and there must be an intense belief in it. Housing was a classic bubble, as were tech stocks in the ’90s, because they were both very overvalued, but there was an incredibly widespread belief that almost could not be questioned — you had to own a house in 2005, and you had to be in an equity-market index fund in 1999.

    Probably the only candidate left for a bubble — at least in the developed world (maybe emerging markets are a bubble) — is education. It’s basically extremely overpriced. People are not getting their money’s worth, objectively, when you do the math. And at the same time it is something that is incredibly intensively believed; there’s this sort of psycho-social component to people taking on these enormous debts when they go to college simply because that’s what everybody’s doing.

    It is, to my mind, in some ways worse than the housing bubble. There are a few things that make it worse. One is that when people make a mistake in taking on an education loan, they’re legally much more difficult to get out of than housing loans. With housing, typically they’re non-recourse — you can just walk out of the house. With education, they’re recourse, and they typically survive bankruptcy. If you borrowed money and went to a college where the education didn’t create any value, that is potentially a really big mistake.

    There have been a lot of critiques of the finance industry’s having possibly foisted subprime mortgages on unknowing buyers, and a lot of those kinds of arguments are even more powerful when used against college administrators who are probably in some ways engaged in equally misleading advertising. Like housing was, college is advertised as an investment for the future. But in most cases it’s really just consumption, where college is just a four-year party, in the same way that buying a large house with a really big swimming pool, etc., is probably not an investment decision but a consumption decision. It was something about combining the investment decision and the consumption decision that made the housing thing so tricky to get a handle on — and I think that’s also true of the college bubble.

    You know, we’ve looked at the math on this, and I estimate that 70 to 80 percent of the colleges in the U.S. are not generating a positive return on investment. Even at the top universities, it may be positive in some sense — but the counterfactual question is, how well would their students have done had they not gone to college? Are they really just selecting for talented people who would have done well anyway? Or are you actually educating them? That’s the kind of question that isn’t analyzed very carefully. My suspicion is that they’re just good at identifying talented people rather than adding value. So there are a lot of things about it that are very strange.

    The Great Recession of 2008 to the present is helping to bring the education bubble to a head. When parents have invested enormous amounts of money in their kids’ education, to find their kids coming back to live with them — well, that was not what they bargained for. So the crazy bubble in education is at a point where it is very close to unraveling.

    source: The Economist Blog

  • Stop Stealing Dreams

    STOP STEALING DREAMS: On the future of education & what we can do about it. Seth Godin unravels the reason why we have school, and asks the question, “What is school for today?” in the post-factory world.

    Seth Godin is the author of 14 books that have been bestsellers around the world and have been translated into more than 35 languages. Permission Marketing was a New York Times bestseller, Unleashing the Ideavirus is the most popular ebook every published, and Purple Cow is the bestselling marketing book of the decade. His free ebook on what education is for is called STOP STEALING DREAMS and it’s been downloaded millions of times since it launched in January, 2012.

    In addition to his writing and speaking, Seth is founder of squidoo.com, a fast growing, easy to use website. His blog (which you can find by typing “seth” into Google) is one of the most popular in the world.