Education

"Nisaba has placed in your hand the honour of being a teacher. For her, the fate determined for you will be changed and so you will be generously blessed. May she bless you with a joyous heart and free you from all despondency."

"On the day when the bowls of rations are inspected, Nance also inspects the servants during the appointments. Her chief scribe Nisaba places the precious tablets on her knees and takes a golden stylus in her hand. She arranges the servants in single file for Nance and then it will be decided whether or not a leather-clad servant can enter before her in his leather, whether or not a linen-clad servant can pass before her in his linen. Any registered and hired person about whom observers and witnesses claim to witness his fleeing from the house will be terminated in his position."

"In order to make barley and flax grow in the furrows, so that excellent corn can be admired; to provide for the seven great throne-daises by making flax shoot forth and making barley shoot forth at the harvest, the great festival of Enlil -- in her great princely role she has cleansed her body and has put the holy priestly garment on her torso. In order to establish bread offerings where none existed, and to pour forth great libations of alcohol, so as to appease the god of grandeur, Enlil, and to appease merciful Kusu and Ezina, she will appoint a great en priest, and will appoint a festival; she will appoint a great en priest of the Land. He approaches the maiden Nisaba in prayer. He has organised pure food-offerings; he has opened up Nisaba's house of learning, and has placed the lapis-lazuli tablet on her knees, for her to consult the holy tablet of the heavenly stars. In Aratta he has placed E-zagina at her disposal. You have built up Erec in abundance, founded from little [...] bricks, you who are granted the most complex wisdom!"

"Lady coloured like the stars of heaven, holding a lapis-lazuli tablet! Nisaba, great wild cow born by Urac, wild sheep nourished on good milk among holy alkaline plants! [...] Perfectly endowed with fifty great divine powers, my lady, most powerful in E-kur! Dragon emerging in glory at the festival, Aruru (mother goddess) of the Land (𒌦), [...] lavishing fine oil on the foreign lands, engendered in wisdom by the Great Mountain (Enlil)! Good woman, chief scribe of An, record-keeper of Enlil, wise sage of the gods!"

"Though concept maps can take many forms, they commonly include both ‘nodes’ (concepts) and ‘arcs’ (linking lines denoting relationships)... Concept maps are great for exploring what knowledge students are bringing to your class. ...[T]ry asking your students to create concept maps on one or more... topics. Then review these for patterns in how the students are depicting the topics (are they missing key connections to other ideas? Are they drawing erroneous relationships?), and make changes to your lesson plans accordingly."

"It is in these shimmering and incessant embraces that the infinite patterns, the infinite Maps of the Mind, are created, nurtured and grown. Radiant Thinking reflects your internal structure and processes. The Mind Map (Concept Map) is your external mirror of your own radiant thinking and allows you to access this vast thinking powerhouse."

"Because meaningful learning proceeds most easily when new concepts or concept meanings are subsumed under broader, more inclusive concepts, concept maps should be hierarchical; that is, the more general, more inclusive concepts should be at the top of the map, with progressively more specific, less inclusive concepts arranged below them. ...[I]t is sometimes helpful to include at the base of the concept map specific objects or events to illustrate the origins of the concept meaning ..."

"Concept maps are graphical tools for organizing and representing knowledge. ...Propositions contain two or more concepts connected using linking words or phrases to form a meaningful statement. Sometimes these are called semantic units, or units of meaning. ...[C]oncepts are represented in a hierarchical fashion with the most inclusive, most general concepts at the top of the map and the more specific, less general concepts arranged hierarchically below. ...[I]t is best to construct concept maps with reference to some particular... focus question. ...Cross-links help us see how a concept in one domain... on the map is related to a concept in another domain... on the map. In the creation of new knowledge, cross-links often represent creative leaps [by] the knowledge producer. ...[S]pecific examples of events or objects... help to clarify the meaning of a given concept. ...Concept maps were developed in 1972 in the course of Novak’s research program... to follow and understand changes in children’s knowledge of science... [T]he researchers... found it difficult to identify specific changes in the children’s understanding... by examination of interview transcripts. ...Out of the necessity to find a better way to represent children’s conceptual understanding emerged the idea of representing children’s knowledge in the form of a concept map."

