I love these podiums I had the I'm a short person so I have to make you know adjustments so I just want to welcome everyone to this conference and tell you how excited I am to be here with Jim Shelton. Jim Shelton was one of the first people I met he runs the Office of Innovation and Improvement and between the people in Washington DC Jim and myself and Hal Plotkin and a couple of other champions I think we have a team Karen Cater who actually worked with Jim and a lot of us to draft the educational technology plan that's out on our website which you need to take a look at and so we are really sort of pushing the envelope as much as we can to get as that your superintendent said superintendent Shumway the highest quality education into the hands of every student here in the US and everywhere else if we can so I'm particularly excited to come here to this conference because I was one of the early followers of the work that MIT did and and looked at what they were doing and said you know what if and I did a lot of research on what it really took to pay faculty to write the very best content that they could and pay designers to work with those faculty and get that material in the hands of everyone who needs it and so oh here we are oh good thanks is this work yes okay that'll help and when when the designers you know in in my gosh 16 year career right after the internet I started in Silicon Valley so I sort of grew up with the mosaic people and the Firefox people and Apple and Steve Jobs was a student at our campus and so was Steve Wozniak and we just had you know a huge amount of innovation in fact in our advanced technology we opened the first advanced technology center which actually had 10,000 students a day in that building learning and in the front of that building when you go in we have a case that shows the original Apple logo that most people have never seen which is the Garden of Eden and an Apple hanging down and Eve pushing her hand up to it and it also we have a motherboard one of the there is there's one in the Smithsonian and one out in Silicon Valley so I mean it's a history that I think a lot of us can share and appreciate and certainly every time I turn on the TV now you see Steve Jobs story and and all of that that he brought to this endeavor so you know why did I get into this why is Jim Shelton our champion in so many places around the country and around the world well when President Obama took office he said a phrase in February and then later in April so he started on January 20th with Secretary Duncan and then about a month later he posited a view that the US would strive to have the best educated most competitive workforce in the world and that really has stayed with me we're 16th in the world now you may not know and so we are competing and we're getting out competed academically and intellectually and technologically by folks in Singapore by folks in China I was just in London with 30 university presidents half were from the UK and half were from the US it was cheered by John Sexton at NYU who started NYU Abu Dhabi and all the conversation was about you know how to leverage what we know and the finest faculty around that we have and how can we partner with other countries to actually share knowledge and push the world toward a democratic society in which we all would be able to live and thrive and so it's a very serious security issue it's a very serious academic issue you know competitiveness has to be leveraged and so in Washington what do we think about well we think about the fact that we have a role to play in open education and what can we do in Washington to really create systemic opportunities for open education to grow and so that's no small task when you think about a whole country and you think about we have 6,200 colleges and universities in the US and we have 100,000 K-12 schools and so we think that's an enormous opportunity and how can you create public and private markets that are going to push knowledge and get this knowledge into the hands of everyone quite frankly so that's the goal and when you go to developing countries and you see what OER can do in terms of the health sciences and water and all of the social and economic problems that we have worldwide it's such a tremendous opportunity to bring faculty together to bring students together and to share knowledge so I was thrilled to hear Superintendent Shumway talk about science you know because what what this is doing is allowing faculty to be as creative as they can be and if you've been in K-12 conversations faculty feel beaten up and I feel extremely sympathetic to them and and and what has happened over many many years and it's not one administration it's not it's just what we have done to the education system has been to create these micro bureaucracies where the faculty just have to take this cookie cutter curriculum and they don't have a lot of room to innovate so when I hear that Utah is allowing faculty to use science technology in K-12 schools and open education resources I know that faculty can repurpose how they want to deliver that content so they'll have access to the content but they'll also have access to their own creative powers to really shape the kind of curriculum that their students need today in that classroom so I think you know for us the open education resources movement really allows on the one hand tremendous innovation and creativity and on the other hand a system for all of us to work together in very new ways so when the president says he wants us to have the best educated most competitive the workforce in the world and I see the people you had a slide up here flat world knowledge creating open content with services around that content you see a lot of markets beginning to come and shape and grow and change which is what we want for this movement we also have so many schools and universities and people around the country who are in tiny places in rural America and we've got to have we're spending a lot of time on broadband to get everyone connected and satellites so that people can use the information that open education will really provide them and so we know that in our work with Carnegie Mellon we had a big conference Arnie Arnie Duncan our secretary has a back to school tour every year