Future Work Skills 2020 (Report: PDF)
http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/front/docs/sponsored/phoenix/future_work_skills_2020.pdf
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Governor Snyder's Education Summit Conference 2013 (Update: Phil Power / Center for Michigan)
Phil's Column— 30 April 2013
By Phil Power/Bridge Magazine
Phil Power is founder and chairman of the Center for Michigan.
Paul Hillegonds, who these days is a vice president at DTE Energy, is one of Michigan’s most plugged-in and thoughtful people.
Whenever something valuable and useful is going on in our state, Paul, a former speaker of the Michigan House of Representatives, is likely to be right in the thick of it. Which is why I was startled last week when he got up at the Governor’s Education Summit and told a story about his son, a junior majoring in economics at the University of Michigan.
Paul had asked his son about his career path after graduation. When the young man said he didn’t really know, Paul arranged for him to talk with a private career counselor for some useful advice.
If someone as knowledgeable and well-connected as Paul Hillegonds needs a counselor to get career help for his son, something is really off the track with Michigan’s labor market.
In his opening address to the conference, Gov. Rick Snyder said our system linking student education from schools and colleges with in-demand careers is essentially broken. “For our most precious asset,” he said, “we’ve built a system that doesn’t work anymore.
“You’re doing a great job giving them knowledge, but then you’re letting them go out (without exposure to career choices).”
That’s sadly been the case for years. Simply put, there’s yawning disconnect in the labor market between the supply side – schools, community colleges, universities – and the demand side, represented by employers clamoring for skilled workers.
In many ways, educators in Michigan remind me of Henry Ford’s famous description of a supply-driven industry: “You can have a car in any color you want, just as long as it’s black.” That worked just fine, till competitors started offering different colors.
A report, “Economic Life in Michigan,” published by Bridge Magazine in 2011, concluded that neither high schools (where career counseling has evaporated in an era of budget cuts) nor colleges try much to help students take a hard look at how to navigate the realities of the working world before graduation.
What should schools do?
There’s a far more fundamental argument going on in the background, however, an argument about the very purpose of education. It pits those who push for a largely vocational view of the process and others who say broad exposure to the arts and humanities provide valuable skills in thinking and creativity.
Both sides miss the reality that today’s labor market in Michigan does very little to resolve the mismatch between what kids study in high school or college — and the kinds of skills and drive they will need to launch themselves on a path to a successful career.
I talked about this with Larry Good, chairman of the Ann Arbor-based Corporation for a Skilled Work Force, one of the leading shops in the field. He suggests we think about the labor market as a whole, rather than chopping it up into separate supply-and-demand silos.
Work-force agencies need to focus on how people gain needed skills and how they can use them to get credentials and jobs. For example, as community colleges develop training programs, they need to follow up to make sure people who attend actually doget jobs — and find out why.
And employers deeply concerned that one out of three Michigan adults have very low basic skills should be doing all they can to increase enrollments in post-secondary training programs.
Good argues for a complete re-focus in the field, organizing around learners, not institutions. He suggests high schools and community colleges should collaborate to provide skills and share the base funding when a learner gets a job.
Another important development now gaining acceptance: Industry-validated, rigorous competency-based credentials as a supplement to regular degrees from high schools or community colleges.
Good points out that credentialing “represents a more agile and surgical way for employers to know whether job candidates have the required skills for a given position and for workers/job candidates to be able to demonstrate their capacities.”
Internships represent another increasingly popular approach. But the system needs to move to one of much closer collaboration between industry and classroom, so that schools help business identify and solve issues, while employers articulate demand trends, help shape curricula and offer work experiences.
Doing that should then cause business and industry to more readily accept the credentials schools offer as the basis for hiring.
But as long as schools, community colleges and the business community occupy separate silos none of this is going to happen.
Which means there is a perfect opportunity for a far-sighted business group such as Business Leaders for Michigan to snuggle up to the Michigan school and community college communities.
Gov. Rick Snyder should consider getting all these groups into a one room and not letting them out until they’ve worked out how to fix the education-labor market disconnect. Up to now, we’ve heard mostly happy talk about all this. More is needed. By talking tough and demanding urgent change, the governor, who knows from experience what it takes in the real world, could make a big difference.
