Items to Share: 26 August

Education Focus

• How Technology Can Help  Dan Meyers' exemplary account of how to use different levels of abstraction to teach maths (high school level, but generalisable) and how technology can facilitate the approach.

• What Did We Learn about PowerPoint and Student Learning? | Faculty Focus Worth reading in conjunction with Edward Tufte's classic diatribe. 

• What a Tech Start-Up's Data Say About What Works in Classroom Forums (Chronicle of Higher Education) More evidence coming in from accumulated data on how things work in practice online. 

• On Leaving Academe (Chronicle of Higher Education) US setting, but it's the same old story

• How Children Learn: Portraits of Classrooms Around the World | Brain Pickings Interesting exercise; what do these pictures tell you about the kind of teaching which is likely to go on in them? 

• Experienced Teaching Looks a Lot like Jazz (Action-Reaction) Short but interesting piece--representing a different tradition from the mechanistic model plugged in initial training. 

• Your Scientific Reasoning Is More Flawed Than You Think: Scientific American On replacing preconceptions in science education; similar to my own discussion of learning as loss.

• Attitudes to Reflection (Inquire Within) Interesting short piece attempting to reclaim reflection as a useful practice in teaching; my take is here.  

Other Business

• Color-Correcting Van Gogh  (Andrew Sullivan)

• ...and in a related vein, on colour, Riddled with irregularity  Philip Ball on new perspectives on language, from Prospect Magazine. (See also Guy Deutscher's Through the Language Glass on this) 

• Squid's membrane goes insane while listening to Cypress Hill (video)

• John Kay - The parable of the ox concerning banks 

• Proxemics: Interesting Thing of the Day Cultural considerations in the management of personal space--just a taster. Hall's work is fascinating.

• Using a plastic bottle to separate eggs (video)

• Even A Few Years Of Music Training Benefits The Brain  (Scientific American Blog Network)

• The humanities, the sciences, and numbers at The Thinking Meat Project Does the application of quanitiative methods have anything to off in the humanities?

• When We Mistake Our World  Stuart Kauffman argues the limitations of a mechanistic, reductionist, paradigm. 

• Why does the return journey feel quicker? - The Irish Times - Thu, Aug 16

• Fifty Shades Generator: Terrible erotic fiction at the click of a button

• Why Waiting in Line Is Torture (NYTimes) ...and ingenious responses

• Chewing Some Olde Fat - Lingua Franca  Possible derivations of colloquial phrases