STEM Education and Social Media
There are many important educational dilemmas facing our country today. The advent of social media and the ever-widening influence of the Internet have changed our education norms in both positive and negative ways. Social media has spawned expanded access to information among wider groups of people by promoting collaborative experiences and generating instantaneous actions and reactions. It has also diminished critical face-to-face contacts and interactions that are necessary for a smoothly functioning society. The Internet encompasses an enormous resource of data available at our fingertips, however it also is replete with both intentionally and unintentionally placed data, as well as both blatantly and subtly false information. It has been reported that approximately 40 to 60 percent of people get their news primarily from the Internet and/or social media.
The Internet encompasses an enormous resource of data available at our fingertips, however it also is replete with both intentionally and unintentionally placed data, as well as both blatantly and subtly false information.
One of the concerns this statistic generates is the diminishing and loss in our society of certain kinds of social skills, critical thinking, and analytical abilities. I was talking recently to a retail shop owner who provides products and educational services. He was telling me that the young people he has hired may be both decent and intelligent, but certain aspects of social sense seem to elude them. He has had to teach them that whatever interactions they are having on their portable devices cannot be more immediate or more important than greeting a customer as they walk in the door. This priority has not been obvious to these young employees. Similarly, an educator expressed a frustration to me about students not having sufficient attention span to read more than a few paragraphs in a printed book before being distracted.
Among many other things, our country’s success, indeed its freedom, has been dependent on technical innovation and a dedicated, skilled, and focused work force. It is essential for our educational system to creatively adapt to both changing technologies and the changing methods of social interaction they bring, and to find ways of maintaining the highest educational standards within our populace.
It is essential for our educational system to creatively adapt to both changing technologies and the changing methods of social interaction they bring.
Sustaining our nation’s technical excellence also means finding ways of encouraging young people to seek careers in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) disciplines. According to the “STEM crisis or STEM surplus? Yes and yes” in the May 2015 Monthly Labor Review from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, there will be a need over the next decade for approximately 1 million more STEM professionals than the U.S. will produce. One age-old barrier to attracting STEM workers concerns the negative stereotypes used by our media, which depict the majority of scientists as antisocial nerds. This has not been helpful to recruit young people into these disciplines.
I am very encouraged that Wolfram has created this blog to foster a dialog to address our changing educational needs. Wolfram products such as Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha are important tools that can play a significant role in the evolution of teaching methods. Although Mathematica was initially focused on being a tool to aid in difficult mathematical calculations, it has evolved over the years, along with other Wolfram products, to encompass a vast global knowledge base, much more adaptable for educational use across a broad range of subjects. But the question is, how can tools like these play a dominant role in our educational system?
I was an early adopter of Mathematica, which I have used for specific projects for a long time. I wish I had had such a tool during my educational years. In my career as an Optical Physicist, designing optical systems for various instruments, Mathematica helped me perform calculations such as random perturbations of manufacturing specifications to determine the acceptable tolerances needed for the manufacture of the individual elements making up an optical system.
Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha are important tools that can play a significant role in the evolution of teaching methods.
For another project, I used Mathematica to help me calculate the light output efficiency I could expect from holographic optical elements. These may be esoteric uses to the average reader, but the point is: it is important for students to have access to tools like Mathematica, which can help them understand not only the fundamentals of STEM education’s importance, but also its real world applications to practical devices we all use. This, in turn, can lead to rewarding jobs for those who can understand how to invent and implement those devices. Think, for example, what goes into the design of a camera in a cell phone, or the virtual reality headsets that are poised to enter our markets.
A number of years ago, I was a member of the Education Council of the Optical Society of America (OSA). During that time, the OSA had developed an “Optics Kit” that it wanted to disseminate to help teach young students about optics, including lenses, mirrors, colored filters, polarizers, and prisms. At the time, I spoke with various educators about providing these kits for their classroom. Invariably, I got the response that they couldn’t do anything with the kits because there was no time available to fit in such a lesson. They were bound to follow a specific, state-mandated curriculum, which did not leave them any flexibility to incorporate new non-curriculum-related topics.
After hearing this response over and over, I decided to go to the source. Since I lived in New York state, I contacted the State Department of Education and inquired about how the curriculum was developed, who oversaw that development, how often it was changed, and what it would take to incorporate new ideas into the curriculum. I was put in contact with someone who was working on an updated curriculum and they agreed to incorporate some optics concepts, based on the Optics Kit, into the new curriculum.