Editor’s note: Former newspaper publisher and University of Michigan Regent Phil Power is a longtime observer of Michigan politics and economics. He is also the founder and chairman of the Center for Michigan, a nonprofit, bipartisan centrist think–and–do tank, designed to cure Michigan’s dysfunctional political culture; the Center also publishes Bridge Magazine. The opinions expressed here are Power’s own and do not represent the official views of the Center. He welcomes your commentsvia email.
Governor Snyder's Education Summit Conference 2013 (Commentary: Center for Michigan / Bridge Magazine)
Guest Column— 29 April 2013
(Bridge illustration/A.J. Jones)
By William Mayes/Michigan Association of School Administrators
On April 22, leaders from the education, business, manufacturing, government, and nonprofit sectors gathered for Gov. Rick Snyder’s 2013 Education Summit. The day’s events focused on ways Michigan could better serve its students while boosting the economy by creating a smoother transition from school to career. Those of us who participated left with a common belief: Michigan will become a vibrant place to learn, work, and live only when all sectors work together.
That conviction is what drives my organization and the school administrators it represents. It is visible in our planning, in our policies, and in our practices. All reflect not only willingness, but also a passion for connecting with other sectors and thinking together about how we can move Michigan forward through educational leadership.
That’s why we applaud Snyder and Superintendent Mike Flanagan for recognizing that this important conversation should continue in a transparent way with a representative task force that includes the voices of experienced educators. In fact, I already know the type of school leader I would invite to the table.
William H. Mayes has served as executive director for the Michigan Association of School Administrators since 2005. MASA is a statewide association that represents the superintendents and first-line administrators of Michigan’s local and intermediate school districts.
I’d look to superintendents of local districts like Fraser, who are taking risks and bringing technology innovations to all facets of their school districts.
I’d consider intermediate school district leaders in Traverse City and elsewhere who are making meaningful connections between students and local partners from industry, business, and nonprofit worlds.
Finally, I’d pull ideas from the overworked, remnant of school counselors who juggle caseloads of 500 or more students each year on how the system might support them better in advising the students who will flow into Michigan’s talent pipeline.
We agree with the Governor that this pipeline is key to Michigan’s economic health. In fact, at last week’s Summit, school leaders in our workgroup defined the essential skills students need for success — goals that resonated with business partners in the room.
We agreed that all graduates should be able to:
–Communicate (using both verbal and writing skills)
–Solve problems
–Think critically and creatively
–Use technology as a tool
–Get along and work together
When public schools — or any schools — send those kinds of job candidates into the workplace, employers will be well positioned to deliver specialized on-the-job training. Because an effective education system should prepare students for available careers that will move Michigan forward.
Educators share that belief with Governor Snyder.
But we also believe that a vibrant system of public education will do more. For Michigan to excel, public education must:
1. Unleash potential and motivate excellence
2. Continue the legacy of the American Dream
3. Protect freedom and democratic ideals
4. Foster creativity, innovation and ingenuity
5. Even the playing field
6. Open doors to opportunity
7. Create community gathering spaces
8. Provide safe havens and helping hands
2. Continue the legacy of the American Dream
3. Protect freedom and democratic ideals
4. Foster creativity, innovation and ingenuity
5. Even the playing field
6. Open doors to opportunity
7. Create community gathering spaces
8. Provide safe havens and helping hands
And it should do it for every Michigan child and citizen.
Our beliefs allow for technology tools that make us more efficient only if they also make us more effective in meeting our goals for all children.
They drive our passion for protecting and improving our public education system.Because, as the governor contends, Michigan’s system is broken in that it allows funding inequity, erects barriers to collaboration, limits capacity and stifles innovation.
Yet despite the odds, most of our schools still patch together programming, find ways to collaborate, uncover capacity, and innovate like crazy. And they produce graduates who still lead the world in creativity and innovation.
So, in the spirit of the governor’s 2013 Education Summit, we invite government and public-sector partners to join educators in thinking together about how we can create a vibrant education system for generations of students.
