Items to Share: 19 May

Education Focus

• The God of Data by Rob Barratt (video--with thanks to Neil Burton for the link)

• Don't Go Back to School: How to Fuel the Internal Engine of Lifelong Learning | Brain Pickings On learning beyond formal institutions, which is of course where we learn practically everything that matters.

• Donald Clark Plan B: MOOC on Human-Computer Interaction: 7 fails in screen design How can a course about something be so poor at the same thing? Although strangely it is not that unusual, as in most courses on how to teach...

Other Business

• ISS Music Video Putting Chris Hadfield's cover of Space Oddity into context.

• Freelancing Rules of Thumb | The Freelancery Seriously tongue-in-cheek--clearly rings bells with commenters.  

• Growing Concern that News Photos Are Being Excessively Manipulated - Spiegel Online ...and what are the boundaries?  

• Crime and Punishment: Juvenile offenders study Russian literature - The Washington Post  

Items to Share: 12 May

Education Focus

• Ken Robinson: How to escape education's death valley | Video on TED.com Sir Ken's latest.  

• Princeton Alumni Weekly: The future of education? Quite a long and considered article on MOOCs. 

• Peace, love and understanding | websofsubstance Harry Webb on using rote-learnt rules to solve maths problems--is it acceptable? 

• David Foster Wallace’s Commencement Speech “This is Water,” Remixed in a Short Video Rather hyped, but interesting 

• infed.org | Informal learning: theory, practice and experience 

Other Business

• Doctor Who Is the Greatest Jew on TV – Tablet Magazine ? 

• Are you inside the circle or outside? | Daniel Pink  Annotated global map--where the people are. 

• How to Spot a Weak Argument by Daniel Dennett. Simple, and it must surely be accurate... 

• He Conceived the Mathematics of Roughness by Jim Holt | The New York Review of Books On Benoit Mandelbrot 

• Philosophy, lit, etc.: A Kierkegaard bicentennial roundup I started gathering pieces on SK's 200th birthday, and then found that Paul Raymont had done it already.

• Your 5-Step Self-Defence Program Against Neuro-Nonsense | Psychology Today      

• The psychology of menus | Life and style | The Guardian

Items to Share; 20 April

I shall be away for a few weeks, and I'll resume sharing when I get back.
Education Focus

• Do we really have high expectations of our students? Or is it just talk? Part Two: Curriculum. | Tabula Rasa 'I want to [...] suggest that low expectations are so entrenched in the system that even the curriculum we teach perpetuates poor standards. The rhetoric of high expectations continues to chime throughout the halls of my school and I wonder once again: is it just talk?'

• How could assessment & accountability unshackle schools? | Pragmatic Education

• First steps into learning and teaching in higher education  A free OOC from the Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development (disclosure--I worked there for a while) principally for people new to the field. For a fee, it can be assessed for 10 Master's level credits. 

• Perspectives on Kirschner, Sweller, Clark (2006) | websofsubstance 'In the period since I published a post linking to the original Kirschner, Sweller, Clark paper and the various responses to this paper, there has been some comment on Twitter and in other blogs. Some of this is thoughtful and considered; some of it is less so. I would like to respond to the main points that have been raised and of which I am aware.' 

• Advocates of RCTs in education should look more closely at the differences between medical research and education research | British Politics and Policy at LSE  'So does the Secretary of State for Education have a “huge enthusiasm” for rigorously evaluating policy, as Goldacre claims? His decisions over spending and the commissioning of policy papers suggests that, like his predecessors, he cares more about appearing interested in evidence rather than actually committing to invest any serious money on gathering it.'

Other Business

• The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens: Scientific American 'How exactly does the technology we use to read change the way we read?'

• Is Brain Science Really Changing How We See Ourselves? | Psychology Today 'There is in fact very little research into the way neuroscience findings are affecting the way we talk and think about ourselves.' 

• Wringing out a washcloth in space Fascinating video.

• Friedrich Nietzsche & Existentialism Explained to Five-Year-Olds (in Comical Video by Reddit) | Open Culture  'A web series inspired by a subreddit, “Explain Like I’m Five” has explained other complicated subjects to five year-olds, including the crisis in Syria and the volatility of the stock market. In this episode, our two presenters prime their students for a discussion on slave morality with the question “who here thinks they’re a good boy or a good girl?”'

No comment...

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Items to Share; 14 April

Education Focus

• Successful Plagiarism 101 - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education  (It's satire.)
   
• Donald Clark Plan B: Keep on taking the tablets: 7 reasons why this is lousy advice A properly sceptical discussion of the use of tablets (as in computers) in schools.

• Moving up Bloom’s Taxonomy in an Introductory Course: What's Being Done | Faculty Focus  '“Of the 9,713 assessment items submitted to this study by 50 faculty teaching introductory biology, 93% were rated Bloom’s level 1 or 2—knowledge and comprehension. Of the remaining items, 6.7% rated level 3 with less than 1% rated level 4 or above.” (p. 437)' 

• The myth of learning styles | thInk Again... No reference to UK studies of course...

