Items to Share: 23 August 2015

A sparse week as befits the time of year...

Other business:

• How Can I Know Anything at All? BBC Animations Feature the Philosophy of Wittgenstein, Hume, Popper & More | Open Culture

• Edge Master Class 2015: A Short Course in Superforecasting, Class I | Edge.org with the pantheon of experts. A substantial commitment to follow, though.  

• See The World’s Most Spoken Languages In One Eye-Opening Infographic | The Mind Unleashed

Items to Share: 16 August 2015

Education Focus

• Vocational education | @Bigkid4 | Labour Teachers On parity of esteem between vocational and "academic" education...

• Compliance by website Mary Beard on schools' response to the requirement to inculcate ‘British values’

• Link feast: Remembering stuff lea[r]ned in school [bps.org.uk]

• How To Learn How To Think [farnamstreetblog.com] On the virtues of taking it slowly

• It’s Harder Now to Change Students’ Lives, but No Less Important - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education 'The forms, norms, and assessments that define higher education are becoming ever more routinized — for the students, faculty, administrators, and accrediting agencies. A Big Mac in Maine looks pretty similar to one in Oregon. The textbook being used for a class in Psychology 101 in New Jersey is probably the same one being used for a class in Psychology 101 in Iowa. Fast-food nation and higher education are becoming ever more homogeneous, and it’s not surprising that students are less engaged. Why should they be? Generic only goes so far.'

• Five academic papers all teachers need to read | Clio et cetera 'This blog post is a quick summary of five of the academic papers that have most influenced me in my development as a teacher, and I would heartily recommend all five to other teachers.'

• Chinese School: Whole-Class Identity | @jonbprimary 'We need a discussion about what kind of ‘learning environment’ teachers want to make within their classrooms, and joining children with their fellow classmates is an important topic to discuss. My argument is that this can only be done [...] by tying together school, local, and ultimately national identity, along with the class unit.'

• Please Help With The UK Education Blogs Spreadsheet Version 12 | The Echo Chamber wordpress.com

Items to Share: 9 August 2015

Education Focus

• Growth Mindset Misconceptions and Missteps | Teaching: Leading Learning An interesting piece which digs down a bit into the mindset model and explores the practicalities of using it to inform teaching.And see also;

• Donald Clark Plan B: Understanding Carol Dweck - queen of growth mindsets 'Hattie confirms that Dweck’s research is exactly what has been found to have a significant effect on learner performance and she has similar theories to Black & Wiliam research and recommendations on feedback. The work of Anderson on deliberate practice can also be seen as an extension of her theories. Teachers, in particular, have found her recommendations ethical, practical and leading to marked changes in motivation and improved results.' And Clark has been busy this week:

• Donald Clark Plan B: ‘The Strange Case of Rachel Doleza’: why diversity training does more harm than good  'The bottom line is that the vast majority of diversity courses are useless, especially when driven by HRs perception of avoiding prosecution. The problem centres around courses run in response to legislative and external pressures. Kalev found that , "Most employers….force their managers and workers to go through training, and this is the least effective option in terms of increasing diversity. . . . Forcing people to go through training creates a backlash against diversity." 'And even more...

• Donald Clark Plan B: 3 fallacies about exaggerated teacher impact in education (Pasi Sahlberg) This is an old tale – the search for a silver bullet in education swings towards single, simplistic causes, that are not supported by research but popularized by cherry picked ideas from countries and reports that suit your political ideology or professional pride. When it comes to education we can’t let either ideological politicians or teacher lobbying define the future. We must objectify, as much as we can, through research, then focus on change.

• What Kind of Feedback Helps Students Who Are Doing Poorly? [Faculty Focus] '[S]tudents perform poorly in our courses for a variety of reasons. Here are some students you’ve likely encountered over the years, as well as a few ideas on the type of feedback that best helps them turn things around.'

• 'Shoe-horned and side-lined'?: Challenges for part-time learners in the new HE landscape | Higher Education Academy

• Want to raise the quality of teaching? Begin with academic freedom | Times Higher Education 'So let’s explain to our students and their parents that they will not be best served by league tables that smother the knowledge and creativity of their teachers, or which skew their education. They need something better than teaching by regulation. Let’s defend this academic freedom, not for the sake of academia but for the sake of future generations of students.'

• Vanity and predatory academic publishers are corrupting the pursuit of knowledge 'Why do predatory and vanity academic publishers and conferences exist? Why are they flourishing now? And what can they tell us about the failings of academia?'

• The Dangerous Fantasy of Generalised Understanding | The Traditional Teacher '[T]he supposedly ‘higher’ cognitive phenomenon which is labelled understanding actually means more detailed and more complex knowledge, as well as the knowledge of how one fact links to another. At the highest level, this detailed and complex knowledge, along with the knowledge of relevant connections, is achieved by experts over many years of study. [ ] In contrast, the type of abstract of conceptual knowledge which is often labelled ‘understanding’ is low on detail. It might be termed generalised knowledge, and it is actually much quicker to master than the large amounts of detail which a genuine expert has at his fingertips. It’s so short on content that you might even learn it through group work, with a few prods to point you in the right direction.' (Read in conjunction with a related link from last week.)

Other Business

• Hospital checklists are meant to save lives — so why do they often fail? : Nature News & Comment 'In 2007 and 2008, surgical staff at eight hospitals around the world tested the checklist in a pilot study1. The results were remarkable. Complications such as infections after surgery fell by more than one-third, and death rates dropped by almost half. The WHO recommended that all hospitals adopt its checklist or something similar, and many did. The UK National Health Service (NHS) immediately required all of its treatment centres to put the checklist into daily practice; by 2012, nearly 2,000 institutions worldwide had tried it. The idea of checklists as a simple and cheap way to save lives has taken hold throughout the clinical community. It has some dynamic champions, including Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, who led the pilot study and has spread the word through talks, magazine articles and a best-selling book, The Checklist Manifesto (Metropolitan, 2009). But this success story is beginning to look more complicated: some hospitals have been unable to replicate the impressive results of initial trials.'

• Why Do We Hiccup? | IFLScience 

• PHD Comics: A Grammatical Conundrum

• BBC Radio4’s Mind Changers: “Carl Rogers and the Person-Centred Approach” | Advances in the History of Psychology

• Dilia Narduzzi on Which is more crippling, guilt or shame?

Items to Share: 2 August 2015

Apologies for running late!


Education Focus

• Is ‘understanding’ a thing? | Clio et cetera 'I have no doubt at all that some will take issue with this, and it is not at all my intention to play down the importance of learning about abstract or disciplinary concepts: to the contrary, I think learning about these things is very important. What I want to suggest, however, is that we need to employ a version of Ockham’s Razor when talking about curriculum and assessment. It is already hard enough! Making ‘understanding’ a thing serves to obfuscate what we are actually talking about. If we mean ‘knows how to do or apply something’, then we are talking about knowledge, or knowing how. Otherwise, we are almost certainly talking about ‘knowing-that’ at a variety of levels of complexity.'

• Everything Is Problematic, University Explains -- NYMag 'The University of New Hampshire has a “Bias-Free Language Guide.” As the document assures its readers, it “is not meant to represent absolute requirements of language use.” [...] So the guide should be understood not as an attempt at censorship, which would be illegal, but as a cutting-edge statement of p.c. language norms. It indicates that the list of terms that can give offense has grown quite long indeed.' (The guide has now apparently been retracted.)