Implementing Common Core Standards (ASCD / Understanding by Design: Professional Development Opportunities)
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Dear Educator:
Two new Professional Development Institutes from ASCD answer your most difficult questions and help you chart a path to successful implementation of the Common Core State Standards. Common Core and the Understanding by Design® Framework: Planning Units with the End in Mind (2 days) Find out how to use the acclaimed Understanding by Design framework to transform broad standards into ready-made curriculum, create units that align to college and career-ready learning goals, and more!
 Using Formative Assessment to Meet the Demands of the Common Core (1 day) Discover how classroom formative assessments aligned to the Common Core help accomplish the instructional shifts in English language arts and mathematics, identify students' learning errors, and provide feedback that leads to more effective instruction.
Who should attend these ASCD Institutes?
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Maryland STEM Initiative (Update: STEM and STEAM Digital Learning Innovations)
Science, Technology, Engineering & Math | News
Prince George's County Schools Test Out Cloud STEM System
Maryland's Prince George's County Public Schools is expanding its relationship with global security and aerospace company Lockheed Martin to tackle the STEM gap among its high school students. In this latest chapter the county's Division of Academics and Office of Information Technology (OIT) have teamed up with Lockheed Martin to test out a cloud-based STEM Innovation system with a small group of students in three high schools, Fairmont Heights, Suitland, and High Point.
The new system, set up by Lockheed Martin, combines Cisco Systems video telepresence equipment capabilities with other forms of collaboration to allow the students and teachers at each high school to share information, knowledge, and research with one another.
County CIO Vennard Wright described the application as a "combination of Skype and Facebook." Along with video and social collaboration, the application will provide a search algorithm to uncover relevant digital resources for students based on their interests. According to Lockheed Martin spokeswoman Sheila Collins, those resources include "cloud-enabled [district] STEM curriculum, high-definition multimedia recordings of discovery-based classroom experiences from mobile devices, and Lockheed Martin career simulation experiences, without physical or geographical limitations."
The intent is to allow students to interact among schools. "During the day, if the teacher is in front of one of the classes, students could raise their hands and send questions back and forth," Wright explained. "After hours, they could interact with other students to talk about the lesson or collaborate with teachers and ask questions about things they might not have understood during the day. They could access lesson plans to review what went on in class."
Over the summer, 10 students will test out the system in a program called Project STEAM, which will take place in the county's Office of Technology. "We've divided them into two teams," said Wright. Each team will work with an expert in each of the areas--science, technology, engineering, art, and math. To test out the system, they'll be competing against each other "to find the most innovative way to use the STEM cloud to solve a problem that's confronting Prince George's County." Examples, he added, might be how to increase high school graduation rates, decrease dropout rates, or raise test scores.
Along the way participants will receive mentoring from a local organization, Men Aiming Higher, on soft skills, such as interviewing for a job. They'll also work with each of the groups within the IT organization, including networking, Web, GIS, and others, "so everyone gets hands-on experience in each of those areas," Wright said. That's a vital piece of the program, he noted. "The reality is, you can have education and certification. But unless you have hands on expertise, your chances of getting a job are not as likely."
If the system works, the program will be expanded to students in seven schools in the fall.
"It is imperative that we emphasize [STEM] education in our school system," said County Executive Rushern Baker, III. "Lockheed Martin has been a great partner, and I want to thank them and the county Office of Information Technology for this innovative pilot that will help our children gain valuable technical experience. By offering their talent, expertise, and resources, Lockheed Martin and OIT will expose students to cutting-edge technology that will help to expand their thinking and perspective."
Lockheed Martin has a long history of working with the school district. In 2010, for example, the company worked with a Prince George's high school to bring engineers into STEM classes as mentors and industry advisors.
Dian Schaffhauser is a writer who covers technology and business for a number of publications. Contact her at dian@dischaffhauser.com.
Read more at http://thejournal.com/articles/2013/04/18/prince-georges-county-schools-test-out-cloud-stem-system.aspx?=THECL#YCYro0VhZGS2JG7D.99
Competency-Based Learning (Federal Rules at Odds with Competency)
Report: Federal Rules Impede Competency-Based Learning
Getty Images
Competency-based learning, which allows students to progress at their own pace after they’ve shown mastery of a subject, rather than by their age, is quickly gaining momentum. Already, a few states like New Hampshire, Maine, and Oregon are moving towards implementing competency-based learning models throughout the entire state. What’s more, 40 states have at least district experimenting with the model. But despite this growth, its proponents say federal policies for accountability and assessment are holding the movement back.