and this year he decided we should have early learning K-12 and higher education not just K-12 so we went to all of the Great Lakes States in four days and one of the things we put together was a conference on cognitive science analytics at Carnegie Mellon and they were showing the open open open knowledge that they had created and they had a lot of professors who work in the cognitive sciences and work with the designers and work with the content experts and they were showing some of the research which is so important for us in Washington I mean one of our jobs is to actually share the knowledge in a very systematic way as I said so that you can have access to the research that's going to drive more momentum in open education and so Candace Thiel who I don't know if she's here at this conference but she has had some research where the Carnegie Mellon students and statistics freshman statistics learned the course in half the amount of time and did as well or better in the next course by having access to 24 hour online materials and actually having access to materials that actually will branch to what students know and don't know so they're not wasting time on what they know and I think this is really going to provide for all of us in education some new avenues to pursue with the scholarship that we have in BYU and our other fine universities across the country and our K-12 schools who frankly are the laboratories for innovation and and most likely much of the OER content will actually be repurposed by students I know that many folks that in the movement are talking about how graduate students find problems with the content that you know would take three years to fix in a traditional textbook and can be fixed immediately so I think you know you can see I'm a champion for this we need to help students get better learn more we're behind I don't have to go into that students can learn faster as some of the research is showing and ultimately what we want is students to have the best access to the highest quality materials so they can become the leaders of this next generation and beyond I know many of you are intimately engaged in this process of thinking about the best way to build on these resources and I'm hoping that you can become our champions we're going to pretty soon probably in a month or maybe a month and a half by by by the holiday break have what we're calling a request for information and what we're asking the country we're asking higher education to send us what is working and why and how you know so what we want is a whole section on open education resources how it's being used and what evidence you're applying to demonstrate that it's being used well it's going to help us sort out how we think about research and evidence and help us with the next phase if you've ever gone to the what works website that the Institute for Education Sciences overseas it will hopefully be a very user friendly type of what works that will be very pragmatic because our president wants us to become first in the world and when president Obama says that and I think about that and I think we have ten years to do this and I think we need to have approximately I like to round off to large numbers ten million more students graduating from college by 2020 if you do the math on that it's four percent increase a year but we know that increases come in waves so we are looking at ways to really provide more access to higher education better partnerships with K-12 we have too many students leaving K-12 got 25% dropping out in some of our urban and rural areas 50% of kids are dropping out of high school we lose it a kid every 22 seconds and so what we're hoping and wanting is the research that will say we can better articulate these pathways for young people we can and excite and inspire them the teachers will be excited and and inspired if they have science textbooks that are open that they can actually manage and use and and feel that that content is getting to those students and we'll have graduates that will be ready for the jobs and the and the opportunities ahead of us as a as a country so I want to salute your efforts Jim is going to tell you a lot more detail about what we're doing in Washington but I'm going to just tell you a couple of things that I wanted you to know about internationally also help lock in is a senior policy advisor I think he's come to the conference before and he wanted me to let you know that he recently met with yang zhejiang who's president of the open University of China can you imagine the open University of China and he has three million students in degree-seeking programs three million actually a side note when I met with the Chinese delegation the Minister of Education told me that they would soon be the largest English speaking country in the world in India the Indira Gandhi Open University which many of you may know as the people's university is claiming similar numbers while offering more than 3,000 degree programs and 3500 courses in a network of open and distance learning with 43 regional centers six sub centers and 1400 study centers all over India I just came back from this meeting in London India's plan is to build 15,000 universities many of them will be hopefully open universities but if you can imagine the size and scope so all of this work that you're doing is going to serve a huge global purpose that is going to bring you know India is our our largest worldwide democracy so our future is definitely going to be in part of their hands to some degree and so as most of you know though we want to also create private sector innovation with open education so we're asking not only other nations to join us and I'm going to actually we have a proposal before UNESCO and the OECD the organization of economic cooperation and development this month this next month to be actually charting out how they're going to contribute to the open knowledge effort and these goals together with OECD and UNESCO are going to hopefully help us connect scholars around the world for that world-class content that our students need we also have a program are you going to talk about enter the Department of Energy okay let me just mention this also we're also working internally in Washington we know there are way too many