"The purpose of this article is to provide a review of the research on a... form of knowledge representation, the knowledge map, and to point to areas of future research... and to some... practical implications... Other forms of graphical representation such as concept mapping... have been widely used in science education research... Knowledge maps are node-link representations in which ideas are located in nodes and connected to other related ideas through a series of labeled links. They differ from other similar representations such as mind maps, concept maps, and graphic organizers in the deliberate use of a common set of labeled links that connect ideas. Some links are domain specific (e.g., function is very useful for some topic domains...) whereas other links (e.g., part) are more broadly used. Links have arrowheads to indicate the direction of the relationship between ideas."

"An important issue is the virtual nature of the concept map. ...[T]he “map” can exist in n-dimensional space. ...[There are] two “laws” of concept maps. [C]oncept models are: "L1: represented using the least number of concept labels and relationships - for the current understanding". This leads to a second law: "L2: each and every concept label signifies an indeterminate number of other related concept labels". Concept maps have to be seen in virtual space – not planar or Cartesian space. The relationships between nodes can be thought of as "deep" as opposed to "surface" linkages. The relationship of concepts - one to another - can be understood in terms of structural knowledge. ...Dave Jonassen has made a plausible case that concept maps provide a measure of structural knowledge. Such... "knowledge of the interrelationships of ideas with a knowledge domain”... suggests that there may be an isomorphic relationship between what is known by the learner and... the external representation - the map. Jonassen, et al (1998) seem to say that the map is a dynamic construction that comes about as a result of the experience of mapping. ..."mindtools represent a constructivist use of technology... the process of how we construct knowledge"... [I]n another paper [he] claims "...concept maps ...are the spatial representations of concepts and their interrelationships that are intended to represent the knowledge structures that humans store in their minds..." (Jonassen et al 1993...) This is the "representational" view."

"David Nelson Hyerle, "Thinking Maps as Tools for Multiple Modes of Understanding" (1993) PhD Thesis, University of California, Berkeley."

"Thinking Maps... are no different from other languages that have been developed within or across cultures: Languages are inherently made by humans and thus are arbitrary and incomplete, and have grey areas and ambiguous "rules" that sometimes govern strange usage. But we have never had... a language of cognition... a language for generating patterns of thinking based on human cognitive structures. Certainly, our spoken and written and mathematical languages are all based on being able to represent out thinking, ideas, and concepts but not for explicitly representing thinking as patterns. ...The thinking patterns are embedded in the linearity of text, and you need to work a bit to dig them out. ...When we Google directions to a place ...we get both the linear, line-by-line directions and a visual map showing the network of ...roads ...offering a multitude of options. Thinking Maps offer mental maps of how we are thinking and new routes for understanding."

"[I]n addition to showing what knowledge a student holds, concept maps also illustrate how that knowledge is arranged in the student’s mind."

"Concept maps are graphical tools for organizing and representing knowledge. Student[s] are given either a list of terms or overall topics, and are told to link them based on their assessment of importance and relation. Based on the work of J. Turns, the concept map is an assessment tool based on nodes and arcs. Nodes are the individual words or phrases that the student is associating. Arcs connect the nodes with one another, typically in an outward fashion, in which there are more nodes the further one gets from the center node. The most important and/or central part of the concept map is placed in the center node. Connected outwards from the center node are the terms that the student deems to be a subset or close relation of the center term. ...[W]e took a series of steps that simplified the complex and diverse concept maps that were created by the students. The first method was to encode the data into an Excel file in order to count the occurrences of each word as a set towards creating a single concept map that embodied the perspectives of the class. We weighted a word based on a point system that rewarded terms that were closer to the center of the concept map."