• The importance of rubrics in higher education advances | Higher Education Academy '[T]he common understanding of the word rubric [...] is essentially any set of criteria [...] which assists in measuring engagement of students with the learning outcomes and aims of teaching. [...] if properly constructed, the use of rubrics can have a number of benefits for learning and teaching at a higher education level. One of the main benefits highlighted, was that rubrics help to ensure that the assessment of engagement with teaching material is carried out in a clear, open and fair manner. With a well constructed rubric, any assessment represents the learning and teaching that has been undertaken, and it is clear to both staff and students how any engagement will be measured, from the outset of learning process.'

• Narrative in the Classroom | Vitae '[W]ork to integrate storytelling into your lectures. Research the history of your discipline so you can tell the stories of great discoveries. Frame important concepts not just in terms of abstract ideas, but also in terms of the specific problems those concepts were introduced to solve. Create mysteries for your students: Present a problem and introduce protagonists in search of a solution. The essential engine of a narrative — “what’s going to happen next?” — is a great weapon in any teacher’s arsenal.'

• The hidden silly side of higher education | Times Higher Education

• Traditional PhD supervision under threat from commercial thinking | Times Higher Education

• Universities say no to new ranking | Education | The Guardian 'The OECD wants Pisa-style tables for higher education to measure students’ ‘learning gain’. But those with the oldest reputations have most to lose'

• What Language Learning Cannot Be – Lingua Franca - The Chronicle of Higher Education 'The truth is that we don’t understand how humans acquire languages. It cannot be through the method of instruction: The instructional materials are not available and would probably be useless anyway. It cannot be through the method of discovery: The task is too hard and (if feasible at all) would take too long. (By Geoff Pullum)

• BBC Mind Changers: New Episodes on Carol Dweck and B.F. Skinner | Advances in the History of Psychology

• Why blog your field work? | patter 'A lot of people tell me that they are worried about posting about research that is so clearly work in progress. But I want to convince you that there are some good reasons to do so, particularly if you’re doing qualitative work with real live people.

• Principled Assessment Design by Dylan Wiliam | The Wing to Heaven 'Last year I read Principled Assessment Design by Dylan Wiliam, which is [...] helpful for anyone looking to design a replacement for national curriculum levels. [I]t packs a lot in – there are useful definitions and explanations of validity, reliability, and common threats to validity. There are two areas in particular I want to comment on here: norm-referencing and multiple-choice questions. These are two aspects of assessment which people are often quite prejudiced against, but Wiliam shows there is some evidence in favour of them.'

• Have I Become an Educated Rita? - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education 'I am forced to conclude that whatever creativity I once possessed has been diminished by the process of formal learning. Not long ago I was speaking with a talented student of my own and was dazzled by his ability to make leaps between the contents of his courses and his own varied reading. For him, Alexander the Great and Alexandre Dumas, econometrics and everyday life, existed in the same plane. They spoke to each other and informed each other. I was wowed by the excitement and movement of his thought. But I was also dismayed — because I, too, used to think like that, and it hurt to reflect that I could do so no more. [ ] Some of this intellectual narrowing is, of course, simply endemic to the academic enterprise.'

Other Business

• The Browser - Accenture And The End Of Appraisal 'In the space of a minute [the head of Accenture] said something wonderful: he is going to free all 330,000 of his staff from the charade of the annual job appraisal. “We are not sure that spending all that time in performance management has been yielding such a great outcome,” he told the Washington Post. “Once a year [I] share with you what I think of you. That doesn’t make any sense. People want to know … am I doing all right? Nobody’s going to wait for an annual cycle to get that feedback.” The most extraordinary thing about this blast of common sense is that it comes from Accenture, which over the years has delivered some world-class, paradigm-busting drivel.'

• John Horton Conway: the world’s most charismatic mathematician | Siobhan Roberts | Science | The Guardian John Horton Conway is a cross between Archimedes, Mick Jagger and Salvador Dalí. For many years, he worried that his obsession with playing silly games was ruining his career – until he realised that it could lead to extraordinary discoveries

Items to Share: 26 July 2015

Education Focus

• Memory is more than Ebbinghaus | Donald H Taylor

• Building a Better Discussion - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education '[W}hat I found was something new, illuminating, and provocative: a research-based approach to understanding the classroom as a social space, and an awareness of how the norms of that social space can help or inhibit classroom discussion. Howard’s book should be essential reading for any faculty member who wants to hear students speak up in the classroom, real or virtual.'

• What Fitness Bands Can Teach Us about Classroom Assessment [facultyfocus.com] 'Although fitness bands are cool tech tools, their “magic” is rooted in the continuous feedback they provide on one’s progress toward fitness goals determined by age, height/weight, and activity level. [ ...] Watching her response and seeing her success have caused me to revisit what we know about the power of formative assessment as a learning tool.'

• ‘Growth mindset’ – Panacea or double-edge weapon? | The Language Gym 'The principles embedded in Carol Dweck’s Growth mindset theory have played a great role in my life, especially in recent years. They are inspiring, motivating and reassuringly universal. However, they are nothing new. [...] In the realm of social learning theory, Bandura’s (1994) produced very similar findings and his self-efficacy theory overlaps with Dweck’s work in many ways. [...] Finally, at the risk of trivializing the present discussion, Rocky Balboa’s famous ‘motivational’ speech to his son, in Sylvester Stallone’s movie, could be seen as a forerunner of many of Dweck’s principles… [ ] So why all the fuss now? Why is ‘Growth mindset’ all the rage in the business and education world at this moment in our history? Why do, these days, so many diagrams displaying Carol Dweck’s commandments pop up in so many Tweets and Facebook posts day in day out?'

• Why Plagiarism Doesn’t Bother Me At All: A Research-Based Overview of Plagiarism as Educational Opportunity | Teaching & Learning in Higher Ed. 'But once we begin to view plagiarism not as an atrocity, an evil misdeed, a crime, but as a mistake, an error in judgment, a lapse, a misstep, a miscalculation, then, knowing how important trial-and-error and revision are at all levels of learning, we begin to recognize that plagiarism can be an opportunity for learning.'

Other Business

• Furlongs Per Fortnight: Interesting Thing of the Day 'something moving at the speed of one furlong per fortnight (f/f) would be moving very slowly indeed. Interestingly enough, though, 1 f/f is almost exactly equal to 1 centimeter per minute; therefore, furlongs per fortnight would be a good unit of measurement for a snail’s pace, which ranges from a bit less than 1 f/f to about 30.5 f/f.'

• I’ll Give it to Mary With Love – and other songs banned by the BBC | The Dabbler Nige recalls some vintage songs banned by the BBC – including some, like a ditty by Cliff Edwards – with good reason…

• Web Design - The First 100 Years 'Brilliant funny provocative talk about technology and design. The first third argues that civil aviation design flatlined after the Boeing 747 because the 747 was good enough for getting round the world fast. The second third argues that the Internet has reached the same stage of development: It’s done. The third third takes issue with software and AI visionaries who claim that the digital revolution is only just beginning (6,600 words)' Thanks to The Browser

• Does Mindfulness Mean Anything? : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR 'We are in the middle of a mindfulness revolution. According to Time, The Huffington Post and a host of other media outlets, mindfulness and meditation are having their moment in the spotlight. From hospitals to corporate wellness programs, mindfulness is — supposedly — a new path to relieving stress, lifting depression and increasing happiness. But, depending on your perspective, the advent of mindfulness and meditation in America is either a milestone in the evolution of the culture — or a mighty avalanche of hype.'

