Improving Lifelong Learning by Fostering Students' Learning Strategies at University

The foundation of how students usually learn is laid early in their academic lives. However, many or even most students do not primarily rely on those learning strategies that are most favorable from a scientific point of view. To change students' learning behavior when they start their university education, we developed a computer-based adaptive learning environment to train favorable learning strategies and change students' habits using them. This learning environment pursues three main goals: acquiring declarative and conditional knowledge about learning strategies, consolidating that knowledge, and applying these learning strategies in practice. In this report, we describe four experimental studies conducted to optimize this learning environment (n = 336). With those studies, we improved the learning environment with respect to how motivating it is, investigated an efficient way to consolidate knowledge, and explored how to facilitate the formation of effective implementation intentions for applying learning strategies and changing learning habits. Our strategy-training module is implemented in the curriculum for freshman students at the Department of Psychology, University of Freiburg (Germany). Around 120 students take part in our program every year. An open version of this training intervention is freely available to everyone

Quantum Holographic Encoding in a Two-dimensional Electron Gas

The advent of bottom-up atomic manipulation heralded a new horizon for attainable information density, as it allowed a bit of information to be represented by a single atom. The discrete spacing between atoms in condensed matter has thus set a rigid limit on the maximum possible information density. While modern technologies are still far from this scale, all theoretical downscaling of devices terminates at this spatial limit. Here, however, we break this barrier with electronic quantum encoding scaled to subatomic densities. We use atomic manipulation to first construct open nanostructures--"molecular holograms"--which in turn concentrate information into a medium free of lattice constraints: the quantum states of a two-dimensional degenerate Fermi gas of electrons. The information embedded in the holograms is transcoded at even smaller length scales into an atomically uniform area of a copper surface, where it is densely projected into both two spatial degrees of freedom and a third holographic dimension mapped to energy. In analogy to optical volume holography, this requires precise amplitude and phase engineering of electron wavefunctions to assemble pages of information volumetrically. This data is read out by mapping the energy-resolved electron density of states with a scanning tunnelling microscope. As the projection and readout are both extremely near-field, and because we use native quantum states rather than an external beam, we are not limited by lensing or collimation and can create electronically projected objects with features as small as ~0.3 nm. These techniques reach unprecedented densities exceeding 20 bits/nm2 and place tens of bits into a single fermionic state.Comment: Published online 25 January 2009 in Nature Nanotechnology; 12 page manuscript (including 4 figures) + 2 page supplement (including 1 figure); supplementary movie available at http://mota.stanford.ed

Manuscriptorium Digital Library and ENRICH Project: Means for Dealing with Digital Codicology and Palaeography

Codicology and palaeography in the digital age can be developed both through adapting existing methods and using information and communication technologies. This can be achieved e.g by projects focusing on the integration of individual resources under a single user interface. This is the aim of the Manuscriptorium digital library as well as the ENRICH project. The integration is based on the centralisation of metadata from various resources and on the distributed storage of data, mainly digital images. This is implemented through a distributed complex digital document, containing the so-called identification record and more data types. The construction of the integrated Manuscriptorium digital library within the ENRICH project is being done in four basic ways: automatically, or semi-automatically respectively manually, and those both online and offline. This has made it possible to amass more than 5,000 documents. For Manuscriptorium, a search is important, which allows information to be gathered through special fields and the differences in graphics to be harmonised. The aim of the ENRICH project is also the creation of tools for the compilation of virtual collections and documents. In its method of integrating resources, the Manuscriptorium endeavours to be an instrument of codicological and palaeographic research

Privacy and Power

Something has gone wrong in modem America, argues Jeffrey Rosen in The Unwanted Gaze. Our medical records are bought and sold by health care providers, drug companies, and the insurance industry. Our e-mails are intercepted and read by our employers. Amazon.com knows everything there is to know about our reading and web-browsing habits. Poor Monica Lewinsky\u27s draft love letters to President Bill Clinton were seized by the villainous Ken Starr, and ultimately plastered all over the nation\u27s newspapers. To Rosen, the nature of the problem is clear: These examples are all part of a troubling phenomenon that affects all Americans: namely, the erosion of privacy at home, at work, and in cyberspace, so that intimate personal information ... is increasingly vulnerable to being wrenched out of context and exposed to the world. Rosen is, of course, hardly unusual in viewing all these issues as quintessential privacy violations. In the past few years the media seem to have woken up to privacy issues, and most of us have been sympathetic readers of dozens of popular articles addressing just such a range of privacy violations. At the moment, the language of privacy seems to be the only language we have for talking about issues such as workplace e-mail monitoring, electronic cookies, medical records, and Monica\u27s love letters. Is this a good thing? Unquestionably, Rosen\u27s examples are troubling, but are they all troubling in precisely the same way? Does it make sense to analyze them all as solely or primarily examples of the erosion of privacy ? Moreover, is there a coherent and articulate conception of privacy that underlies all of Rosen\u27s examples