"[D]o students correctly learn their discipline and properly frame it cognitively so that they use it in practice? Concept maps and concept inventories can examine this from macro and micro perspectives. Concept mapping is an established tool... designed to measure conceptual organization, or how students organized the knowledge they have learned (or not learned). These maps are... graphical organizers for thoughts, theories, and/or concepts in a particular discipline... Understanding is schematically represented by creating a hierarchy of ideas of concepts linked together through branches of subconcepts, with interrelationships indicated by additional branches or cross-links... [T]he difficulty in using them for assessment has been in their scoring. ...Maps usually are scored by counting concepts, links, and hierarchies. Recently more sophisticated approaches have appeared that better facilitate their use as an outcome assessment tool. ...Concept inventories for various engineering subject areas have been developed to measure... conceptual understanding... of such fundamental, small-scale phenomena as heat, light, diffusion, chemical reactions, and electricity..."

"Concept maps have long provided visual languages widely used in many different disciplines and application domains. Abstractly, they are sorted graphs visually represented as nodes having a type, name and content, some of which are linked by arcs. Concretely, they are structured diagrams having discipline- and domain-specific interpretations for their user communities, and, sometimes, formally defining computer data structures. Concept maps have been used for a wide range of purposes and it would be useful to make such usage available over the World Wide Web."

"The importance of concept maps in expert learning has... been explained. Mappings of processes such as the design process are... related to the acquisition of procedural knowledge. ...[C]oncept maps may come in all shapes and sizes... Hyerle... distinguished between eight types of thinking map. A circle map helps define words or things in context and presents points of view. Bubble maps describe emotional, sensory and logical qualities. For example, at their center in a circle might be a heroic person, and from the center other circles describe the characteristics of the hero. Tree maps show relationships between main ideas and supporting details. Block schematic diagrams are examples of flow diagrams... Engineers often use such maps to show causes and effects as well as to predict outcomes. Maps may also be used to form analogies or metaphors and these are often used to try and explain s. ...Danserau and Newbern... called bubble maps 'node' maps. The nodes contain the central ideas. The links... show relationships between the nodes. ...They argued that concept maps should provide easy illustrations of complex relationships, less work clutter, be easy to remember, and easy to navigate. ...McAleese and Cowan warned that concept maps are only useful to the learner, if they are constructed by the learner. It is a view that is beginning to be taken up by the engineering community... [S]tudent constructed maps become the navigational tool that allows them to explore relevant content and expand their maps..."

"The focus of this investigation is on the use of thinking maps as tools for students and teachers in classrooms from kindergarten through graduation. Thinking maps are eight fundamental thinking processes represented and activated by semantic maps [Circle, Bubble, Double Bubble, Tree, Brace, Flow, Multi-Flow and Bridge]... This distinct set of visual tools is used for inter-actively connecting, sharing and reflecting on information for personal, interpersonal, and social understandings. ...[S]tudents who are taught how to use this set of tools will be helped in becoming independent and interdependent learners. [T]hey... [will] have a common visual language in the classroom for connecting and seeing what they are thinking, for deepening dialogue, and for assessing how they are thinking and learning. ...This investigation of thinking maps as student-centered tools is... a practical response to a continuing educational problem... defining the relationship between teachers and students... Since the advent of public school education this relationship has been securely entrenched in teacher lecture and the rote repetition of lessons by students. ...[T]he teacher-talk and student-listen relationship that had been criticized by progressive educators for generations has finally become recognized to be at the heart of our educational problem."

"Concept maps can be classified into three types: object maps, verbal maps, and spatial maps corresponding to three distinct styles of learning and communication. According to neuropsychologists Olysa Blazhenkova and Maria Kozhevnikov, object learners and communicators are found among artists and multi-media persons who process information through colorful, concrete, multi-dimensional, and multi-sensory images. The verbal style of communicating and processing of information, according to the media scholar, Marshall McLuhan, has dominated Western learning for centuries... This cognitive style is opposed to the object style and a third type, spatial style in that spatial learners, as in the case of object learners, process information non-verbally, and through images."