• We Are Ruled by Professors [Victor David Hanson, Sept 8 2010] 'Since we seem now to be ruled during this administration by former professors, here is a rant about what I have learned of the university...'

• Daniel Kahneman: ‘What would I eliminate if I had a magic wand? Overconfidence’ | Books | The Guardian The psychologist and bestselling author of Thinking, Fast and Slow reveals his new research and talks about prejudice, fleeing the Nazis, and how to hold an effective meeting.

• Video: How to cook an egg perfectly in just 3 seconds - Boing Boing But it does remind me of a camping trip in Scotland in 1960... with my brother and his room-mate from university (later Speaker of the Norwegian parliament). We didn't have a primus stove, so we borrowed Dad's blowlamp instead, which proved capable of charring the bottom of a fried egg to a cinder and leaving the top totally raw, in about the same length of time.

Items to Share; 19 July 2015

Education Focus

• You can keep your magic beans, or why I got over SOLO | MrHistoire 'What is troubling [...] is that zeal with which I and many others approached SOLO as some kind of structrual saviour, gloriously guiding us up just five short steps before opening the six-sided gates of success. What does this say about us? What does it say about a profession which is so keen to find an easier way? Everything we do isn’t wrong and I, of course, do not object to helping students follow a path. But that path is not generic and there isn’t a shortcut to be found. You can keep your magic beans, Jack – I’ll stick to my subject.'

• Lesson Study 101 | barrydunn 'Lesson Study is a professional learning cycle where 2 or more teachers identify a challenge to learning, research possible solutions, plan a lesson together using this knowledge, observe the lesson and reflect upon their findings. This cycle is then repeated until all members of the group have delivered a collaboratively planned lesson and their finding are often delivered to colleagues or others to share their learning.'

• Cooperative Learning Structures and Deep Learning [facultyfocus.com] 'The results of the research support a conclusion at odds with much of the writing about cooperative learning. “Changing the instructional methods is in itself not enough to discourage a surface approach and promote a deep approach to learning.” (p. 183) Students won’t engage in deep discussions with peers unless they see the value of those exchanges in terms of their own achievement. It boils down to this simple fact: many students don’t believe they can learn content from and with their peers. Much evidence verifies that they can, but they first need to be convinced. '

• Will at Work Learning: New Scientific Review of Learning Styles '[A] new research review by Daniel Willingham, debunker extraordinaire, and colleagues.'

• Parlez-vous professeur? What teachers really mean - Tom Bennett  - TES Community 'The gap between what we say and what we mean is often the loneliest, longest space. Language, properly used, should shatter Jericho with its precision and economy.'

• Chimp implants, Amazonian pungency and sub-human scholars – exam howlers return | Times Higher Education

• Why do we demand evidence for our research, but teach on instinct? | the academic teacher 'One thing I want is to get this aspect of professional practice included in my job description – at the moment despite being on a full-time teaching contract I have no obligation to embed evidence based practice into my teaching! However, even if I don’t manage this I will still continue with it – I would never want to go back to a point where I wasn’t fully assessing how my learners and my teaching interact as I have already learned so much from it. I now firmly believe science educators have a responsibility to embed respect for evidence in their teaching just as much as they do in their research, and should be supported by their institutions to do so.'

• Let's not abandon the humble lecture quite yet [The Conversation] 'Before we all abandon the lecture, let us fully examine the potential that it has to make learning a social event and a strength, a place where we can all learn together. [ ] “A thrilling, action-packed, emotionally-enriching blockbuster lecture! Coming Soon to a lecture theatre near you!”

• What’s worse than a Ref for teaching? An Ofsted for universities | Higher Education Network | The Guardian 'The more we measure in education, the more invisible the learners become. We see our measures are inadequate so we measure more stuff. In schools things are done and policies are made on the grounds it will be “good for Ofsted”, and not because it is good for the children who attend the school. [ ] In universities, we’ll change things because “it’s good for the Tef”. We’ll fail to make improvements as “it’s not in the Tef”. But the main victims of the Tef will be the students. And with the lure of the right to charge more fees, what could possibl[y] go wrong?'

• What are the Best and Worst Ways to Prepare for an Exam? - Scientific American Daniel Willingham's answer

• We’re not mentally ill – we’re teenagers | Education | Mental health | Parents and kids | spiked 'I do think [the school] has helped to create an environment in which young girls, in particular, are encouraged to think of themselves as having emotional and mental problems. Often it feels like, after having their pretty normal teenage worries and concerns labelled as serious anxieties, my friends eventually come to think of themselves as being emotionally broken. [ ] This is not my friends’ fault. Nor is it the fault of their parents and the environment they have at home. The professionals in our schools are to blame – they are claiming to be solving problems, when really they are creating them.

• Can neuroscience solve the mystery of how students learn? | Teacher Network | The Guardian  Educational neuroscience burst onto the scene with the hope of explaining how we learn. But the jury is still out on whether it’s useful for classroom practice

Other Business

• Apparently There Are 4 Kinds of Introversion -- Science of Us 'Introversion, thanks largely to Susan Cain's 2012 best seller Quiet, is having something of a cultural moment. Once a mostly misunderstood personality trait — and often considered a behavioral defect when it was considered at all — it's now the subject of countless other books and online listicles [...]. And as more regular, non-scientist types started to talk about introversion, psychologist Jonathan Cheek began to notice something: The way many introverts defined the trait was different from the way he and most of his academic colleagues did.' 

On a time-saver

My first computer was a "Joyce", in 1985. Joyce was apparently the name of Alan Sugar's secretary at the time, and became the colloquial label for the Amstrad PCW 8256. (256k of memory, one floppy drive —taking extortionately priced 3" discs which never caught on—with a formatted capacity of just under 180k, a green-screen monitor and an included dedicated 9-pin dot matrix printer...) It revolutionised my work, and made possible the production of a book and my doctoral thesis.

It came with a dedicated word-processing package called LocoScript. Among its many features (including an add-on mail-merge facility which was a simple programming language in its own right) were its ability to store phrases, which were each associated with a letter, and were relatively permanent features such as names and addresses and simple commands so that paragraphs could be numbered or laid out consistently; and blocks which were clipboards associated with numerals. So you had a capacity for 26 phrases and 10 blocks.

When I had to move on to a PC I was dismayed to lose all that functionality—just one clipboard for everything! I've played around with many substitutes over the years, including work-arounds incorporated in office suites, but so far encountered none with the simple elegance of phrases and blocks.

I'm happy to say it is back (although I'm a bit behind the curve—it's apparently been back for more than a decade) now in the form of applications called Breevy (highly intuitive—free 30-day trial, £24.20 to buy)  and PhraseExpress for Windows (free for personal use, but too bloated and cluttered with features I'll never use, for me) and another (compatible) package called TextExpander for Mac. There is/was another, simpler, variant called Texter for Windows, but although I have downloaded the installer, it won't play with Windows 8.1. Reviews here.