KnowledgeWorks, an organization that supports three education-focused initiatives — New Tech Network, EDWorks and Strive — recently released a report highlighting the pain points between federal policy and a competency-based system. The report, Competency Education Series: Policy Brief One [PDF], points out that, although the federal government has supported some aspects of competency-based learning, implementing the new model can be difficult because of federal restrictions.
“The greatest conflict stems from disconnect with the work on the ground and federal accountability and assessment systems,” the report states. “Implementers faced with this disconnect have no choice but to juggle two systems: one required by federal law and one developed by the educators, students, parents, and community leaders committed to successful implementation of competency education.”
CLASHES OVER TIME
Time is the biggest point of contention between the two systems. The federal government measures school accountability as well as student achievement through time-based modules. Seat time and annual test results are the primary ways that the government keeps schools accountable,categorizes them, and targets them for intervention. And required end-of-year tests focus school instruction timelines in specific ways that do not allow students to move at their own pace, a key element of a competency-based system.
With the competency models, students take summative assessments at various times throughout the year. They demonstrate what they’ve learned as they’re learning — not just during one or two big testing seasons, as most schools do.
WHAT’S WORTH TESTING?
Another big difference between the two systems is what gets tested. Competency-based learning focuses not just on content, but also on “soft skills” like communication, collaboration, and other higher-order thinking skills. In contrast, the federal assessments focus on the subjects of math and English Language Arts aligned with academic achievement standards, but not necessarily with core competencies. In other words, everything is based on a number score, not on whether the student can demonstrate that he can do each individual task determined to be a core competency.
Federal accountability standards track student achievement, not growth. Many competency-based models are tracking progression in career and college readiness as well as core competencies, and those can’t be reported to the federal government under the current rubrics.
COST
The report also identifies limited resources as a roadblock to improve assessments, which they agree are essential, in order to complement the competency-based system. States already spend a significant amount of money on required federal assessments, so there’s no additional money to invest in assessments that would allow for demonstration of mastery or to evaluate throughout a year and not just at the end.
NEXT STEPS
The KnowledgeWorks report doesn’t give a smoking-gun solution for the various problems it raises. Instead, the group intends to continue investigating how federal policies could encourage competency-based learning by studying the effects of the few programs the government has decided to fund in this area. The organization also plans to pull together best practices from states moving ahead despite the challenges and to figure out how competency-based education could be assessed in a more comparative way.
On Perception and the Observational Grid (maybe a stretch, still some connectivity here to internal G.P.S. post (???)
On Borges, Particles and the Paradox of the Perceived
By WILLIAM EGGINTON
In 1927 a young German physicist published a paper that would turn the scientific world on its head. Until that time, classical physics had assumed that when a particle’s position and velocity were known, its future trajectory could be calculated. Werner Heisenberg demonstrated that this condition was actually impossible: we cannot know with precision both a particle’s location and its velocity, and the more precisely we know the one, the less we can know the other. Five years later he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for having laid the foundations of quantum physics.
This discovery has all the hallmarks of a modern scientific breakthrough; so it may be surprising to learn that the uncertainty principle was intuited by Heisenberg’s contemporary, the Argentine poet and fiction writer Jorge Luis Borges, and predicted by philosophers centuries and even millenniums before him.
While Borges did not comment on the revolution in physics that was occurring during his lifetime, he was obsessively concerned with paradoxes, and in particular those of the Greek philosopher Zeno. As he wrote in one of his essays: “Let us admit what all the idealists admit: the hallucinatory character of the world. Let us do what no idealist has done: let us look for unrealities that confirm that character. We will find them, I believe, in the antinomies of Kant and in the dialectic of Zeno.”
Kant’s antinomies are paradoxes that are inevitably produced when our reason overreaches the boundaries of what we can learn through our senses and makes pronouncements about the world as it is in itself, independent of how it appears to us. His second antinomy, which deals with the divisibility of space, shows that we can infallibly reason both that the basic components of nature are simple, indivisible substances, and that all substances are infinitely divisible, despite the fact that each of these positions blatantly contradicts the other.