"This moment in time... anywhere you turn people are talking about how bad things are, how terrible it is...everybody is meeting hysteria with more hysteria... and it’s getting worse... We’re not supposed to match it or even get locked into resisting or pushing against it. We’re supposed to see this moment in time for what it is. We’re supposed to see through it and then transcend it. That is how you overcome hysteria... how you overcome the sniping at one another, the trolling, the mean-spirited partisanship on both sides of the aisle, the divisiveness, the injustices, and the out-and-out hatred. You use it. Use this moment to encourage you, to embolden you, and to literally push you into the rising of your life... To borrow a phrase from my beloved mentor Maya Angelou: Just like moons and like suns, with the certainty of tides, just like hopes springing high, you will rise. .. I hope that every one of you contributes to the conversation of our culture and our time. And to some genuine communication, which means, you have to connect to people exactly where they are; not where you are, but where they are. And I hope you shake things up. And when the time comes to bet on yourself, I hope you double down. Bet on yourself. I hope you always know how happy and how incredibly relieved everybody is in this room is that you’ve made it to this place, at this time, on this gorgeous day."

"Today I want to talk about purpose. But I’m not here to give you the standard commencement about finding your purpose. We’re millennials. We’ll try to do that instinctively. Instead, I’m here to tell you finding your purpose isn’t enough. The challenge for our generation is creating a world where everyone has a sense of purpose. One of my favorite stories is when John F. Kennedy visited the NASA space center, he saw a janitor carrying a broom and he walked over and asked what he was doing. The janitor responded: “Mr. President, I’m helping put a man on the moon.” Purpose is that sense that we are part of something bigger than ourselves, that we are needed, that we have something better ahead to work for. Purpose is what creates true happiness."

"You’re graduating at a time when this is especially important. When our parents graduated, purpose reliably came from your job, your church, your community. But today, technology and automation are eliminating many jobs. Membership in communities is declining. Many people feel disconnected and depressed, and are trying to fill a void. There are people left behind by globalization across the world. It’s hard to care about people in other places if we don’t feel good about our lives here at home. There’s pressure to turn inwards. This is the struggle of our time. The forces of freedom, openness and global community against the forces of authoritarianism, isolationism, and nationalism. Forces for the flow of knowledge, trade and immigration against those who would slow them down. This is not a battle of nations, it’s a battle of ideas. There are people in every country for global connection and good people against it... Before you walk out those gates one last time, as we sit in front of Memorial Church, I am reminded of a prayer, Mi Shebeirach, that I say whenever I face a challenge, that I sing to my daughter thinking about her future when I tuck her into bed. It goes: ”May the source of strength, who blessed the ones before us, help us find the courage to make our lives a blessing.” I hope you find the courage to make your life a blessing."

"Now that I have presented some of the bad news, the good news is that there really is a solution. And the solution is each and every one of you. Because you will become the new editorial gatekeepers, an ambitious army of truth seekers who will arm yourselves with the intelligence, with the insight and the facts necessary to strike down deceit. You’re in a position to keep all of those who now disparage real news, you all are the ones that are going to keep those people in check. Why? Because you can push back and you can answer false narratives with real information and you can set the record straight."

"In many ways, this isn't advice for those graduates getting ready to spend the weekend getting obliterated at parties—this is advice for those of us bitterly hearing it long after the fact. Maybe you're 10, 20, 40 years out of school and you need some shot of inspiration, professionally, creatively, or otherwise—these are the words for you. -Ellen DeGeneres...Tulane University....Most inspiring quote: "It was so important for me to lose everything because I found what the most important thing is. The most important thing is to be true to yourself." -Kanye West... Los Angeles Trade Technical College... "When you're the absolute best, you get hated on the most." -Jane Lynch... Smith College...: "Life is just one, big improvisation." -Amy Poehler, School: Harvard University..."Try putting your iPhones down every once in awhile and look at people's faces." -Elizabeth Warren... Suffolk University,... "Knowing who you are will help you when it's time to fight. Fight for the job you want, fight for the people who mean the most to you and fight for the kind of world you want to live in. It will help when people say that's impossible or you can't do that. Look,... if you fight for what you believe in, I can promise that you will live a life that is rich with meaning." -Stephen Colbert... Northwestern University..."If everybody followed their first dreams in life, the world would be ruled by cowboys and princesses.""