PhraseExpress also has a cut-down Android app. which I haven't looked at.

So why do I think this is worth drawing your attention to? Marking and feedback. We are continually being called upon to raise our game in this area (although the weak link is often getting students to pay attention...) We try to personalise comments, of course, but it is in the nature of the beast that many of the phrases we use are standard and repetitive; "Referencing!", "Evidence?", "Well-made point." ...And even when we can scrawl on scripts, our remarks are often less than helpful because of the sheer time they take to write—they become so cryptic that we think that they convey something useful, but to students unversed in our restricted code they may be meaningless.

Move to electronic submission and commenting via an office suite, and the process is even more cumbersome. Of course you can use codes to point students to standard points—but my experience  has been that they just find it too much hassle. Yes, that is indeed their loss...

Years ago, I attempted to grapple with this issue with a semi-automated marking shell, using a spreadsheet and a mailmerge to generate personalised but also standardised feedback. it was pretty clunky then, and it is only still on the site because I put so many hours into devising it—and who knows, someone may resurrect it. (I once did something similar with a simulation scenario in social care based on a spreadsheet. I realised I couldn't take it any further and wound it up by sending it to a newsletter/journal, [“Computer-aided Learning and Experiential Learning” New Technology in Human Services vol 9 No 1, 1996] Some years later it was picked up by some diligent scholar and led to several years of fascinating consultancy and learning at the Open University.

But if your feedback can be expanded to a full paragraph from typing only a half-a-dozen characters? You can't make your students read and act on it. but you can make it more likely, and save effort at the same time. I think it's called win-win.

Items to Share: 12 July 2015

Education Focus

• 'Banning the bullet’ in student presentations | The Higher Education Academy Official Site 'Students can often take the easy way when generating a presentation, creating lists of bullet points from a source text, without thinking about the effectiveness (or not) of such approaches or how close they may be to plagiarism of the source. As educators who are seeking to develop students transferable skills we need to facilitate the acquisition of more imaginative approaches to oral presentations by students.' “Reconstructing” the source information to create something more visual may itself facilitate learning.'

• Are Oxbridge tutorials still the best way to teach students how to think? [theconversation.com]

• My vote for the top 10 tools in learning 2015 [teachinginhighered.com] Digital, of course.

• Sucking the life out of the academy | Education | spiked 'The new universities minister wants more meddling and micromanagement.'

• Lesson Study – the best type of CPD you can do in school! | mhorley 'Last week, I joined two colleagues to carry out a Lesson Study looking at Decimal Place Value with Year 7. I[...] this is just a quick reflection on the process.

• Seven rules the Teaching Excellence Framework should follow | Higher Education Network | The Guardian 'A new way to measure teaching quality in universities could soon be on the cards. Here’s how to get it off to a good start'

Other Business

• The powers that be are taking the pop out of Bubble Wrap because they hate us [mashable.com]

• The American Scholar: It Takes a Laboratory - Sam Kean On the growth of large teams of experimenters in science.

• Small talk dies in agonies | joe moran's words 'I do not regard small talk as a vice. I think of it as a vital life skill, but in my case acquiring it seems to be the work of a lifetime.'

Items to Share: 5 July 2015

Education Focus

• Educationists have forgotten the power of knowledge | Education | spiked 'What follows from a vision of providing each and every pupil with access to powerful knowledge is that those of us based in faculties of education have to rethink our roles as specialist educational intellectuals or theorists. We should stop telling teachers what to do, and start supporting them instead. We should be helping them to think through what they do, to think the unthinkable and the not-yet thought. Lastly, we have to convert our education faculties into spaces for thinking and debate. Evidence of what works is important, of course. But more vital still is a willingness to question educational practices, and to learn from discussions and debates. It will be a long road, but it is the only worthwhile one. '

• Will the University of Adelaide's lecture phase-out be a flop? [theconversation.com] 'The University of Adelaide is planning to completely phase out lectures. In their place will be online materials and small group face-to-face sessions. According to University of Adelaide Vice-Chancellor Warren Bebbington, the lecture is dead – and it is not coming back. Lectures have been around for hundreds of years. They have survived other technological revolutions, including the printing press and the motion picture. Adelaide will be the first university in Australia to break with tradition and eliminate them entirely. But is this change good for learning?

• FE Culture: Professional Status 'More than four million 14 to 19‑year‑olds and adults are educated and trained through the FE system each year. Courses and options are numerous and encompass a fully comprehensive range of students. FE does not discriminate – why? It has a range of highly skilled, professionally trained and continually developing lecturing staff. [ ] The government proposes to halt this, to remove the requirement for lecturers in FE to be professionally qualified, through its draft deregulation bill. The key driver for this is on the first page: “Publication of the draft Bill is the latest step in the Government’s ongoing drive to remove unnecessary bureaucracy that costs British businesses millions”.'

• Speaking for a reason: the Last Proper Class of 2014-2015 | Sam Shepherd 'Conversation, broadly, falls into two categories: transactional, where the participants are trying to achieve something, and interactional, where the people involved are engaging in social bonding, what I think of as a human parallel to chimpanzees picking fleas out of each other’s fur. Interactional conversation is about forming and developing social and personal interactions, rather than trying to make something happen. The second one is much harder, I think, to achieve in a second language: the social and interpersonal nuances are much harder to follow. This is why “talk to your partner about…” so often bombs: students aren’t sure what the point of the conversation is, aren’t clear about what the conversation is trying to achieve.' 

Other Business

• In Defense of Ethnography - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education (David Perlmutter) 'Controversy over the sociologist Alice Goffman’s On the Run, a study of young people on the margins of society, has put ethnography on trial. Lost in the accusations and rebuttals, I fear, is the reality that ethnography is one tool among many but too valuable to dismiss or ignore. Like other methodologies, it has strengths and weaknesses, but it complements other approaches in crucial ways.'

Items to Share: 28 June 2015

Education Focus

• Can inclusive education do more harm than good? [theconversation.com] 'Recently, a teacher expressed his misgivings about the “inclusion at all costs” ideology of modern education. Despite being well supported by his school and hugely in favour of inclusive practice, he outlined his difficulties in managing a young fellow with Down Syndrome whose behaviour in the classroom was extremely difficult, and increasingly dangerous. This resulted in children and staff leaving the school, citing concerns about their safety and psychological health. [ ] The article attracted derision from many, but also a sigh of relief from other teachers and a surprising number of parents of children with a disability.

• More Physics Clangers | e=mc2andallthat By the examiners. '[T]hose who call for rigour should display rigour.'

• The crisis in non-fiction publishing | Books | The Guardian  'When it comes to high-calibre non-fiction, risk-averse trade publishing houses are producing too many copycat ‘smart thinking’ books that promise more than they deliver. But praise should be given to the university presses.'

• Which Reasoning Style Best Describes The Way You Think? [io9.com] Duck! Bullsh*t incoming!

• BPS Research Digest: Is dyslexia associated with exceptional visual-spatial abilities?

