Microfinance loans have expanded greatly in the recent years as a way of helping the poor gain cheaper loans, but percentage take-up of microcredit has remained lower than expectations. In an attempt to explain this phenomenon, this paper uses a randomized evaluation of the impact of introducing microfinance loans in a new urban setting in Hyderabad, India, to determine if lack of flexibility i...

Communication is a desirable skill for robots. We describe a method of how these skills could be learned. An architecture of connectionist models is developed to allow the learning of a simple non-grammatical language. Concepts, in the form of a word and its meaning, and numerical quantities are understood separately. A physical system of two mobile autonomous robots, teacher and student, is bu...

Could current efforts to reshape legal education and give more emphasis to professional identity formation be harbingers of a developing social movement in higher education? I want to argue that they should be seen that way. Furthermore, I want to suggest that conceptualizing those efforts as a social movement helps to explain why recent workshops on the formation of student professional identi...

Early clinical placements in dance movement therapy are students’ first encounters with the discipline as practiced. Clinical placement accentuates differences between class work, study and movement experientials (somatic learning) with other “normal urban neurotics,” and the actual needs and expressions of clinical populations. A student’s remembered perspective produces a less complicated vie...

We present a new visualization method to summarize and present periodic population movement between distinct locations, such as floors, buildings, cities, or the like. In the specific case of this paper, we have chosen to focus on student movement between college dormitories on the Columbia University campus. The visual information is presented to the information analyst in the form of an inter...

The popularity of online education environment is growing due to the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) movement. Many types of research in educational data mining (EDM) and Learning Analytics have focused on solving assessment challenges; however, the large number of students enrolled in MOOCs makes it difficult to assess learning outcomes. Thus, it is necessary to develop an automatic learning...

In many countries there is evidence of the international educational movement toward more student centred and technology supported teaching as a way to better prepare students for the future. This has been the focus in Vietnam, for example, since the education reform agenda developed in 2000, but the little evidence that there is seems to indicate that teaching remains largely didactic and teac...

Following the launch of the positive psychology movement teachers and educators emerged as early adopters of this fledgling science. This approach was called positive education. It describes scientifically validated programs from positive psychology, taught in schools, that have an impact on student well-being. The growing body of evidence about the reach of positive psychology has formed a con...

“I am a classic baby-boomer: born in Berkeley in 1947 while my father was in medical school on the post-WWII G.I. Bill. I was raised in Lawrence, Kansas, where both of my parents were professors at the University of Kansas. I knew that I wanted to be a professor from about age 11. I am also a product of the 1960s, radicalized politically first by the civil rights movement and then by the the st...