Items to Share: 24 February

Education Focus

• Donald Clark Plan B: Too cool for school: 7 reasons why tablets should not be used in education Excellent piece--I could not agree more. 

• Who will watch the OFSTED watchmen? (Pragmatic Education) The espoused theories of the Chief Inspector versus the theories-in-use of the inspecting minions.

• The lesson you never got taught in school: How to learn! (Neurobonkers | Big Think)

• We all know David Starkey was a terrible teacher… don’t we? (Scenes From The Battleground)  "What if it had been cut to show the quality of the teaching rather than the difficulty of the students’ behaviour?" 

• Methodology isn’t methods.. or… what goes in a methods chapter | Patter Research education, academic writing, public engagement, funding, other eccentricities. (by Pat Thomson) 

• Freakonomics » How to Game a Grading Curve (The professor) grades exams on a curve — the highest grade in the class, whatever it may be, becomes 100 percent, and “everybody else gets a percentage relative to it.” So students collectively planned a boycott:...

Other Business

• Encapsulated Universes (Edge.org) "We have 7,000 languages. Each [...] encompasses a world-view, [...] the ideas and predispositions and cognitive tools developed by thousands of years of people in that culture. Each [...] offers a whole encapsulated universe. So we have 7,000 parallel universes, [...] this great diversity is a real testament to the flexibility and the ingenuity of the human mind." and more in this vein: Five examples of how the languages we speak can affect the way we think

• Language Log; An invented statistic returns Women do not talk three times as much as men 

• A Tale of Two Cows | Visual.ly The famous tale of poltical systems updated.

• Short Sharp Science: Higgs may spell doom, unless supersymmetry saves us 

• Raising the stakes on life’s big choices - FT.com Using a coin-flipping website, an experiment aims to investigate how people make the most important decisions (by Tim Harford) 

• The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food - NYTimes.com "What I found, over four years of research and reporting, was a conscious effort — taking place in labs and marketing meetings and grocery-store aisles — to get people hooked on foods that are convenient and inexpensive." 

• Polishing Your Prose, (The Chronicle of Higher Education) How to refine your writing, word by word, phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence. By Steven M. Cahn (Until eventually you say nothing at all.)