• It's not PowerPoint's fault, you're just using it wrong [theconversation.com] Up to a point...

• Sir Ken Robinson versus Nick Gibb: The Battle of the Subjects | @katie_s_ashfor

• Why universities should get rid of PowerPoint and why they won't [theconversation.com] 'An article [...] recently argued universities should ban PowerPoint because it makes students stupid and professors boring. I agree entirely. However, most universities will ignore this good advice because rather than measuring success by how much their students learn, universities measure success with student satisfaction surveys, among other things. [...] Overreliance on slides has contributed to the absurd belief that expecting and requiring students to read books, attend classes, take notes and do homework is unreasonable. [ ] Courses designed around slides therefore propagate the myth that students can become skilled and knowledgeable without working through dozens of books, hundreds of articles and thousands of problems.' 

Other Business

• The impossible world of MC Escher | Art and design | The Guardian 

• The Internet Accused Alice Goffman of Faking Details In Her Study of a Black Neighborhood. I Went to Philadelphia to Check. [3quarksdaily.com]  

• Negotiation Tactics: 31 Techniques and Strategies [nickkolenda.com] Substantial (7k words) and practical article. 

Items to Share: 9 — 21 June 2015

Education Focus

• Why the ‘false growth mindset’ explains so much | David Didau: The Learning Spy '...Dweck then dropped a bombshell. She’s identified a phenomenon she calls the ‘false growth mindset’. Because we’ve unanimously agreed that having a fixed mindset is egregious and a growth mindset makes you a better all-round human being, no one wants to fess up to being ‘fixed’. When asked, we tend to say, “Yes of course I have a growth mindset,” because the alternative is to say, “No, I’m afraid I’m a terrible person.” It seems reasonable to suggest teachers are at least as prone to this as anyone; we tend to know more about the perceived benefits of growth mindset than most other people and so there’s a huge social pressure to fall into line. But just saying you have a growth mindset does not (quelle surprise!) mean you actually have one. What you actually have is a false growth mindset. This goes some way to explaining why schools are so bad at allowing teachers to behave in a way consistent with the growth mindset....' 

• And see also: 20 psychological principles for teachers #12 Goal setting | David Didau: The Learning Spy ' [...] Trouble is, the evidence appears to be vastly overstated. King and Burton argue that goals only works in the narrowest of circumstances: “The optimally striving individual ought to endeavor to achieve and approach goals that only slightly implicate the self; that are only moderately important, fairly easy, and moderately abstract; that do not conflict with each other, and that concern the accomplishment of something other than financial gain” otherwise, research indicates that “goal investment, goal structure, and goal content may all lead to negative outcomes.”...'

• And: It’s the shape of the bell curve, stupid!  David Didau: The Learning Spy Useful thoughts on effect sizes. 

• By freeing prisoners from cycle of crime, education cuts re-offending 'Teaching inside a prison takes patience. Not because the students are difficult or dull, they are not. On the contrary, you are unlikely to meet a more highly motivated and interesting group of adult learners. It does take time, however, to have your fingerprint scanned, to pass barefoot and beltless through the metal detectors, to have your personal identification, criminal history and biometric data checked. [ ] A prison teacher also needs to be flexible. When visiting incarcerated students, be ready to roll with the unexpected. If you arrive on a family visits day, or during an emergency lockdown, or when students can’t make it to the education block, your own sense of time warps and stretches.'

• Cheating with essay mills: an extension of students asking each other for help?  [theconversation.com]

• Giving Bad Whiteboard | Sam Shepherd '[H]ere, in proper controversial style, is a list of the things that I try to remember when I am freestyling on a whiteboard. You can call them “dos and don’ts” if you like, or God forbid, good practice. But I’ll stick with “stuff I try to remember”.

• Give students diagrams before the lecture - Futurity 'Giving students illustrative diagrams that show relationships among key concepts before a lecture can boost their learning and recall, say researchers.' Big deal!

• More than sums: Hannah’s Sweets – a great time to be a maths teacher! Excellent commentary on the "notorious" GCSE question.

• Average Master's thesis lengths charted by discipline - Boing Boing (US data of course)

• What does the word ‘engagement’ mean to you? An interview with Roger Kneebone, National Teaching Fellow | The Higher Education Academy [From the HEA] 'In this post Roger Kneebone (HEA National Teaching Fellow) talks to Jenni Carr about his use of simulations in learning and teaching and the relationship between public engagement activities and learning and teaching. [ ] Roger is Professor of Surgical Education & Engagement Science at Imperial College London (r.kneebone@imperial.ac.uk).'

• The Semmelweis Reflex: Why does Education Ignore Important Research? | chronotope

Other Business

• How to design a metaphor – Michael Erard – Aeon 'Can metaphors be designed? I’m here to tell you that they can, and are. For five years I worked full-time as a metaphor designer at the FrameWorks Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC, whose clients are typically large US foundations (never political campaigns or governments). I continue to shape and test metaphors for private-sector clients and others. In both cases, these metaphors are meant to help people to understand the unfamiliar. They aren’t supposed to make someone remark: ‘That’s beautiful.’ They’re meant to make someone realise that they’ve only been looking at one side of a thing.'

• Crowdsourcing the Serengeti: how citizen scientists classified millions of photos from home  'Snapshot Serengeti’s success demonstrates the enormous potential for citizen science to help researchers tackle bigger questions than ever before. Camera traps provide a way to collect the ecological data necessary to answer bigger questions about the world around us, but citizen science is what provides a way to turn this data into new scientific knowledge, enabling research at a scope and scale otherwise impossible.'
  
  Seven Books Bill Gates Thinks You Should Read This Summer [farnamstreetblog.com] 'Bill Gates is out with his annual summer reading list and, while longer than last year’s, it’s a great place to kick off your summer reading. [ ] “Each of these books,” Gates writes, “made me think or laugh or, in some cases, do both. I hope you find something to your liking here.”'  

Items to Share: 7 June 2015

Yes, I know it's late! So?

Education Focus

• Gallery Critique | Class Teaching '[Peer assessment is] not always that useful. In fact, it can often be damaging and compound misconceptions. Gallery critique, where students spend an extended period of time reading and assessing the work of their peers, as well as giving high quality feedback, seems to be a far more purposeful alternative.'

• Desperately Seeking Sir: Empathy, Behaviour, Excuses and Reasons 'I have taught two children that were killed by other children. One was stabbed and one was shot. I have taught children who have killed other children. I have taught a number of children that have been stabbed. I have taught a number of children who have stabbed other children. I have taught one child who said he 'couldn't remember' how many people he'd stabbed. I have taught children who have been convicted of rape. I have taught children who have been abused. I have taught a child who believed a small person lived inside their head and gave them instructions. I have taught a number of children who have battled suicidal thoughts. I have taught one child who attempted suicide but did not quite succeed. I have taught children who have had to be educated in high security units. I have taught children who have had to be forcibly committed to mental health institutions. I have, by necessity, wiped the arse of a child with severe special needs when taking him on a day trip to a theme park as he had made a bit of a mess of it...'