silos and there's just way too much bureaucracy just use an example we're going to be regulating on teacher preparation there are 440 requirements for a prospective teacher to meet a federal requirements one of them is that every prospective teacher must take the Myers-Briggs test now I took the Myers Briggs test I'm an ENFJ but I don't think that should be a requirement for prospective teachers so we are looking to you and this is sort of a larger plea or request from you tell us what we can get rid of that makes no sense we have a lot of the department is 33 years old we have a lot of stuff that just doesn't make sense for the 21st century so if you have ways that we can streamline we are going to go through a formal rulemaking process on you know certainly student loans and teacher preparation and we have recommendations coming in on redesigning accreditation and the like big hot topics for education but we really want to hear from you if you have ideas of things that are getting in the way and using open education standards that we have bureaucracies legislation mandates regulations we'd like to hear what ideas would be for repurposing those and making them better but anyway the Department of Energy is working with us to create a recently unveiled national training and education resource which is it's called ENTER NTER a sophisticated free line free online open source 3d platform for next generation online learning and we've required when we did a $500 million competition for community colleges this last year that Cable Green and others helped us think through when we put out that first $500 million of what will be four years of competition and that's another opportunity we'll have another competition in the winter through the Department of Labor and we're hoping you can put together some OER consortia with your partners in in higher education community colleges and four-year universities that can benefit high schools also we got some great proposals in in the first round and it's a it's a lot of money everything that will be created will have to be open and we'll have to use the CC by platform from Creative Commons so that the derivative purposes can be allowed to be open and so we're allowing public and private partnerships to participate in that and we're hoping to create really the next generation of learning so I think the Department of Energy are our relationship with them we have a relationship with DoD Jim Shelton has been enormously helpful in helping us can we get access to open knowledge that has been created over many years for which there is research for which we should be applying that to the education sector so President Obama two years ago proposed the American graduation initiative and I should read you actually what he said two years ago because I think you can put in context everything that I that I've been talking about this morning and I'm gonna turn the microphone over to Jim in a minute and so two years ago right after taking office in July he was in Michigan and at McComb Community College and he said even as we repair brick and mortar buildings which we're doing now with the American Jobs Act we want to save teachers jobs say firefighters jobs and build out crumbling K-12 schools we have an opportunity he says to build a new virtual infrastructure to complement the education and training that that colleges can offer and we want to support the creation in his words of a new online and open source clearinghouse of courses so we can offer more classes without building more classrooms this will make a difference for rural campuses that often struggle to attract students and faculty it's gonna make it possible for a professor to complement his lecture with an online exercise or for a student who can't be away from her family to still keep up with her coursework and then he says at the end we don't know where this kind of experiment will lead but that is exactly why we ought to try it and so I think you know we have an administration that really wants to as said at the beginning push the envelope and get the very best content into the hands of students we are behind if you look at the statistics for K-12 and higher education we're losing half of the students who start in a higher education in a college or university half don't graduate in six years people don't know that we're really pushing I was at the state university conference yesterday in Boston asking them you know we've got to get more students finishing their programs where is the big bottleneck a couple too much too many underprepared students needing remedial courses that are out of date and a testing system that's that's out of date also so we need to modernize those systems in developmental education there are a lot of online courses being created they're gonna be much better than what we've had in the past the faculty know best how to put this knowledge together the designers can make it available and we can test it and have the research to make sure it's going to work so let me stop there let me turn this microphone over to Jim Shelton and tell you what a joy it is David to be here at the conference I really urge you on we also want visitors how Pluckin wanted to me make sure you knew that when you come to Washington whether you're going to see the new Martin Luther King Memorial which is unbelievable or go to the museum the museum or any of the other great parts of Washington DC come and visit us tell us what you're doing participate in the request for information when it comes out in the federal register will make sure David can can get the word out to all of you and tell us what the research is that's driving the excellence that we need so badly so desperately in this country thank you so much


Reduced the size of metal organic frameworks, MOFs, derivatives is an effective strategy to manipulate their phase engineering owing to size dependent oxidation. Herein, a spatial confined growth strategy is proposed to encapsulate small-size MOFs derivatives into hollow carbon nanocages. It realizes that the hollow cavity shows a significant spatial confinement effect on the size of confined MOF crystals and subsequently affects the dielectric polarization. This article was authored by Han Xiaosu, Guo Zhengjiang, Yi Wang, and others.