On the one hand, Kant says, our reason tells us that as we home in on a substance we will eventually come to a unit that cannot be further divided, for if we didn’t, there would be nothing out of which the world and everything in it is composed. On the other hand, our reason also tells us that such a simple substance, if we find it, occupies space; and if it occupies space, that space must be divisible.
In formulating the antinomies, Kant was inspired by Zeno. Zeno’s paradoxes purport to prove the impossibility of motion. To get from Point A to Point B, a traveler must first cross to a Point C halfway between them. Prior to that, though, he or she must cross Point D halfway between A and C, and so on infinitely, such that the traveler never in fact moves.
In both Zeno’s paradoxes and Kant’s antinomies, an act of observation engenders an apparent contradiction in the very knowledge it produces. As it turns out, it is this very same apparent contradiction that we see at work in the uncertainty principle. While any and all observations contain this inherent paradox, it becomes visible only when pushed to the extreme, either of logic or of the physical world.
In a story published in his 1941 collection “Fictions,” Borges created just such an extreme scenario. His character in that story, Funes, has a memory so perfect that he perceives every moment in time as entirely distinct, unrelated to those coming before or after. Consequently, he is incapable of overlooking minor differences in order to connect the impressions of one moment in time to those of the next. He becomes frustrated at our how language generalizes, at how we use the same word, “dog,” to refer to a four-legged creature facing one direction at 3:14 and facing another direction at 3:15.
While Borges may have been inspired by examples of prodigious memory, pushed to such impossible extremes the example of Funes reveals the paradox at the heart of any and all knowledge of the world: namely, that there can be no such thing as a pure observation, one free of the changes imposed by time.
What Funes shows is that, at its most basic level, any observation requires a synthesis of impressions over time. Furthermore, the process by which the synthesis takes place, the media through which it is processed, and the entity doing the synthesizing are all essential aspects of the knowledge being produced. This is, in a nutshell, the first part of Kant’s 1781 opus magnum, “The Critique of Pure Reason.”
Kant had been challenged — awoken from his dogmatic slumber, as he said — by the empiricist David Hume’s assertion that we could never infer any certain knowledge about, for instance, laws of causality, because we are limited to knowing what our senses can learn about the world at any given moment. We may know that the sun is rising now, he famously argued, but cannot infer with any certainty that it will rise again tomorrow.
Kant’s insight was that, in order for the knowledge we get from our senses at any given moment in time to mean anything, our mindsmust already be distinguishing it and combining it with the information we get in prior and subsequent moments in time. Thusthere is no such thing as a pure impression in time — no absolute, frozen moment in which we know the sun is rising now without being able to infer anything from it — because such a pure moment without a before or after would be nothing at all. Funes from Borges’s story could have a concept of “dog” in the first place only if it included the four-legged creature changing positions over time — which is exactly what Borges concludes when he points out that Funes can’t really be said to be thinking at all, because to think means to “forget differences, generalize, make abstractions.” Not only is it entirely possible to infer from our momentary impressions to prior and later events, but we are in fact always doing so.
For an observer to perceive an entity, he or she must be capable of distinguishing it from the succession of impressions preceding and following it; in order to grasp those impressions as pertaining to the same entity, however, the same observer must be able to take them as a unity despite the differences that succession implies.
This ineluctable fact of observation underlies the paradoxes of motion, the antinomies, and the uncertainty principle. For in all cases, some minimum of motion, distance or velocity — namely, change over time — is required for any observation to take place, even as the observer posits an unchanged point or particle as being subject to that change.
At the level of normal, physical sensation, the fact that these necessary elements of observation exclude one another passes unnoticed. It is only at the highly focused, granular level of quantum physics or in the extreme situations of philosophical fictions that this mutual exclusivity emerges.
Borges continues the passage I quoted at the outset by writing: “we have dreamt the world. We have dreamt it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time; but we have left in its architecture tenuous and eternal interstices of unreason, so that we know it is false.”
It may well be that the uncertainty principle, along with other curious aspects of quantum theory, is another such interstice of unreason, a reminder not that the world we know is false, but that it is always the world as we observe it.
William Egginton is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of “In Defense of Religious Moderation” and the forthcoming “The Man Who Invented Fiction: Cervantes in the Modern World.”
