Category Archives: Education

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, turned 20 on January 15. With its 55 milion articles in 300 languages it is the 13th most visited page on the web. Wikipedia entries are generally in the forefront of preliminary web research on almost any topic. The very feature …

“Wikipedia’s 20th anniversary revives debate about its reliability and the need for critical thinking skills in students”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village The COVID-19 pandemic has caused widespread disruption to schooling and it seems that it will be there for an undetermined period of time, at least pending availability of a vaccine. In the mean time online distance learning has become the “new normal” for many, posing …

“How to create an inclusive and engaged virtual classroom in the COVID-19 era”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village The debate about the gender gap in STEM education has come back to the forefront recently with the nomination of Emmanuelle Charpentier (France) and Jennifer Doudna (USA), for the 2020 Nobel prize in Chemistry, and Andrea Gehz (USA) for Physics. Three out of eight laureates …

“Can Nobel Prizes and other scientific awards further women’s progress in STEM fields?”

The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) has to be credited with pioneering international large-scale assessments (ILSAs) and with setting the bar very high in terms of methodology. The IEA also shares data and information with education stakeholders, policy-makers, researchers and field practitioners. In this spirit, the new volume edited by Dr …

“IEA involves top researchers and time-served field practitioners in new open access publication on ILSAs”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village “Planet Word”, opening up in Washington DC on October 22, 2020, will be an interactive center dedicated to language arts. Its mission is to inspire a love of words and language and the project is grounded in the belief that language and literacy are the …

““Planet Word”, an interactive museum dedicated to language, opening up soon in Washington DC”

by Steve Dept, cApStAn CEO When I used to run a small translation agency in the nineties, the majority of my clients were universities. Researchers wrote papers, reports and questionnaires (in elegant French, accurate German, factual Dutch or in rather poor English) and needed them translated. They received documents relevant to their work, written in …

“Chez cApStAn — where great minds come together and share”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Academic institutions worldwide are embracing “STEM” (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) education and related curricula, supported in many cases by government funding. The STEM acronym was officially coined in 2001 by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), and the STEM movement developed in response to growing …

“Trends in learning: STEM, STEAM, STREAM… A battle of acronyms?”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village A group of major names in UK entertainment, politics and technology has launched a campaign called “Turn On The Subtitles” calling on broadcasters and technology companies to include same language subtitles in all programming. If English-language subtitles were to be run along the bottom of the …

“Same language subtitling in programming could improve reading literacy in children, claims UK campaign “Turn On The Subtitles””

Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village The debate on whether skills training could emerge as a viable and scalable future alternative to college is long standing and heated. There appears to be, however, a mounting consensus that colleges and universities have not come close to keeping up with the skills demanded by …

“Opportunity@Work and Accenture call on employers to tap into the hidden pool of talent of “Skilled Through Alternative Routes” (STAR) workers”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Over 11.000 students aged 13 to 19 took part in Cambridge International’s first ever “Global Perspectives” survey. The results, announced on March 2, reveal that students are keener than ever before to learn about global issues like climate change in school, but almost a third …

“Cambridge Assessment International’s new survey reveals that students want to learn more about climate change in school”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village UNICEF released today the results of an online poll it conducted in February 2020 on 40.000 young people in over 150 countries. The poll revealed the major limitations of current education sytems in preparing young people for the skills needed for future work. Almost a …

“UNICEF teams up with PricewaterhouseCoopers to help equip young people around the world with the skills they need to get jobs”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Much has been said and written about the so called “21st century skills” but there is no real consensus on what is meant by this term and how these skills are included, if at all, in countries’ curricula. A new study by the IEA (International …

“New IEA study on schoolchidren will map how 21st century skills are defined and integrated in curricula across the world”