Hapgood

Mike Caulfield's latest web incarnation. Networked Learning, Open Education, and Online Digital Literacy

  • I’ve been playing around with cognitive disfluency in slide design for my class lately, trying to solve a conundrum. The problem is this — we know from research that reading materials that introduce “desirable difficulties” (such as presenting information in a difficult to read font) are recalled better than reading materials with a cleaner, more… Continue reading

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  • From A. N. Whitehead’s An Introduction to Mathematics, a brilliant early reflection on what we now see as a System 1/System 2 problem: “It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise… Continue reading

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  • Hello world!

    Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging! Continue reading

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  • Keynes, Anti-Semite? Really?

    Pardon the intrusion — but I find this interesting. There’s a diary entry of Keynes being circulated around that supposedly proves Keynes was an anti-Semite. This is meant to be a brilliant rebuttal to Paul Krugman’s “Keynes was Right” column on how Keynes’s theoretical model of macroeconomics has been vindicated. In some ways it doesn’t… Continue reading

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  • Why the I Love Charts post is the most beautiful thing I’ve read today

    Why the I Love Charts post is the most beautiful thing I’ve read today There’s so much to like in this post. It starts with nuanced exploration of feminism, terminology, and privilege, but ends as a reflection of the difficulties of staying a good person on the internet, especially when you run a site. Dealing… Continue reading

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  • Klout wins for this year’s stupidest bar chart

    Check it out here:  http://blog.infoadvisors.com/index.php/2011/12/22/stupidest-bar-chart-of-2011-congrats-klout/ I’m not sure how you trust a company who claims to have some super-secret statistical insight when they put out things like this.  Continue reading

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  • A Herd Immunity to Nonsense

    Mark Pagel on the internet and our cultural evolution: A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we’ve seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What’s happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we’re being domesticated by these great big societal… Continue reading

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  • Cognitive Bias and Education as a Public Good

    A strange but true exhortation from Dan Kahneman, the guy who, with Amos Tversky, basically invented the field of cognitive bias. After forty years of looking into the weird world of bias he says the only effective way to get around your own biases is to create a society of people skilled enough to correct… Continue reading

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  • Evidence-Based and the Marginal Cost of Zero

    If you can conceive of a solution to a problem that has a marginal cost of zero due to cheap replication and economies of scale, then that’s good. If you’re doing that by going into the digital space, where cost of experimentation is low, even better.  Many elements of education are best seen through the… Continue reading

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  • From Obama’s 2012 campaign blog. I am glad to see them standing up for what they accomplished here instead of running from it. This is truly something that the administration should be proud of. guardian: Photograph: Brian J. Clark/AP Two women share historic kiss at US Navy ship’s return For the first time since the… Continue reading

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