• Fail again. Nicky Morgan on Academies | SurrealAnarchy 'So on, somehow on marches ‘Academisation’, all business values and managerialism, being brought into an education sector that is itself falling for business values and managerialism without the need to be turned into academies but we’re sick of the either so we’ll try the other… Whether it works or not… But what works is our mantra, that Blairite creed: “What counts is what works…” has now turned into “What counts is what we say works…” which it always was but…'…

• Learning Styles are NOT an Effective Guide for Learning Design - The Debunker Club 'Special Note: This Month (June 2015) the Debunker Club is targeting the Learning Styles Myth in a special debunking effort'

• I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me - Vox [US] 'Things have changed since I started teaching. The vibe is different. I wish there were a less blunt way to put this, but my students sometimes scare me — particularly the liberal ones. [ ] Not, like, in a person-by-person sense, but students in general. The student-teacher dynamic has been reenvisioned along a line that's simultaneously consumerist and hyper-protective, giving each and every student the ability to claim Grievous Harm in nearly any circumstance, after any affront, and a teacher's formal ability to respond to these claims is limited at best.'

• Closing the feedback loop | The Higher Education Academy  'Getting students to engage with feedback can be a challenging task and in this post Leah Marks [...] shares her experience of a method for encouraging students to use the feedback. To encourage students to engage, they were asked to write feedback reflections and assignment grades were witheld until this was done. Increased engagement with feedback resulted in improved writing and students found the reflective approach helpful.'

• Cognitive Load Theory and its implications for instruction | Filling the pail

• All academic metrics are flawed, but some are useful [theconversation.com] 'Why are bean counters so fixated on counting? Why are universities overrun by metrics? Are we heading for a world where we know the cost of everything and the value of nothing? [ ] Is an obsession with metrics really corrupting science?

• The Hydra | Esse Quam Videri On the surprising acceptance of spurious junk "research" in apparently respectable policy debates...

• Making a difference in education: What the evidence says | British Politics and Policy at LSE 'Research suggests that who teaches you matters much more than what school you go to. Yet a major proportion of educational spending has gone on fostering Academies and Free Schools. The Academies formed up to 2008-9 have been evaluated, and found to have positive results; but improved outcomes were mostly confined to better-achieving students, with little or no benefit to the lowest achieving. At the time of writing, there was no comparable research on Academies founded after that, though an Ofsted survey of 2012-13 found half those inspected ‘requiring improvement’ or ‘inadequate’. There has been little research on Free Schools or primary Academies, though DfE data do not show them to be providing more progress than local authority primaries.'

Other Business

• ‘Cheeky Nando’s’ – Lingua Franca - The Chronicle of Higher Education '[W]hat I’m really getting is that slang can go wonderfully deep — with intricate, subtle, and sometimes hilarious notes of class, gender, and group identity. And also that “cheeky Nando’s” won’t be coming to America any time soon.

• Offline: What is medicine's 5 sigma? [Editorial in the Lancet] 'The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. As one participant put it, “poor methods get results”. '

• Consciousness Began When the Gods Stopped Speaking: Julian Jaynes’ Famous 1970s Theory Long introduction to Jayne's maverick and intriguing "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"  

• The Spy Who Billed Me | Atlas Obscura 'It might be incongruous to think of spies having to account for expenses, like any old suit on a business trip, but in reality, people working for intelligence services do have to keep track of the money they're spending, file expense reports, and even hound their company (the Company, in this case) to reimburse them. "They're the same as the reports any businessman would submit after meeting a client," says Chris Lynch, former FBI and CIA counterintelligence officer and author of The C.I Desk. "Meals, miles, parking, small gifts, other expenses, receipts if they had them, some kind of 'certification' if they didn’t."

Items to Share; 31 May 2015

Education Focus

• A Don’s Life: Exams, and dumbing down 'Students aren't smarter, but they work harder. And we probably teach them better too. But dumbing down?? No.' But Mary Beard teaches at Cambridge...

• The Education Myth by Ricardo Hausmann - Project Syndicate 'In an era characterized by political polarization and policy paralysis, we should celebrate broad agreement on economic strategy wherever we find it. One such area of agreement is the idea that the key to inclusive growth is, as then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair put in his 2001 reelection campaign, “education, education, education.” If we broaden access to schools and improve their quality, economic growth will be both substantial and equitable. As the Italians would say: magari fosse vero. If only it were true.'

• A Small Victory in a Bigger Battle – The End of Graded Observations in FE Inspections | Perspectives on professional development 'If, [...] attaching a grade to a one-off, episodic event like a lesson observation is no longer deemed fit for purpose, this inevitably raises the question of why stop at observations? Why not extend the removal of grades to the inspection process as a whole? There is a strong case for moving towards an assessment framework that simply operates on a ‘good enough/not good enough’ basis.'

• The Trick of Teaching - HuntingEnglish   We know a great deal about the human memory, but there is still so much more to know. Much of what we learn is counterintuitive and unveils the idosyncratic of our mind and memory. One such quirk is that when students expect to teach new material that they remember it so much better.

• SEDA - Blog Post: Motivating Students is not Magic One of a series of pieces commissioned by Graham Gibbs. (See side-bar for links to others)

• Stress levels of teaching professionals in FE are increasing due to constant change | Teacher Support Network 'A degree of stress is to be expected in any professional role but this survey clearly suggests there is now a very serious cause for concern in further education. It has pinpointed some of the prime causes of stress and it’s now for colleges to respond to those challenges and work with us to start to reverse this worrying decline in wellbeing' (by Sally Hunt of UCU)

• The case against inquiry-based learning | Education in Chemistry Blog 'Writing recently in The Irish Times, William Reville, emeritus professor of biochemistry at University College Cork, stated that newer teaching methods employed in the UK and Ireland are ‘sharply inferior to the older teaching methods they supplanted’. His article highlighted a 30% difference between educational scores in China, where whole-class teaching is employed, and those locally, where child-centred methods are used.'

• Laurie Taylor on academics v administrators | Times Higher Education 'Managers and administrators who once had a mute background presence are now a noisy part of the daily life of every scholar. Their ranks continue to swell even though the UK is already one of the very few countries in the world where non-academic staff already outnumber academics [...] No wonder that my weekly [...] column is no longer stuffed with professors and readers but with directors of corporate affairs and human relations and the heads of research excellence framework strategy, overseas recruitment, research impact, fundraising, external relations and brand management. No wonder that what used to be a mildly patronising relationship between dons and their administrative servants has now become more and more like a battle for control.'

• And in similar vein: Bureaucracy: why won’t scholars break their paper chains? | Features | Times Higher Education 'We spend more and more time assessing what we do, and fewer and fewer hours doing it - just to give administrators something to do for their gold-plated salaries

• Evidence Based Educational Leadership: Do all good ideas need to be researched? - A response to David Didau An interesting rejoinder from Gary Jones to a recent post, leading to a stimulating exchange in the comments... 

Other Business

• ‘Cheeky Nando’s’ – Lingua Franca -  The Chronicle of Higher Education 'Humility is always a good thing. I got a dose of it recently, courtesy of a BuzzFeed article posted to Facebook by a friend of mine, an Anglo-American journalist. The article was called “Americans On Tumblr Are Trying To Find Out What A ‘Cheeky Nando’s’ Is And Are Struggling” and concerned a meme that had become popular in England.'