"I’ve watched how, in a blink of an eye, technology went from products used by the very few, to ending up in the pockets of billions, bringing social change and corporate disruption...Only a few generations have been granted the role of determining whether a revolution in communication will allow our better angels – or our darker angels – to win. You leave here with incredible opportunity, but also with immense responsibility. Your brains have been rewired to process all this Net-based information. Your brains are dealing with the world in a different way than humans ever have. That kind of profound shift has occurred only six times in the entire 200,000-year history of Homo Sapiens. And you, here today, are the vanguard of the seventh wave... Will you let darker angels win as you add fire to the flame, or will you seek out and spread real news? The question is whether you'll tell your children that this decade was the beginning of a new dark age, or whether it was the time of something new and wonderful. Light a path for the better angels. The world is counting on you."

"You don't need to be the smartest person to be the most effective. Being effective means not just mastering the facts but – figuring out how to move your agenda forward... Change happens only when you could educate and inspire others. When you could use facts to create faith in what's possible... The easy part will be to write papers for your peers... The harder part, and the one you should think about, is how are you going to explain inconvenient truths to people who may not want to hear them. How are you going to rouse an audience to action?...The measure of a life is not time or money. It’s the impact you make serving God, your family, community, and country. Your report card is whether you leave the world a better place."

"Gappers experienced the greatest impacts related to their personal growth and development;"

"Having a wide range of experiences was also important;"

"Executive Summary... this study represents the most comprehensive exploration of gap year experiences of Americans to date. Highlights Include:"

"81% of all survey participants said they were very likely to recommend taking a gap year to someone considering it;"

"The general experience of “being in a new and different environment” was the most meaningful element of the overall gap year experience;"

"Those who participated in a gap year had, on average, shorter times to graduation and higher GPAs as compared to national norms;"

"Gappers currently experience higher levels of job satisfaction and civic participation as compared to national norms..."

"A gap year is really a year to yourself, a celebration to the years that you have spent in academia. You have the utmost power on how you wish to spend it... During the gap year, you have the opportunity to tinker with new... [ideas], sprinting from your never changing pursuit of science to a short detour of non-science or vice versa. Read the papers of renowned scientists or... perhaps, develop a habit of reading books... it is also important that you enjoy it. If an internship isn’t your thing, then try a hand in volunteering. The future is not predictable, nor should your experiences be."

"The gap year may be a solution for some students to grow socially and emotionally, to gain maturity, or to get a stronger financial footing...Even decades ago people took gap years for a variety of reasons... According to data from the freshman class of 2015, 2.2 percent of students in the U.S. took a gap year before college... By contrast, 15 percent of Australian students and over 50 percent of students from Norway, Denmark, and Turkey took gap years. Students participated in a variety of activities including work, service, travel, and learning a new language."

"William and Charles agreed his gap year should be “vocational, educational and safe.”...Prince William.. went on to travel through Kenya, the Indian Ocean island of Rodrigues, and volunteered in Patagonia, South America... He then went on to attend Saint Andrews, where he met his future wife, Kate Middleton."

"Because of comfort, some people will only live in the realms of what they know. Maybe they will stay in the same town or work in the same job for their entire life. Others, however, will grow to feel confined by living life within the limits of comfort, and break free from its mold... Shawn Wolfe grew up in Annville, a township in Central Pennsylvania, where miles of rolling farmlands are a familiar landscape for its nearly 5,000 residents. After graduating high school in 2014, Wolfe embarked on his first journey out of the country, spending his summer before college in Germany. This experience abroad awakened him to the fruitful world that exists beyond the farm lands of his hometown."

"Universities are starting to understand the benefits of the gap year and making deferrals easier, even offering their own gap year service experiences...[some] are offering scholarships to make gap years available to students of diverse backgrounds..."

