regular
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Stanovich on Conflict and Critical Thinking
Well, actually the Hitchcock review of Stanovich: What types of people succeed in overriding interactional intelligence in conflict situations? As one might expect, subjects with greater cognitive ability (as measured by SAT Total scores) were more likely to do so. But so were those with the dispositions characteristic of an ideal critical thinker: even after… Continue reading
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Openness as a Privilege Multiplier and the MIT Certificates
This is pretty huge news: Millions of learners have enjoyed the free lecture videos and other course materials published online through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare project. Now MIT plans to release a fresh batch of open online courses—and, for the first time, to offer certificates to outside students who complete them. The credentials are part… Continue reading
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Base Rate, Revisited
Reading Dan Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, and I can tell very early in it’s going to be excellent. The following Kahneman insight is an old saw of research on statistical intuition by now, but was revolutionary when he and Tversky came up with it in the early 70s. I thought I’d share it for… Continue reading
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Moonwalking with Einstein
Just finished Joshua Foer’s book Moonwalking with Einstein, one of the most amusing books I’ve read in a while. I’d highly recommend it to anyone, just based on the style of his writing alone, which strikes me as Jonah Lehrer as written by Sarah Vowell (of The Wordy Shipmates period, not Assassination Vacation). But that… Continue reading
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Higher Education is Already a Voucher System
Saw this about the K-12 online space today in NYT: Some teachers at K12 schools said they felt pressured to pass students who did little work. Teachers have also questioned why some students who did no class work were allowed to remain on school rosters, potentially allowing the company to continue receiving public money for… Continue reading
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Badges
Yep. As Rowin points out that badges ‘draw upon widespread use of badges and achievements in gaming‘ and as somebody who has many badges and achievements in various game systems I can’t help but wonder if some of the problems that have cropped up in games might cross over into the Open Badge Initiative. David… Continue reading
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Openness as a Privilege Multiplier
…was the name of the presentation Jim Groom and I originally submitted to ELI 2011. It was going to investigate the tendency of “undirected and unregulated openness to exacerbate inequality both in and out of the classroom” and suggest that this tendency “undermined the social justice claims of openness”. Jim’s remedy was going to be corporate regulation… Continue reading
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A Statistical Literacy Concept Inventory
Been thinking lots about concept inventories. The key to a good concept inventory is that it tests intuitions, not terminology or formulas. It’s far too easy to pre-test students on a test with unfamiliar vocabulary, spend a semester on vocabulary, then act surprised that students do better at the end of the semester when they… Continue reading
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Juliette Culver is a Freaking Genius
I just decided to give Evernote another try, found my old account active, and spent a couple hours going through my old bookmarks from 2009. One was to Juliette Culver’s blog, which I’d made a note to myself was brilliant. It is, but more importantly it’s just even-keeled and unpretentious in its brilliance. It cuts through hype… Continue reading
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A real paper really wrote this
From the NYT: “In addition, Senate Republican leaders would go after “millionaires and billionaires,” not by raising their taxes but by making them ineligible for unemployment compensation and food stamps and increasing their Medicare premiums.” It’s things like this that make me sign up for yet another semester teaching statistical literacy. The fact that this sentence exists… Continue reading
Hapgood 