Education for Education's Sake @Mike Flanagan (Update)
Why Adam Smith Is Right And Mike Flanagan Is Wrong About Public Education
April 24th, 2013, 7:40 AM
According to Michigan Radio's Jack Lessenberry, Michigan Superintendent Mike Flanagan simply does not care for education as its own end. Lessenberry disagrees.
Michigan Radio: What Flanagan said that bothered me so much was this. “Most of us in education have grown up with an ethic that was something like this: Education for Education’s Sake. That’s just silly.”
Well, excuse me, Dr. Flanagan, but no, it’s not silly. There’s nothing wrong with education for education’s sake—if that means teaching people how to think, and how to learn.There is also nothing wrong with knowing lots of things that are part of culture and civilization, even if they aren’t knowledge that can immediately be converted into cash.
Lessenberry's dissent doesn't go far enough. If you believe government's only valid role is to provide the services the marketplace cannot--and that's the very definition of government in a capitalist society--then the only valid purpose of public education is education for its own sake. We used to call that a Liberal education. We also used to believe such an education was essential for citizens of our republic.
Flanagan obviously would prefer to do away with the great books and pure science for a vocational curricula. In its place, he would establish a system that trains the next generation of workers for what The Simpsons' Superintendent Chalmers called "tomorrow's mills and processing facilities."
Here's the problem with that: It's in an individual's long-term financial interest to learn how to, say, cut hair or fix cars, if they wish to do so professionally. In many cases, it's in an employer's interest to train people to do a particular task. So, let the individual or business pay the freight for such job training.
The public's interest is to ensure a common level of understanding and knowledge across society. Nations governed of, for, and by the people won't endure if the people are ignorant of the world, if they can't read, or fail to understand basic math.
Smith's Practical Vision
This is what Adam Smith believed about education. When he wrote "Wealth of Nations" at the dawn of the industrial revolution, he didn't think England required a public education system to train youth in the practical arts of farm labor or industrial weaving. He advocated the opposite.
The Wealth Of Nations: In Scotland the establishment of such parish schools has taught almost the whole common people to read, and a very great proportion of them to write and account. In England the establishment of charity schools has had an effect of the same kind, though not so universally, because the establishment is not so universal.
Smith's educational vision was practical as well as Liberal. He did not, as an 18th Century Mike Flanagan may have preferred, advocate for courses like "Geometry for Coal Mines: The Science of Small Spaces." Perhaps a mill hand would find practical science useful in his job, or perhaps he'd use that knowledge to create an innovative device in his spare time.
The Wealth Of Nations: If in those little schools the books, by which the children are taught to read, were a little more instructive than they commonly are, and if...they were instructed in the elementary parts of geometry and mechanics, the literary education of this rank of people would perhaps be as complete as it can be.
The goal wasn't "workforce development." It was to provide enough education so that every citizen could be intellectually self-sufficient. Learn to read and write, acquire an understanding of basic mathematics and science, and you can obtain (as Will Hunting famously observed) an Ivy League education for "a buck fifty in late charges at the public library."
Yes, American schools have always offered what might be deemed vocational courses--home ec, shop class, photography, etc. Most students in an auto shop class are unlikely to become ASE-certified mechanics. For most, these vocational classes are about learning general skills that translate to many facets of life--teamwork, problem solving, a sense of accomplishment that comes from doing a job correctly.
Education for education's sake serves the individual--but more importantly, it serves the general public. It's an intellectual foundation that liberates a person of even the most humble origins to rise above his/her station and allows them, if they so choose, to reach his/her intellectual potential.
Short-Changed By Career Tracking
In contrast, a strictly vocational education tracks students into paths of labor based on their family's financial and/or social status. Such a system could deprive society of innovators and surgeons and entrepreneurs who were pre-ordained to dig ditches by an educational bureaucrat.
A public education system that eschews education for education's sake no longer serves the public interest. Instead, it becomes a Chamber of Commerce subsidy that is ripe for corruption.
A local school focusing on culinary skills would be of great value to a restaurateur. An ample supply of graduates ready to work in his restaurants could drastically lower his employee training costs. Would our restaurateur lobby a school board and contribute to campaigns to ensure such a school existed? And would a school board subject to such influence create vocational programs that benefit their backers' economic interest, rather than their students' long-term economic interest?