• Brain-Training Games Don't Actually Make You Smarter : The New Yorker 'Last year, the New York Times Magazine published a glowing profile of the young guns of brain training called “Can you make yourself smarter?” The answer, however, now appears to be a pretty firm no—at least, not through brain training. [Meta-analysis concludes] the games may yield improvements in the narrow task being trained, but this does not transfer to broader skills like the ability to read or do arithmetic, or to other measures of intelligence. Playing the games makes you better at the games, in other words, but not at anything anyone might care about in real life.' 

• The most commonly discovered approach to teaching | websofsubstance 'Discovery approaches may have a place with more expert students, but I worry that sometimes we end up choosing things that are easy to discover, or methods that we find fun over things that the students need to learn. And we also run risks that being straightforward and expository avoid.' and The Kirschner, Sweller, Clark (2006) Cycle of Papers  Why "minimal guidance" approaches to teaching do not work--and that's pretty well everything apart from direct instruction. It's a contested view! 

• It’s either a false dichotomy or a bathtub full of spinach | websofsubstance  --- well worth saying because false dichotomies are legion in what passes for educational "debate".

Other Business

• What was the most comforting condolence sentence you ever heard?  Not sure how I got here, but this is web 2.0 at its best... 

• Charles Crawford on Bruce Sterling as a modern orator--  very interesting analysis of a "free-wheeling" closing speech by a great author of SF.

• Tom Lehrer’s Mathematically and Scientifically Inclined Singing and Songwriting, Animated | Open Culture 'Nobody can deny the importance of learning how to subtract or how to tell one element from another, but we’d do well to keep Lehrer’s sharp human insights, present implicitly in all his music and explicitly in some of it, in mind. So put one of his records on the next time you have a birthday of your own, taking a bracing shot of his wit before you continue, as he put it in “Bright College Days", "sliding down the razor blade of life.”'  He's just celebrated his 85th birthday

• Anxiety and Avoidance - NYTimes.com  'When avoidance prevents one from dealing with life, it is maladaptive. But when avoidance is proactive and part of active coping and agency, it helps the person control the accelerator, brakes, and the track switches. It is a useful adaptive activity.' 

• Pakistani Musicians Play Amazing Version of Dave Brubeck’s Jazz Classic, “Take Five” | Open Culture 'How’s this for fusion? Here we have The Sachal Studios Orchestra, based in Lahore, Pakistan, playing an innovative cover of “Take Five,” the jazz standard written by Paul Desmond and performed by The Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1959. Before he died last year, Brubeck called it the “most interesting” version he had ever heard.' 

• NCBI ROFL: Left-handed people avoid using exact numbers. : Discoblog  (You can't always tell whether the articles referred to were intended to be taken seriously)

• Denver Airport Flash Mob - Neatorama  Swing!
  

On spurious academic "tools"

The other day I was contacted about advertising on learningandteaching.info. That is not unusual, and I always turn it down--the site is not a commercial venture, and the expenses are trivial at the moment. However, on this occasion the proposal was to promote free plagiarism checking services, and suggested links from my page on plagiarism.

There is indeed a good case for such services. Probably most students' institutions now use plagiarism checking software, principally Turnitin, and require its use at every point of assessment submission. That's fine for them, but not such a good deal for the student, who is frequently not allowed to use the service to get formative feedback on their work--there are various reasons for this, but they chiefly focus on security issues. So, although the sheer size of the checking database is important, a lighter-weight service tailored to the student's needs can be very useful as a way of ensuring that they do not stumble unintentionally into plagiarism--after all the consensus is that much plagiarism is the consequence of ignorance of academic conventions about citation and originality, rather than deliberate cheating. (See links from the page cited above.)

So I entertained the idea of linking to some of these services, as a service of my own rather than via their advertisement, and I went to the urls provided, to find both of them point to Grammarly, which sells itself principally as a grammar checker and whose plagiarism tools are very limited in the free version.

The other plagiarism checker is apparently free-standing, but touts itself as a means of ensuring that web content is original, because that helps with search engine optimisation. That is not quite the same as assuring academic integrity, and of course it works only from public web pages. It also has a (proper) grammatical error in its submission box; "watch the article re-writer do it's thing". I suppose it may be some limited use, but if you can access a proper service, do so.

Grammarly gave no useful information at all about what content was not unique; as I had rather expected, payment would be required for any more detail. It emphasises its use as a grammar-checker. Moreover, the list of "grammatical rules" which flashed past was spurious. It included "split infinitives" and "prepositions at the end of sentences" and use of the passive voice among many other items which concern obsessive pedants and no-one else. It gave a "score" of 44% to a section of a forthcoming book which has already been proof-read and edited by real live people. Of course there was no recognition of the register or style of the piece (that is available on paid versions), nor of differences between US and UK usage and spelling.

It has been reviewed to similar effect and in more detail here, and here.

But it's not merely the technical incompetence of the service which concerns me. More pernicious is its impact; if I were a less-than-confident student getting a report like that I would feel incompetent and highly discouraged. I am not in favour of "going easy" on students lest they be discouraged--they do need accurate, stimulating and usually uncompromising feedback. They do not need to be treated as "fragile learners" to use Kathryn Ecclestone's term*.

But services such as these are nit-pickers on steroids; they mistake adherence to aribtrary "rules" for good practice in writing, and generate innumerable Type I errors as testimony to their rigour. They are con-tricks, and should be avoided, which is why I have not linked to them.

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* Ecclestone, K. (2010) Transforming assessment in lifelong learning, Buckingham: Open University Press