Allow me to clarify: the School of Ants project wants students, teachers or anybody to send in their ants (via Scientific American’s “60-Second Science“). All you need to do is contact them to get the collection kit (which includes 9 cookie-crumb-rich vials), then leave them out at your home, school, office, etc. Once collected, send your ants back to the NCSU Department of Biology. The collective USA results get posted on an interactive web-based map, allowing you to learn much more about the spread and diversity of ants than you ever thought possible.

What if you live outside of the USA? You may be in luck. According to the project’s website, “Insect specimens cannot be sent through international mail without proper permits,” but the team is coordinating with global ant experts to try to make it happen, and says to check back to the website for a future list of participating countries.

The next collection (and kit request period) begins on September 1st, so mark your calendar to get a piece of the action.

Happy collecting!

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Photo courtesy of Sancho McCann via Flickr.

In fact, the only way to change the situation, Heckman argues, is to focus on tomorrow. What does that mean? The hosts cited landmark studies that show the only cost-effective way for low-income people to get these basic, integral job skills–communication, collaboration, problem-solving–is to go to preschool. That’s right, preschool. Sounds like a joke, but the studies are dead serious. In one (the Perry Preschool Project), the randomly selected control group that didn’t go to preschool fared much worse as adults than the randomly selected “treatment” group of preschool attendees, who got 2 hours a day of it. Here’s highlights of the damage:

As Heckman points out (via the hosts), these results indicate that the return-on-investment (ROI) of preschool is greater than any other form of education.

Other implications
Naturally, there’s a risk involved in making such conclusions: fatalism. If you didn’t get preschool before age 6, it’s too late, some might say. Good luck with your life, we’ll see you later (in jail). What can we do to help disadvantaged adults today? What should we do? Obviously, we’re not sending them to preschool, but maybe we need to tweak job-training programs so that they actually focus more on the most-needed people skills, or the “soft skills,” as Heckman referred to them. At the same time, let’s make sure raising the $14 billion one of the hosts says is the collective amount it takes to make preschool available to all underprivileged kids is a priority.

The ROI is incontrovertible on that.

‘What are your weaknesses?’

What an awful, awful thing to ask someone.

But first! A recap: post number one in the interview series taught us how to dress for an interview. We learned not to wear a suit if you’re applying to be a lifeguard. Sound advice! Next, we all laughed over a The Oatmeal comic, which mocked interview questions. I can’t say it was especially useful, but hopefully funny.

Now, we’re going to tackle the question that inevitably comes up during most interviews, ‘Tell me about one of your weakness.’ Personally, I think this and most other standard interview questions (most of which begin with ‘tell me about a time when. . .’) are remnants of a bygone HR era. They’re anachronistic holdovers that refuse to die, owing most likely to HR staff that won’t retire. I don’t know where they came from, but they’ve become ubiquitous, and they’re ineffective. Most people I talk to invent stories on the spot to answer the ‘Tell me about a time when’ questions; not because they haven’t done great things, but because it takes much less mental effort to tell a nice story than it does to mine the depths of memory for a scenario that matches the criteria that they’re after.

Anyway. Weaknesses. The desired outcome of this question is to sound capable, yet humble. Most advice that I’ve read on how to answer this question says to frame a strength as a weakness. For example, ‘I work way too hard,’ or ‘I’m a perfectionist.’ In my opinion, answers like that will make you sound disingenuous. Lifehack.org recently suggested a method that I like, and have actually used in practice:

The solution? Choose a technical skill that is unrelated to the job you are applying for…

For example, “Well, accounting really isn’t my thing. I understand the basic idea behind book keeping, but I don’t really get the nitty-gritty details. Of course, that’s also why I’m applying for this job in human resources. I think it leverages my strengths and steers clear of the technical skills that I haven’t learned yet… like accounting.”

I generally like this advice because it’s true, yet likely won’t affect your chances of being hired. I’d ideally like to see a shift from ineffective questioning to more of a conversational interview format. I’ve had a few interviews like that, but unfortunately they’re not the norm.

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Photo by the U.S. Air Force

The site allows you to choose by city or interest, and has information for students, parents and employers. We’ve discussed internships before, and have come to the conclusion that they’re generally a good thing. We’re not really sold on the unpaid variety, since only higher income students can afford to take them, but they exist, and can provide valuable real world experience.

If you have any experience with summer internships, let us know about it in the comments section.