Given everything we know about government, it's reasonable to assume that would be the case.
Plainly, Mike Flanagan is wrong. The public education system, the one we as taxpayers fund, exists to educate for education's sake. This has been the goal and purpose of public education in Anglo-American society for as long as capitalism has been our economic system. To radically alter that now would be a huge disservice, not only to students, but to our nation's long-term social and economic fortunes.
Our Internal G.P.S. (Revealed)
PROFILES IN SCIENCE
A Sense of Where You Are
Brian Cliff Olguin for The New York Times
May-Britt Moser with Thelma, one of the lab rats used in the research she and her husband, Edvard I. Moser, are conducting.
By JAMES GORMAN
TRONDHEIM, Norway — In 1988, two determined psychology students sat in the office of an internationally renowned neuroscientist in Oslo and explained to him why they had to study with him.
Unfortunately, the researcher, Per Oskar Andersen, was hesitant, May-Britt Moser said as she and her husband, Edvard I. Moser, now themselves internationally recognized neuroscientists, recalled the conversation recently. He was researching physiology and they were interested in the intersection of behavior and physiology. But, she said, they wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“We sat there for hours. He really couldn’t get us out of his office,” Dr. May-Britt Moser said.
“Both of us come from nonacademic families and nonacademic places,” Edvard said. “The places where we grew up, there was no one with any university education, no one to ask. There was no recipe on how to do these things.”
“And how to act politely,” May-Britt interjected.
“It was just a way to get to the point where we wanted to be. But seen now, when I know the way people normally do it,” he said, smiling at the memory of his younger self, “I’m quite impressed.”
So, apparently, was Dr. Andersen. In the end, he yielded to the Mosers’ combination of furious curiosity and unwavering determination and took them on as graduate students.
They have impressed more than a few people since. In 2005, they and their colleagues reported the discovery of cells in rats’ brains that function as a kind of built-in navigation system that is at the very heart of how animals know where they are, where they are going and where they have been. They called them grid cells.
“I admire their work tremendously,” said Eric Kandel, the Nobel laureate neuroscientist who heads the Kavli Institute for Brain Science at Columbia and who has followed the Mosers’ careers since they were graduate students.
John O’Keefe of University College London, whose discovery in the 1970s of so-called place cells in the brain that register specific places, like the corner deli or grandma’s house, and who was one of the Mosers’ mentors, said that the discovery of the grid cells was “incredibly significant.”
The workings of the grid cells show that in the brain “you are constantly creating a map of the outside world,” said Cori Bargmann, of Rockefeller University, who is one of the two leaders of a committee set up to plan the National Institutes of Health’s contribution to President Obama’s recently announced neuroscience initiative.
Often, the workings of billions of neurons that produce our thoughts are opaque. But electrical recordings of signals emitted by grid cells show a map “with a framework and coordinates that are completely intuitive,” Dr. Bargmann said. And to find such a straightforward system is, in its own way, “just mind-boggling.” What is the brain doing being so mysteriously unmysterious?
The implications of the discovery are both practical and profound. The cells have been proved to exist in primates, and scientists think they will be found in all mammals, including humans. The area in the brain that contains the grid cell navigation system is often damaged early in Alzheimer’s disease, and one of the frequent early symptoms of Alzheimer’s patients is that they get lost. The Mosers do not work on humans, but any clues to understanding how memory and cognitive ability are lost are important.
On the most profound level, Dr. O’Keefe, the Mosers and others speculate that the way the brain records and remembers movement in space may be the basis of all memory. This idea resonates with the memory palaces of the Renaissance, imagined buildings that used spatial cues as memory aids. The technique dates to the ancient Greeks. In this regard, neuroscience may be catching up with intuition.
A Welcome Ambush
Edvard, 51, and May-Britt Moser, 50, now direct the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience and the Centre for the Biology of Memory at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology here in Trondheim. They have a steady stream of findings coming from their lab, and a slew of awards, the latest of which, the Perl-U.N.C. Neuroscience Prize, they received April 16 at the University of North Carolina.