• Players with more Time | More Intelligent Life 'Slowing time is linked to a state of flow, or being in the zone. Playing cricket for Kent one July morning in 2003, I made 149 runs in about three hours. I scored faster than ever before, but felt in no hurry to get anywhere, even to a hundred. I felt the rhythm of the ball in sync with the downswing of the bat. My mind revved at the same pace as the game. There was no sense of rush (the ball arriving too soon) or impatience (wanting it sooner). There was a suspension of ambition that was rare for me. The innings didn’t feel like a stepping-stone, even though it turned out to be, but an end in itself. I felt very clearly, that high summer’s day, that my job was not to get in the way—to be the conduit rather than the agent. [ ] The match was not rushing forwards, opportunities were not slipping by, and I understood, just that one time, a line from Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”: “Though we cannot make our sun/Stand still, yet we will make him run.” '

Items to Share: 24 May 2015

Education Focus

• How should I revisit past content? | Bodil's blog The three part lesson; the 5 minute lesson plan; the 7 Es lesson structure; the countless other lesson planning proformas I’ve encountered. What do they all have in common? Despite being wildly popular, they place no emphasis on recalling and revisiting prior learning. Memory deserves far more love and attention than this. [ ] Recaps should be a nonnegotiable part of practically every lesson.

• No, Smartphones Aren't Making Children Autistic | Big Think

• What's the best, most effective way to take notes? [theconversation.com] 'If it feels like you forget new information almost as quickly as you hear it, even if you write it down, that’s because we tend to lose almost 40% of new information within the first 24 hours of first reading or hearing it. If we take notes effectively, however, we can retain and retrieve almost 100% of the information we receive.'

• The Literacy Blog: i.t.a: a great idea but a dismal failure 'Talk to anyone today who was taught to read through i.t.a. (Initial Teaching Alphabet) and they will almost invariably tell you how they’ve never been able to spell correctly since. [ ] As i.t.a. was more or less abandoned in the sixties/early seventies (though it did cling on for much longer in some places), many of today’s generation of teachers will never even have heard of it except from their parents or grandparents! So why write a blog posting about it?'

• Feedback from teachers doesn't always help pupils improve [theconversation.com] 'What looks feasible in controlled experiments or in theory may not work so well in practice. Once the researchers with their extra funding have gone away, and the intervention moves away from the enthusiastic schools volunteering to take part in the study, perhaps the “effect” of feedback on attainment drops. When rolled out across the board to all pupils and all schools, any advantage may be reduced or even lost because of the challenges, such as time pressure, that teachers face in implementing feedback strategies in the classroom. Some teachers may also exhibit sullen resentment at being told how to do something that seems so basic.'

Other Business

• Competence, Performance, and Climate – Lingua Franca - Blogs - The Chronicle of Higher Education [Geoff Pullum] 'Noam Chomsky’s distinction between competence and performance has been controversial in linguistics and psycholinguistics for 50 years. The proponents of generative grammar presuppose it and rely on it, and have tried explaining the distinction many times, often unsuccessfully. I recently came across a neat way to encapsulate it that comes not from a linguist but from a mathematical meteorologist.'

• How One Psychologist Is Tackling Human Biases in Science [nautil.us] 'Sometimes it seems surprising that science functions at all. In 2005, medical science was shaken by a paper with the provocative title “Why most published research findings are false.” Written by John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, it didn’t actually show that any particular result was wrong. Instead, it showed that the statistics of reported positive findings was not consistent with how often one should expect to find them. As Ioannidis concluded more recently, “many published research findings are false or exaggerated, and an estimated 85 percent of research resources are wasted.”'

• TYWKIWDBI ("Tai-Wiki-Widbee"): The shortest scientific paper ever published  

• Most people want to know risk of overdiagnosis, but aren't told [theconversation.com] 'An Australian survey released today has found a large majority of people report they’ve never been told by doctors about the danger of being overdiagnosed – and an equally large majority say they want to be informed. [ ] This is the first time anywhere in the world the general community has been asked about their knowledge and views on the “modern epidemic” of overdiagnosis, which happens when someone is diagnosed with a disease that won’t actually harm them. Being overdiagnosed means you’re likely to be over-treated, and potentially suffer the harms of that treatment without getting any of its benefits.' 

Items to Share: 17 May 2015

Education  Focus

• How One Psychologist Is Tackling Human Biases in Science [nautil.us] 'Sometimes it seems surprising that science functions at all. In 2005, medical science was shaken by a paper with the provocative title “Why most published research findings are false.” Written by John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, it didn’t actually show that any particular result was wrong. Instead, it showed that the statistics of reported positive findings was not consistent with how often one should expect to find them. As Ioannidis concluded more recently, “many published research findings are false or exaggerated, and an estimated 85 percent of research resources are wasted.”'

• Five Common Misconceptions about Learning | Filling the pail

• Donald Clark Plan B: Deficit model in education: a dangerous conceit? 'If only we filled our minds up with even more knowledge, even more skills, GDP will dog-leg upwards, productivity will soar and all will be well. The conceit of education is that the answer to bad schooling is always more schooling. The glass is always half empty, even when the data suggests it is close to the brim. We always seem to have deep deficits and divides; digital divide, digital skills, maths, 21st C skills, qualifications, even happiness!'

• Five ways universities have already changed in the 21st century [theconversation.com] 'Global higher education underwent a period of remarkable change in the first 15 years of the 21st century. Five key trends affecting universities around the world illustrate how, despite increased access to information, our understanding of higher education remains limited.

• University Readiness | The Traditional Teacher 'The problem isn’t spoon feeding: it’s hoop jumping. Pupils are trained to perform peculiar tricks for the benefit of examiners, while schools neglect to give them a proper grounding in the academic subjects. In fact, our pupils are not being fed enough. They are intellectually malnourished. But this is not inevitable, even within the current exam system. There are brave schools that are bucking the trend and focusing on core knowledge. They will find that their GCSE results are very good as well, because they will go far beyond the impoverished requirements of the GCSE curriculum.'

• researchED New York, part 2: Daniel Willingham persuades - Tom Bennett - Blog  'Willingham was doing something he's very good at, and many academics aren't: summarising and highlighting useful lessons that cognitive psychology can teach to teachers – all teachers, be ye progressive bringer of light or neo-trad axeman. He took pains to describe how these biases and filters affect everyone. In point one, above, he was at pains to say, "this is all of us, we all do this".'

• What’s the Point of a Professor? - NYTimes.com 'You can’t become a moral authority if you rarely challenge students in class and engage them beyond it. If we professors do not do that, the course is not an induction of eager minds into an enlarging vision. It is a requirement to fulfill. Only our assistance with assignments matters. When it comes to students, we shall have only one authority: the grades we give. We become not a fearsome mind or a moral light, a role model or inspiration. We become accreditors.'

• What is an “original contribution”? | patter Doctoral regulations invariably include a requirement that the thesis constitute an "original contribution" to knowledge. What does that mean? 'As David Lodge argues, originality is taking the reader, and I’m suggesting the thesis reader/examiner too, somewhere which is simultaneously familiar and not. Original thinking and writing defamiliarises and in doing so, recovers a newness about the topic no matter how well trodden it is. An original contribution to knowledge offers the reader a chance to re-view and re-think the event/text/phenomena in question. That’s the kind of original contribution I’m interested in.