I'm Travis Belote with the Wilderness Society in Bozeman, Montana, the town that was brought up as being really white earlier today, and I can attest to that. I'm here to talk to you about my involvement with the Ecology Plus program and how we use remote internships and some of what we learned from that process. So a little bit about Ecology Plus, it's actually an NSF-includes program, supported program led by Theresa Maraud at Ecological Site of America and George Middendorf at Howard who are both the peak OPIs on this project, and it's really meant to bring together a collective of organizations and a cohort of students to work on these things, so mentor and networking, sort of entering career pathways, access to opportunities, and overcoming and identifying institutional barriers, and so when I first approached Theresa about how we could potentially work together, we came up with this idea of remote internship, and so remote internships is a way of making opportunities more accessible to different people, and so I'm in Bozeman, which is on the in the west there, and the students, the cohort of students were recruited from the Baltimore DC area, and so how can we give an opportunity to do ecological research in this remote internship setting. We focused on, I mean the reason I think I'm here is that we focus on data science, and so the fact that you can use spatial data in GIS, and it's available, widely available for lots of different qualities and metrics, be it biophysical or cultural or other, to focus on that being the way that we do the remote internships, focus on doing data science, so we learned things like just basic scientific process, asking questions, formula hypotheses, collecting the data, analyzing it, doing summaries, data display, making maps, and then telling the story, and so through this we felt like these were transferable skills of working with data, working with GIS, no matter whether the students go into ecology or some other field, these were transferable skills that would be useful to them in their careers. One of the things, so the three things we learned, so this is kind of the clickbait, like the three things we learned, although I just learned another one at lunch that I want to make sure I get to, is that even though remote is sort of, that was the point of the project, is to do remote internships where, with the idea of making these opportunities accessible to more people, it's invaluable to have time together, and so the three students, Ed and we'll be speaking next, came out to Montana, we spent a 14 or 15 hour day in Yellowstone doing the whole figure eight loop road, getting to know each other and doing training, understanding each other, you know, just sort of getting to know each other was the biggest part, but we also did a lot of just training and coming up with the formula and the questions, downloading data sets, getting our feet wet with things. This was a really long week for everybody, but it was awesome. The other thing, so spend time together and then make sure you have good software and good ways of doing screen shares, and I'm, you know, for those of you that are savvy, this is probably an easy thing, but if you work for an organization, you need to make sure that they're committed to providing resources to doing, and I know that a lot of these things are free Google Hangouts and those sorts of things, but if you need to buy the $500 team viewer subscription, things like that, invest in this sort of ability to screen share, whether it's the students sharing the screen with you, are you sharing the screen with them and letting them watch you code or watch you click around in GIS, that is invaluable for being able to not only have face to face time through remote internship, but also just doing shadowing and sharing screens and taking turns on that. That's been super helpful, and so figuring that out early is really important. And then make sure there are stakes in the game. So both from the mentor perspective and the student perspective, having a deliverable that you're both accountable for is really important. So you can't just say, oh, we're going to do remote internship. We'll meet once a month or once every two weeks and learn some stuff. We had early on, we said, okay, I'm flying back to DC and you all are going to give presentations to my staff in the organization. We're going to open up as a webinar to everybody in the organization and with Ecology Plus, and you're going to present what you've worked on, and I think that was a really important thing that we did is to have accountability and something to show for the work that we've done, because otherwise, I'm busy, they're busy taking classes and it would be too easily, sort of easily go to the last thing on your list to do in the week. So having accountability is really important. The thing that we talked about at lunch that we didn't do, which I would add to this, is have a debrief. We never debrief. We never sort of got together and said, what worked well? What didn't work well? How could I have been better? What could we have done to make the process better? We didn't do that. We identified it just about an hour ago at lunch. I wish we'd have done. So there's my fourth thing and thank you for your time. Thanks for having me. This is a huge honor to be here.


Here's the list of sources I use to put together the How Fast Is It? video book. These books, videos, and websites also represent resources you can use to do further research. The meaning of relativity is Einstein's own book on the subject. It's a worthwhile read, even if you don't do the math. Kip Thorn's book, The Science of Interstellar, covers the science behind the movie. It's a great resource for understanding black holes. Elementary Differential Geometry by Barad O'Neill was the textbook I used at San Diego State University. It is well written and covers the foundations and geometry needed for a deeper understanding of general relativity. Another good college textbook is Concepts of Modern Physics by Arthur Breezer. There are two particularly useful sources for learning about relativity theory. One of them is the Stanford University YouTube series presented by Leonard Suskind. I used it extensively, but it assumes a deep understanding of the math. Better yet, for those who are not familiar with differential equations, Dr. John D. Norton's website is outstanding. Norton has a deep understanding of the subject matter and discusses it in non-mathematical terms. I used his examples extensively. For gravitational waves, there is no better source than the LIGO site itself, as well as the associated Caltech and MIT site. They have created resources usable by everyone from middle school to postdoctoral students. It also has an outreach facility for teachers. And don't forget, every How Fast Is It video segment has a document with the text, links, music, pictures and notes located on howfarawayisit.com slash documents. The following identifies all of my sources. Thanks for watching.