But they did not grow up in a center of academic ferment or intellectual competition. They were born and raised on islands off the coast of Norway a couple of hundred miles north of Bergen, part of an area known as Norway’s Bible Belt. They went to the same high school, but didn’t really get to know each other until they met again at the University of Oslo in the 1980s.
May-Britt, who grew up on a farm, remembers an environment in which drinking, card playing and dancing were all frowned upon. When she called home from Oslo announcing that she had been to a bar and had her first beer, her mother said, “And what’s next?”
The Mosers married in 1985 while still undergraduates. By the time they had finished their doctorates, in 1995, they had two daughters, but they were ready to see the world, to train in laboratories outside Norway. And they did spend time in England, with Dr. O’Keefe, and in Scotland, with Richard Morris at the University of Edinburgh.
But the Mosers’ travels were cut short when they were ambushed by a job offer too good to refuse, from the university in Trondheim, where they have been ever since.
“Without knowing it, we actually negotiated,” May-Britt said, “because we were not interested if we only got one job, and we got two jobs. And we were not interested if we did not get the equipment we needed, and they gave us that.” Suddenly, without having really planned it, they had their own lab.
Of course, nothing happens suddenly in research. They began in what Dr. May-Britt Moser described as a bomb shelter, and gradually, over time, built up their program. Similarly, they did not set out looking in the part of the brain where they ended up.
They began recording the activity of cells in the hippocampus, with electrodes implanted in the brains of rats as they roamed an enclosed area. This is still a main method, and the rats are intriguing to watch, pursuing little bits of chocolate cereal on the floor of an enclosure, seemingly oblivious to the implants attached to their skulls.
A Black Box
The Mosers wanted to find how information was flowing to the place cells, whether it was going from one area of the hippocampus to another. But even after they inactivated sections of this brain area, the place cells still functioned. So it seemed that information was flowing in from the nearby brain area, the entorhinal cortex.
They started looking there, and in their early work they were helped by Menno Witter, then in Amsterdam, now at Trondheim, in the delicate task of guiding the electrodes to the right spot.
“We didn’t immediately find the grid cells,” Dr. Edvard Moser said. At first they noticed cells that would emit a signal every time a rat went to a particular spot, and they thought that perhaps this was something like the place cells in the hippocampus that are tied to locations in the outside world. But gradually they learned that what they were seeing was a cell that tracked the rat’s movement in the same way, no matter where the rat was. The cell was not responding to some external mark, it was keeping track of how the rat moved. And when they gave the rats enough room, a very regular pattern emerged.
“The first thing was that we thought there was something wrong with the equipment,” Dr. Edvard Moser said.
“I thought, ‘Is this a bug?’ ” Dr. May-Britt Moser said.
After a 2005 paper in Nature, in which they reported the discovery and named the cells, other labs confirmed the findings and more discoveries followed, in their lab and elsewhere.
It is now clear that the grid cells, in combination with cells that sense head direction and others that sense borders or boundaries — both originally identified in other parts of the brain by other labs — form a kind of dead-reckoning navigation system in the brain that maps movement.
Information flows from this part of the brain to the hippocampus, and then back. Exactly how the grid informs the place cells, and vice versa, is not known.
What scientists have now are two ends of a system with a black box in the middle that is not fully understood. At one end are place cells. At the other are grid cells. As to what exactly happens in between, and how the grid cells form in the first place, Dr. Edvard Moser said, “That’s still a 10-, a 20-year research problem.”
Or, as Dr. O’Keefe put it, “We are still in the pre-Newtonian phase of neuroscience.”
The Mosers remain something of an anomaly. Not only are they off the beaten academic track, but they are a married couple who work together on the same scientific problems at the same institution at the highest levels of science, a true rarity.
They do have different spheres in their new, state-of-the-art lab. May-Britt is more hands-on with the experiments and the design, and Edvard is more involved in mathematical analysis and interpretation of the results.
“We have a common project and a common goal,” he wrote in response to an e-mailed question, “and we both intensely burn for it. And we depend on each other for succeeding.”
He continued, “Most couples manage to cooperate on child raising — for us, our brain project is our third child, so nothing different, really.”
Tri-County Alliance on Michigan School Funding Legislation (Update)
Sunday, April 28, 2013
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