• Do all good ideas need to be researched? | David Didau: The Learning Spy 'I was asked a very good question by Alex Wetherall. Basically – and I hope he forgives my paraphrase – he asked whether it would be worth conducting some ‘proper’ research on my good idea. I said no. It seemed as though this came as something of a surprise to the research literate audience. I’ve had a good think since and I stand by the justification I gave.'

• Ideas: Why Good Teachers Get Bad Evaluations '...an interesting piece of research on student evaluations of teachers. It judged the quality of teachers by how well their students did in later courses, compared the result to student evaluations of teaching quality, and found that the two anti-correlated. On average, good teachers get bad ratings, bad teachers get good ratings.'

Other Business

• Turning wood [kottke.org] 

• BBC - Future - Press me! The buttons that lie to you 'The tube pulls in to a busy station along the London Underground’s Central Line. It is early evening on a Thursday. A gaggle of commuters assembles inside and outside the train, waiting for the doors to open. A moment of impatience grips one man who is nearest to them. He pushes the square, green-rimmed button which says “open”. A second later, the doors satisfyingly part. The crowds mingle, jostling on and off the train, and their journeys continue. Yet whether or not the traveller knew it, his finger had no effect on the mechanism.'  

• Henry Marsh’s “Do No Harm” - The New Yorker Review of the much acclaimed memoir of a brain surgeon.

Items to Share; 27 April to 10 May 2015

Back again. Move went well, thanks. Now trying to get back on an even keel.

Education Focus

• What is an “original contribution”? | patter (In respect of the rubrics for a doctorate) 'As David Lodge argues, originality is taking the reader, and I’m suggesting the thesis reader/examiner too, somewhere which is simultaneously familiar and not. Original thinking and writing defamiliarises and in doing so, recovers a newness about the topic no matter how well trodden it is. An original contribution to knowledge offers the reader a chance to re-view and re-think the event/text/phenomena in question. That’s the kind of original contribution I’m interested in.'

• Do all good ideas need to be researched? | David Didau: The Learning Spy 'I was asked a very good question by Alex Wetherall. Basically – and I hope he forgives my paraphrase – he asked whether it would be worth conducting some ‘proper’ research on my good idea. I said no. It seemed as though this came as something of a surprise to the research literate audience. I’ve had a good think since and I stand by the justification I gave...'

• Ideas: Why Good Teachers Get Bad Evaluations '...an interesting piece of research on student evaluations of teachers. It judged the quality of teachers by how well their students did in later courses, compared the result to student evaluations of teaching quality, and found that the two anti-correlated. On average, good teachers get bad ratings, bad teachers get good ratings.'

• Conservative victory means England’s school system will look like few others in the world [theconversation.com] 'The Conservative education manifesto was long on aspiration. It promised that England would lead the world in mathematics and science; that there would be a place in a “good” primary school for every child; that every “failing” or coasting school would be turned into an academy to drive up standards; that universities would remain “world-leading”; and that further education would “improve”. But translating these – rightly aspirational – goals into policies will bring some difficult challenges...'

• How 'digital natives' are killing the 'sage on the stage' [theconversation.com] 'Make the lecture an entertaining performance piece on the area that causes the students to look into it more deeply. Recognise that students can get information from many places and embrace this by aiming for the lecture to be a highlight reel and a teaser rather than an expert at the pulpit. Yes, this means every lecture should be a special occasion, but is that really a bad thing? If it gets our students thinking, then hasn’t it done its job?'

• Ludwig Wittgenstein's Short, Strange & Brutal Stint as an Elementary School Teacher | Open Culture'Wittgenstein comes off, by many accounts, as an exemplary and almost unbelievably engaged teacher. He and his students, in Robins’ words, “designed steam engines and buildings together, and built models of them; dissected animals; examined things with a microscope Wittgenstein brought from Vienna; read literature; learned constellations lying under the night sky; and took trips to Vienna, where they stayed at a school run by his sister Hermine.” Hermine herself remembered the kids “positively climbing over each other in their eagerness” to answer their philosopher-teacher’s questions,'

• The Dvorak Keyboard Controversy: Interesting Thing of the Day 'All modern computers—Macs, PCs, and Linux machines—include the capability of switching into a Dvorak layout if that’s what you prefer (though the physical keys won’t match the characters they type unless you perform some minor surgery on your keyboard or put stickers over the existing letters). So if you want to try out Dvorak yourself, you need only consult your computer’s Help to find out how to change that setting. Chances are you’ll find that it takes a few weeks or so to retrain yourself to the point where you’re about as fast as you were using QWERTY. If you can tolerate the temporary loss in productivity, you may find the experiment useful.'

• What should written feedback look like? | David Didau: The Learning Spy  and The fetish of marking | David Didau: The Learning Spy 'I don’t really think marking is a bad thing, but I do think it comes at an appalling cost to teachers’ well-being. The fact that very many teachers seem reluctant to cast off their shackles shows the extent to which we’ve imbued marking with magical powers and superstitious awe. Teachers probably do need to mark some work, if only so they understand the process of assessment, but I don’t think the process needs to be nearly so onerous or widespread. Marking is only a proxy for what we actually want...'

• I'll be back: TEDinator 2. A review of Ken Robinson's 'Creative Schools' Part 1 - Tom Bennett - Blog' [W]hat Ken does is point out that in many educational ecosystems, things are far from perfect. Life, too is far from perfect. And he does what all great politicians, circus barkers and medicine men have done for centuries: tells us he knows how to fix it. The map to Canaan is his. But pointing out to people that they're slaves in Egypt doesn't mean you're Moses. Sometimes it can make you Pharaoh.'

• Will at Work Learning: Excellent New Book Debunking Learning and Education Myths 'There's too much crap floating around the learning and education fields; too many myths, misconceptions, and maladaptive learning designs. [ ] I'm passionate about the need for more debunking. The need is great and the danger to learning and learners is dire. [ ] Fortunately, entering the world is a great new book by three researchers, [...] Their book is titled, Urban Myths about Learning and Education, and it's jam packed with a list of 35 myths that plague our field.

• What Rote Knowledge Isn’t – A short introduction to inflexible and flexible knowledge | …to the real. 'Almost inevitably, when talking about memory and memorisation, the notion of ‘rote knowledge’ came up more than once, but I’ve tended to find that what is meant by ‘rote knowledge’ is rarely well-defined. I’ve found that people generally have a notion of what rote knowledge might be, and that it’s bad… but that’s about it.'

• The Trials and Rewards of Teaching in Prisons | Academies Community 'Teaching in prisons is tough: not just mentally but also because of the insensitive system. However when teaching the most troubled and desperate of people can also come hand in hand teachers also experience the greatest amount of pride when their students succeed. It’s a mentally challenging rollercoaster.'

 Other Business

• The centenarian psychologist [apa.org] 'As he approaches his 100th birthday, cognitive psychology pioneer Jerome S. Bruner reflects on the past, present and future of psychology.' 

• Psychology of Pricing: A Gigantic List of Strategies [nickkolenda.com]  

• What Makes a Hero: Joseph Campbell’s Seminal Monomyth Model for the Eleven Stages of the Hero’s Journey, Animated | Brain Pickings