This problem still exists today. Teachers are bound by packed, predetermined curricula. They may use their own teaching skills and creativity to get the concepts across that are contained in the curricula, but they do not necessarily have the time, freedom, or initiative to advance extracurricular topics.
Another thing that is more important today than ever is to connect a student with real world applications of what they are learning. For example, an abstract concept, such as complex numbers, is typically introduced in high school. Teachers may understand the mechanics of working with and manipulating complex numbers, but how many can convey how complex numbers are used in practice in fields such as optical or electronic design? Many teachers do not have corporate experience and are not familiar with the real-world environments of, for example, product design.
[It] is more important today than ever to connect a student with real world applications of what they are learning.
The OSA sponsors an annual Educators’ Day event, which provides workshops and corporate interactions for science educators to connect them with real-world applications and hands-on activities. During my time on the Education Council, I found it very rewarding to see how appreciative the teachers were of Educators’ Day and how it opened their eyes to the way the concepts they teach get used in practice.
In summary, technological advances, such as the rise of social media, have created the need for new approaches to education. My suggestions to address this issue are:
1. We need to harness the benefits of technology such as social media, including its natural ability to engage large numbers of people, create topical focus groups, and disseminate classroom information.
2. We need to understand the boundaries for student learning about where the benefits of incorporating technology end and the technology becomes a distraction and barrier to students’ ability to absorb the information necessary for them to successfully integrate into the work force after their educational years.
3. Our educational system needs to be able to quickly adapt to changing technologies and social paradigms, which are rapidly affecting the way students learn. The dumbing down of our society will eventually threaten our freedom. Therefore, immediate action within our educational community is necessary to find ways to encourage larger numbers of students to understand basic scientific principles and develop independent critical thinking in order for them be productive citizens in the work force, as well as to recognize, and to be less prone to being swayed by, the current prevalence of fake news and phony arguments found on social media.
4. More action should be encouraged by educators, parents, and students to go to the source to ensure that curricula are keeping up with the times.
5. More flexibility should be built into curricula to allow for the use of a wider range of useful educational technologies, such as Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha.
6. There should be a continuing and more concerted effort to connect educational concepts with real-world, practical applications that use these concepts.
7. There needs to be even greater efforts than the many that currently exist to make connections between educators and the corporate world and to foster a better understanding among educators of corporate environments, cultures, and jobs, enabling them to better prepare their students.
Technological advances have created the need for new approaches to education.
These are just a few of my observations. My goal with this post is to encourage a dialog among educators and people interested in education, via whatever means they can, from in-person meetings to forming social media groups. I want to encourage educators to actively and creatively reach beyond their current job duties to confront the challenges we are currently facing, in order to improve and update our educational system. Our future depends on it.
Editor’s note: If you are interested in pursuing some of the STEM educational goals Michael Metz describes in this post, Wolfram Research offers resources. Please feel free to explore the following:
The Computational Thinking Initiative
Wolfram Programming Lab
Wolfram|Alpha Web Apps
Wolfram|Alpha for Educators
About the blogger:
Michael Metz
Michael Metz is an independent consultant. He received a B.S. in Mathematics and an M.S. in Physics. Mr. Metz spent most of his career as an Optical Physicist, researching, designing, ray-tracing, analyzing, tolerancing and performing hands-on laboratory experiments for optical systems used in various cutting edge instruments, for medical, industrial, entertainment and government applications. Additionally, Mr. Metz was an entrepreneur in the field of Holography, and a pioneer in the development of edge-lit holograms. Later in his career, he became a Quality Engineer with expertise in Quality Systems for medical devices and related FDA regulations, medical device reports, complaint handling, and corporate corrective and preventive actions. Throughout his career, Mr. Metz developed custom software programs, spreadsheets and databases as an aid to the projects he worked on, using various computer languages such as Fortran, Basic, Pascal, Mathematica, Visual Basic for Applications, Zemax Programming Language, C/C++ and various others. Coming from a family that included many educators, Mr. Metz has always had a particular interest in education. He had a Teaching Fellowship in Graduate School, and gave many presentations and corporate trainings during his career. As an inventor, Mr. Metz was awarded 6 patents, and is very familiar with the patent process. As a writer, Mr. Metz has a published book chapter and magazine article, as well as several published technical papers. For fun, Mr. Metz avidly pursues music, and is an accomplished folk guitarist and performing musician.