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Photo by Magdalines

How about waste? When innovative technology is implemented correctly, it can save money. Simple enough, right? When it’s not, you get excessive waste and cost burdens, as CCAP’s Andrew Gillen stated earlier this week in a post tweaking colleges and universities for always trying to cultivate their own versions of existing technologies in-house as opposed to adapting the (cost-effective) ones that already work.

Instead of using established technologies that allow them to do more with less, higher-learning establishments too often take the DIY approach, which usually results in less productivity at a higher cost. Gillen’s case in point: email. As custom school email systems are expensive to develop and maintain, and their audiences are limited, the associated per-user costs are high. He then lists other examples of what I’ll call “high-tech waste”—library search engines, course registration software—that could otherwise be done better and more cheaply with mass-market alternatives.

The concluding hammer:

“Technology may very well be a cost add on rather than a cost reducer in higher ed, but that is a deliberate choice by colleges, not something inherent in the nature of technology. “

This sensible argument settles the debate in a crowded mountainside that often looks like two rams batting heads:  “tech is expensive/wasteful/distracting” vs. “tech is the universal education panacea and a rightful object of worship.”

We’ve all sat opposite the HR rep whose professional talent consists exclusivity of reading from a list of abstract, irrelevant questions. Anyway, The Oatmeal says it better than I can (click the image for a full list of the 6 Crappiest Interview Questions). Fair warning to those with delicate sensibilities, he talks about pee and whatnot.

But it’s more than just a cool, fast way for teachers to communicate course information or students to get answers to their questions (avg. response: 14 min.), at least according to one of its investors in a NY Times article earlier this week. Aydin Senkut is quoted talking about how the site represents fundamental shifts in education, much like proponents of the Khan Academy, the founders of SuperCool School, and teachers who use Twitter as a backchannel in the classroom talk. Senkut even ties what the site does into the mega-hot business/marketing trend of data mining:

“With Piazza, it’s about turning data into actionable intelligence. We want to empower people to ask and answer questions, and we’re going to measure every aspect of it.”

Here’s hoping this hard-core data analysis leads to better ways to help educate people the world over.

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Photo courtesy of Robert Montgomery via Flickr.

Check out our current favorite words:

Judging by our word cloud, it looks like Wordle is only using a few of the most recent blog posts. I think it’d be interesting to see a cloud of words used over the entire course of the blog.

These days, continuing education can mean so much more: that you’re willing to learn on the job, off-the-job, and at whatever chance you get. And if you’re serious about your career prospects in a knowledge economy, you’d better recognize the advantage those chances give you.

Rule #1: Recognize.

Now more than ever, education has the ability to be asynchronous and border-less. Classrooms can be virtual, and learning spaces can shrink to the size of a desktop computer, tablet or smartphone. While formal higher education has become more expensive than ever, you can still get free lectures and other forms of highly presentable knowledge from iTunes U, Khan Academy, TED Talks, Big Think and OER Commons, among other places.

Rule #2: Read books. Lots of them.

Indeed, as Aurora Meyer argued in her recent Brazen Careerist blog post, reading a wide range of books is one of the most powerful ways you can help your career prospects:

“Every book you read adds to your collective knowledge. … you should continue to learn because more than anything else, learning makes you a valuable employee. It sets you apart, makes you a more well-rounded person and keeps your skills sharp.”

In contrast, she then mentions the worker who doesn’t change and the increasing disadvantage that person faces each time new, younger hires arrive with “baffling technical skills.” The point is solid: you don’t want to be that person. I’ve written before about how anticipating and adapting to workplace change is one of the most valuable skills employees can have.

Rule #3: Avoid stupidity.

Remember, too, that just having the information isn’t always enough. You need to be able to use it well and logically sort disinformation from the truth, or at least a reasonable approximation of it. As The New Yorker‘s Adam Gopnik recently said, the problem of entrenched stupidity is bigger than the problem of not having access to information. So there you have it: think critically, and don’t succumb to being stupid. (Easier said than done!)

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Photo courtesy of ShashiBellamkonda via Flickr.

Mr. Kahn has recieved funding from Google, as well as the Gates Foundation. He’s posted thousands of lessons on everything from the French Revolution to macroeconomics.

Sites like the Kahn Academy continue to redefine the way we think about education.

Have you taken any of the lessons? If so, what did you think? Let us know in the comments section.