Bridenstine's First Hearing As Administrator
Hearing: Review of the FY2019 Budget Request for NASA
FWIW @NASA Administrator @JimBridenstine has certainly been paying attention to the people who prepared him for today's hearing. No peering down at notes or leaning back to have staff whisper in his ear.
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) May 23, 2018
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I suggest he not use any science jargon until he is highly familiar with the material. Just keeping things in simple English is better for all involved.
He is a naval aviator you know. It takes basic knowledge of science and engineering to become one. Did you know they still teach them to navigate by the stars? Just in case GPS and other electronic aids fail.
If all it takes is a renaming of the Education Office to save it then go for it – a Rose by any other name…
???
So does this mean STEM engagement/Education will not go away?
I consider it a test to see whether Bridenstine reverses prior decisions. It appears the decision was made by competing directorates (Operation and Exploration) in order to steal already meager education funds and with Bolden he let them do what they wanted; the guy had no backbone. Ops and Exploration have an insatiable appetite for money but in case no one has noticed, they get little done. They are real ‘operators’; they haven’t done exploration in half a century. And they have no plan today to do any better. Personally I’ve lost all confidence in those schmucks and am waiting to see if Bridenstine can fix the problem.
On the education front. I just stopped by my old source locations at JSC to get some k-12 and high-school materials and pictures to hand out to some teachers and students I will be meeting while doing some traveling. I haven’t had the opportunity to interact with students in a couple years and abruptly found out that JSC has closed their media relations building and PAO has nothing in hard copy. They said down-load it and print it out. It is most distressing that NASA has gone to the lowest levels, making instructors and luminaries pay for their teaching materials like so many educators have been forced to do in our crumbling lower education system. If you cant see that the direction of this society is going is not good, then it isn’t surprising that we are where we are.
See, this is the problem. I do outreach all the time and am quite reliant on the cool materials that I get from PAO. Download it and print it out? Shameful.
??? The world is going to digital materials. I don’t remember how many years ago I handed out paper materials in my on-ground classes. It is all, even assigned articles, on the class website for students to download to their device of choice.
Do K-12 teachers still use paper? My grandkids in High School (California) say they download everything their devices.
And there is more than sufficient psychological and human learning studies out there to show that this “total” electronic mode of education is dumbing down our youth and society. It has even shown that physiologically/neurologically this affects brain development and causes learning to be less efficient and permanent. The neural hand eye motor pathways created in most of us previously are not being developed in children not taught cursive anymore. We are actually creating a new neurological variety of human, and most likely not for the better. And on a motivational/inspirational aspect it is probably doing exactly the same thing. Just because you’re human does not mean your truly understand how humans work, even yourself.
References? Most of the various studies I see warn about learning apps aimed at young kids, under 5, not the use of eBooks, articles, etc., in a classroom setting.
Also I understood you were worried about climate change? Do you know how much green house gases are released by making paper? And the toxins that paper adds to land fills?
And many wonder why it is so difficult to put a man on the Moon. But then this is not the same country that put a man on the Moon.
In the district adjacent to JSC the high school teachers are allocated one sheet of paper per student per week. If the teacher wants more than that they must pay for it and provide it themselves. The district does not provide computers either in school or for the students to take home. If they use a computer in the library-there are a limited number- most external internet websites are blocked. A large fraction of students have no computer and no internet. Smartphones are the digital device that most students use; not much good for anything other than a quick answer on Google.
My iPhone allows me to download books that are in pdf on the NASA website and import them into Kindle. I often use the Notes feature to write lectures and other documents including meeting notes, the mail feature allows me to send them to my email to cut and paste into Word Files. Most course management systems have apps for smart phones that allow you to do most of the things you are able to do on a computer on the iPhone. I am writing this on an iPhone. I assume other smart phones are just as capable as the iPhone is so don’t sell them short.
Rather than doing the old prints NASA, most of which will probably end up in land fills they should be offering screen savers and frames to this new generation.
As I look around I do not see too many people reading and writing extensively on their smart phones. I see some mainly looking at Facebook postings or sending a quick text message. So what is possible is not how you suggest it is used. I know I do not use my smart phone in this manner.
You remind me of the NASA manager, the one managing educational and communications programs, who told me “we figured everybody else was just like us”. What he meant was that he thought everyone else in the US had a 6 figure GS-15 salary with maybe another household income or two, so maybe a $200,000 to 250,000 a year salary, and besides everyone has a laptop their place of work has given them. No, the average here is probably closer to $40,000, and most people have to pay for their own computers.
Where I teach in the South Texas border area it’s more like a $30,000 average which is why most students buy the digital versions of the required texts since they are far cheaper than the print versions. And it allows them to use Amazon instead of the bookstore. But it does involve a learning curve to adapt.
One of the problems, which the NASA media people ought to realize because they have exactly the same issue with their own media on their own webpages and on Youtube, is that most people looking at the internet do not look at anything for very long, usually 30 seconds to a minute. That goes for young students as well as adults. There are ways of getting people to look for longer, either interactive apps or serial publications so that you keep bringing them back. NASA has very little of those.
Apparently someone was trying to save some dollars but forgot what the purpose was. NASA has essentially a captive audience of 50 or 75 million students in classrooms and NASA has been missing out on reaching them for as long as they have cut off paper products like the old NASAFacts wall charts.
There has been a lot of research done on this. Too bad NASA doesn’t look at any of it.
Keith is right, there was no confusion. This was a NASA AA trying to move education funding into technical areas.
If you recall the obfuscation was to ‘move education’ to the NSF, the Department of Education and the Smithsonian. Department of Ed does not produce educational materials; all they do is serve as a clearinghouse for federal funds going to states and local communities. NSF also provides grants but most of their support goes to colleges and research foundations.
Smithsonian people told me they were badly hurt by this fictitious move of responsibility and funds. Since people had heard Smithsonian was supposed to receive the dollars that had previously been going to NASA education, donations fell off precipitously. Their was never any funds transfer. Smithsonian’s main role besides exhibits, is school group tours. Most educational products fall more into the category of historical research.
Good job, NASA management, you not only screwed over your own education organization and people, laying a lot of good people off in the process, you managed to screw up a lot of others too.
This comes from management not knowing what they do not know, and not trying to find out in advance before they screw things up. This battle has gone on now for about six years. Maybe Bridenstine can straighten out the clueless NASA management?