"Rooftops bars, cozy hangout areas with Netflix and traditional cooking classes aren't what most people would associate with hostels. But they are exactly what some... offer their guests... Winners are picked after judges also analyse reviews from 1.2 million customers... of 36,000 properties in over 170 countries... The Adventure Q2 Hostel has been named best in Oceania. It has rave reviews...it also scooped the prize for the hostel in the best location and best for gap year students."

"Students who go abroad as Global Gap Year Fellows gain skills like time management, flexibility and confidence that are useful when they return to campus... Thomas Elliott, senior political science and contemporary European studies major, went on a gap year with GGYF to South Africa where he worked for a professor of social ecology from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg to research the impact of HIV/AIDS on individuals from rural South Africa."

"The Gap Year Association today announced the start of Gap Year Exploration Month. Taking a gap year is a growing trend and the Gap Year Association is excited to announce Gap Year Exploration Month celebrated annually in the month of February, as a shared initiative of educators, experiential education experts, program providers, industry groups and others who understand the benefits of a gap year. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, fewer than 40 percent of students enrolling in college in 2019 will finish their degrees within four years. For this reason, more and more students are deferring their college enrollment for a year of travel, personal growth, and professional skills development."

"They looked at the top 10,000 Instagram posts tagged with #gapyear, and matched the locations in the snaps to destinations around the world, to find out which location is the most popular with those using social media to keep a photo diary of their trip. So if you're after grid goals and an exciting year abroad..."

"Students selected as Global Gap Year Fellows will have two tracks that they could pursue...a "self-design" gap year which allows students to spend six to nine months abroad completing a service-related experience of their choice with the guidance of GGYF staff and mentors. The second track is a community immersion with Global Citizen Year for students who prefer a more structured experience abroad in Ecuador, Brazil, Senegal or India for eight months. Both tracks are service-based."

"In the year 2000, a fresh-faced, 18-year-old Prince William had just graduated high school and was well on his way to attending the University of Saint Andrews in Scotland. But, before he started his freshman year of classes, William was hell-bent on taking a gap year. Though normally that’s a fine thing to do, Prince Charles wasn’t exactly thrilled with the idea..."

"There is one thing I regret, a sadness that passing time has actually increased rather than diminished. I wish I'd taken a gap year between finishing school and starting university. At the time it never occurred to me to take a break, even though other friends from school were doing so... For whatever reason, I started on campus as soon as I could and studied, almost without pause, for over a decade to obtain three degrees."

"Gap years are becoming increasingly popular among high school graduates. Former President Barack Obama’s daughter Malia took a gap year after graduating high school and before attending Harvard, which brought gap years into the news. But even before that, Prince William and Prince Harry both took gap years before attending college. Many colleges in the U.S., some of the most prestigious Ivy League schools included, are even starting to support the idea of taking a gap year before attending college."

"The most important reason, at least for many students, for taking a gap year is to give students the opportunity to explore their personal interests and find out more about what they want to do with their future. Students often don’t know themselves when they get out of high school. Their brains haven’t fully developed, and even though many may think they know what they want, it’s not uncommon for students to change their minds multiple times during college about what exactly they want to do with their lives."

"The wealthiest one per cent of families are taking gap years with their children as they want to show them “how real people live”, a travel agency has revealed. [A]... London-based travel agency, arranged 80 sabbatical trips lasting at least one month over the past six years, with a significant jump in bookings last year. The exclusive trips are becoming even more popular amongst wealthy families, who want to take their children all over the world and show them a simplistic way of life “from a bygone era”... Snow leopard spotting in India, living with the Sān people in Botswana and diving with sharks off the coast of South Africa."

"An increasing number of students are choosing to break up their studies by travelling overseas for extended periods... But while a freewheeling attitude and sense of adventure are key to successful backpacking, careful planning is equally essential... There are so many places to visit in the world and there’s no pressure to see them all at once."

"Key characteristics of a transformative gap year: It is purposeful and practical, involving some element of service to others; it takes students out of their comfort zone, challenging them to learn new skills and try on new perspectives; it offers the right balance of autonomy and mentoring to help students build self-confidence and a sense of purpose; it is accessible to students from all economic backgrounds."