Today's economy has left many young working Americans struggling not only to find jobs but with paying back their student loans. Students loans currently exceeds $1 trillion. This debt is delaying many things students usually aspire for after graduation such as owning a home, and buying a new car, among others. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York have a new study that found 30 year olds with student loans are now less likely to have debts such as home mortgages than 30 years old without student loans.

I found it hard to believe that many students are in so much debt that they are delaying many things in their life. But in life you have to make an investment in yourself in order to succeed. Feel free to check out this article, what questions or thoughts does this bring to you?

Mr. Kaufmann, 71 years old and a partner at the law firm Dewey Ballantine, has decided to retire. With enough money to do so, Mr. Kaufmann goes back to taking classes. It started with taking a class on Chaucer. After that, he took another class on the “Divine Comedy” by Dante and then took another one called Heresy in the Medieval World. He enjoyed these classes so much he decided to get a master’s degree in Classics (Latin and Ancient Greek) at the City University of New York (CUNY). Once he received his masters, he received several job opportunities for teaching. Mr. Kaufmann has now been teaching for three years and seems to be staying for a few more years. I was very surprised when I read this article knowing that it is never too late to do what you want to achieve in life.

He has set an example for many students that are now looking up to him.

Add your brilliant thoughts, comments and questions to the vialogue below and learn more about today's seminar here.

Not long ago, I talked about a recommender vs. users tastes and diversity: should we recommend right or recommend smart? Now, here’s a new paper with an innovative recommendation model that considers tastes and evolution.

Julian McAuley, Jure Leskovec (2013) From Amateurs to Connoisseurs: Modeling the Evolution of User Expertise through Online Reviews 22nd international WWW Conference, May13-17, 2013.

The authors developed a latent factor recommendation system that explicitly accounts for each user’s level of experience. They studied a novel dataset of 15M beer, wine, food, and movie reviews. Basically, the algorithm proposed an approach of pandora for beer. Instead of suggesting the beer you would like to enjoy at that moment, it acknowledges that our tastes may change over time, and may change again in the future. Such model considers users’ personal evolution (experience), helps to discover acquired tastes in product rating systems and also allow us to discover when do we acquire them.

Curious re: the future of mobile technologies across a wide variety of verticals? Check-out this meetup to be held Wednesday May 15th from 7-9:15 at Brooklyn Law's Feil Hall.

Brooklyn Law Professor Jonathan Askin shared this event and I am excited to profile his work for New Learning Times... check-out his BLIP Clinic. I came-across Professor Askin and his unique focus on "hacking" the legal system at a recent NYU Poly DUMBO hosted panel/Meetup devoted to hackathons.

Jessie Arora is at it again. She continues to summarize her knowledge of the education landscape with blog posts like the this one, where she includes EdLab in her list of other "teacherpreneur communities."

EdLab: research, design, and development unit at Teachers College, Columbia University that hosts a variety of seminars and seeks to connect the education, technology and research communities. Their publication, the New Learning Times (NLT), provides daily coverage of the transformation of learning opportunities in the information age for those shaping the future of education, including profiles of various education leaders. (@EdLabTC)

Add your thoughts regarding today's seminar to the vialogue embedded below! Learn more about UClass here.

Week 18: Dr. Sharon Hsiao

You will need the following:

EdLab is a learning organization, and as such, we should find ourselves sharing knowledge and ultimately teaching each other various processes. Today, we will get an opportunity to dust off our teaching skills and give feedback on one another's styles.

If you walk out of today's D&R being a little more aware of your own teaching and learning styles, then you've met the goal!

Activity

1. Pair up and teach something (absolutely anything) to your partner in 3 minutes. Your partner should observe, jot down notes, draw it out, take photos, etc. to visualize what and how s/he’s teaching

2. Get feedback from your partner...

Today from 3-4 pm in 203 Butler Library, Candace Thille, director of Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative will speak as a part of the CU/CCNMTL speaker series. Check-out our New Learning Times coverage of OLI... here!

Signup sheet for the event: http://bit.ly/columbialist (please clear this with Hui Soo first!)

Candace Thille has been featured in numerous articles and was profiled in 2012 by The Chronicle of Higher Education as one of
the “12 Tech Innovators Who Are Transforming Campuses.”

OLI is a grant-funded group at Carnegie Mellon University that offers innovative online courses to anyone who wants to learn
or teach. Founded in 2002, the group’s aim is to create high-quality courses and contribute original research to improve
learning and transform higher education.

The Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning will record Thille’s presentation, and the video will be publicly

“What problem do you want to solve?” asks Google’s education evangelist, Jaime (pronounced Hi-mee) Casap. This was the running theme throughout the summit as speakers from all different areas of education technology – non-profits, mobile app companies, and corporate giants – shared their stories and thoughts on education. In the 21st century, it’s no longer about asking kids, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” It’s asking kids what kinds of problems they want to solve. That’s what we should ask ourselves as those working in education technology today.

There were a total of 11 speakers. Many of the talks were inspiring; others, not so much. The three that made an impression on me were Joliz Cedeno, program associate at Global Kids, Rebecca Garcia, co-founder of CoderDojo NYC, and Jaime Casap of Google.

Joliz Cedeno's exuberance and passion for her work in the Global Kids was infectious. She spoke of students being creators of content on the web rather than mere consumers and even showed the audience a couple of the projects her students created, one using Second Life to make short films that brought awareness to climate change issues and another using a mobile app, Geocaching, to bring awareness regarding the hot topics during the 2012 presidential election. The projects were amazing. I wish I knew how to use some of these tools!