November 2011
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Critical Thinking and Clickers
Reading up for the Critical Skills workshop, found this paper out of Colorado University: When teaching with clickers for the first time, the first author wrote several ConcepTest-style questions assessing students’ correct application of sociological theories and concepts. Students worked hard at answering these questions, but they seemed intensely focused on getting the correct answer at Continue reading
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The State and its Monopoly on Violence
Well, brief detour from ed stuff for a minute, but I hope you will indulge. I’m reading Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, and it’s just really good. I’ll talk soon about how this book could be worked into a statistical literacy course (the ed angle), but I wanted to just share something the Continue reading
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On the basis of that research, Ms. Howard calls for a “fundamental shift” in how writing is taught. Professors should focus more on starting the research process collaboratively with students, she says. They should select a few complex sources and explore them with the whole class. “What that means is not rushing students quite so quickly in their first semester in college into writing a 25-page research paper written from 15 sources,” she says, “but rather taking them through the process of engaging with those sources first.”
On the basis of that research, Ms. Howard calls for a “fundamental shift” in how writing is taught. Professors should focus more on starting the research process collaboratively with students, she says. They should select a few complex sources and explore them with the whole class. “What that means is not rushing students quite so Continue reading
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Efficiency = Feedback / Cost
This is exactly the kind of formulation that drives me mad sometimes. But in a time where our budgets are imploding it’s better to give management a simple formula that encapsulates much of the debate than to merely cross your fingers that they get it. We’re kind of blessed to have an enlightened administration here at Keene Continue reading
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Two Educational Contexts
From Dan Kahneman: True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes. You are probably an expert in guessing your spouse’s mood from one word on the telephone; chess players find a strong move in a single glance at a complex position; and true legends of instant diagnoses are common among Continue reading
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Quality time
I don’t know if you’ve seen this Microsoft vision of the future yet. On the whole it’s pretty standard. The weirdest things about these recent corporate visions of the future is how they are always about someone traveling. Remote video in these things is used not to eliminate the travel (via business videoconference) but to Continue reading
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Pinker on Statistical Literacy
Better Angels, indeed: In a question and answer session on Freakonomics Radio, Pinker was asked what people can do to help society “resist the urge to think things are worse and worse and the world is less and less safe when this is manifestly not the case”. Pinker’s answer was interesting: “One necessity is greater Continue reading
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Canvas Instructure and the de-commodification of the LMS
One of the oddest yet most exciting stories of the past year or so is how the LMS, which had sunk to the level of a utility, has suddenly been revived. There’s a common path software takes, where it moves from a feature and performance war cycle slowly into a commodity cycle where the product Continue reading
Hapgood 