Technology in higher education: learning with it instead of from it.

Now, researchers at the University of Missouri have found that activity - based learning, rather than lecture - based, imporves student creativity and learning by allowing students to use technology to 【小题1】 their own original ideas.

Isa Jahnke, associate professor in the MU College of Education's school of Information Science and Learning Technologies, collaborated with former doctoral student Julia Liebscher to study how higher education professors in Europe use mobile 【小题2】 in their classes. She found that student creativity was most enhanced by professors who allowed their students to use technology in a team setting to come up with an unusual product or 【小题3】.

For example, one group of students in a history class developed an app that virtually teaches users about the history 【小题4】 the Berlin Wall. Rather than simply lecturing the material to the students, Jahnke found that allowing them to use technology in a collaborative way enhanced the students' creativity and 【小题5】 of the content.

"This research is useful for professors to rethink how they 【小题6】 their existing courses," Jahnke said. "We need to shift away from purely lecture-based learning where students are just consumers of information toward a more meaningful 【小题7】 approach with technology where students are able to come up with creative and new solutions in a team setting."

Jahnke added that there are resources at MU, such as the Teaching For Learning Center, to help professors 【小题8】 their course designs in the ever-changing educational landscape.

"If we have universities that are producing more creative-thinking students, then we have more people who can help come up with 【小题9】 for all of society's grand challenges," Jahnke said. "Creativity will lead to better inventors, managers and business owners, but first we need to ask ourselves as educators if we are using technology to put our students in positions to be 【小题10】 in the first place."

The vast jungles of the Amazon rainforest are home to tribes (部落) mostly isolated from the outside world, whose way of life, largely unchanged for hundreds of years, is now 【小题1】 threatened by modern civilization.

Now, scientists discover they can monitor these “uncontacted tribes” using satellites, which would allow inexpensive and safe 【小题2】 of these tribes in order to protect them from outside threats.

In order to help 【小题3】 these uncontacted Indians, researchers need accurate estimates of their populations. One way to collect this data involves flying over their villages, but such over-flights are both expensive and could fill these native peoples with fear. Another strategy involves meeting individuals on the ground, but among other risks, scientists could 【小题4】 spread disease to members of the tribes.

Instead, scientists 【小题5】 whether satellite images could monitor uncontacted tribes. The result was inspiring. They 【小题6】 their locations and measured the sizes of their villages, houses and gardens. “We can find isolated villages with remote 【小题7】 and study them over time.” Walker told Live Science. “We can ask: Are they growing? Do they move?”

Surprisingly, based on the sizes of the houses and villages, the scientists find the population densities of these isolated villages are about 10 times greater, on 【小题8】, than other villages of native Brazilian peoples. This may be due to the fact that they have to live closer together because they are not as good at 【小题9】 the forest, since they lack modern devices like chainsaws and tractors, the researchers said. The tribes may also be afraid of spreading out due to fear of being 【小题10】 by outsiders, Walker said.

The researchers now plan to focus on 29 more isolated villages to “look at their ecology--that is, distance from rivers and roads--and use this to model where else we can find more isolated villages,” Walker said.

Over the last 150 years, the field of medicine has accomplished many astonishing things. Some of these medical 【小题1】 are well-known, antibiotics, vaccines and organ transplants, for example. Here are three success stories in the world of medical science.

On July 2, 2008, D’Zhana Simmons from South Carolina was given a heart transplant. She 【小题2】 Kfroma condition called dilated cardiomyopathy(扩张型心肌病), which meant that her heart was weakened and her blood wasn’t being pumped efficiently. Her new heart failed to 【小题3】 properly, so doctors fitted two pumps to keep her blood 【小题4】 while they went looking for a new heart. It was almost four months later, on October 29, that another transplant was carried out successfully. In 【小题5】, she’d lived without a heart for 118 days. This is thought to be the longest a pediatric patient has been kept alive without any heart at all.

In1999, a patient in a persistent vegetative state(植物人状态) due to a motor accident was seen to be twitching(抽动) by one of his nurses. His doctor 【小题6】 a common sleeping pill, zolpidem, in case this twitching was caused by discomfort. The doctor crushed it on a spoon, fed it to the patient, and was shocked when just half an hour later, the comatose(昏迷的)person made a noise for the first time in five years. This simple 【小题7】 has since been tried with several other patients with marvelous results. Not all patients respond--in fact, around forty percent don’t show any improvement--but those who are successfully rescued from their comas are finally able to 【小题8】 their loved ones, and even have conversations.

Blindness is not a single, uniform condition; it can be variously caused by problems in the eyes, the nerves and the brain. Thanks to machine implants, people who were completely blind sometimes become capable of【小题9】 colours and describing objects.

The device works like a digital camera, creating an image and then sending signals through nerve cells to the brain. Doctors were also able to restore sight to a man who had been blind for forty-three years; they did this with the help of stem cells, one of the most 【小题10】 fields in medicine. Neither of these treatments are yet perfect, but they show what science may be capable of in the future.