Items to Share: 10 March

Education Focus

• OFSTED Best Practice Videos | Scenes From The Battleground "Here are the recent OFSTED videos in order of terribleness with the least terrible first."  See also the preceding four posts, well researched and  highly critical of Ofsted. [Oh! Update.]

• Do we ‘collect’ data? or – beware the ontological slip … | patter  (Pat Thomson) More interesting thoughts on educational research, this time on reification--I'm not convinced this time, however.

• Michael Sandel’s Famous Harvard Course on Justice Launches as a MOOC on Tuesday | Open Culture "In a single offering, Sandel will bring his course to more students worldwide than he did through his decades teaching at Harvard."

Other Business

• TYWKIWDBI ("Tai-Wiki-Widbee"): Is there "no such thing as a stupid question" ? Er... no. 

• Maslow Re-visited and found wanting (Dick, 2001) It's a pity that the ancient Wahba and Bridwell paper (1976), referenced here, is not available in a more legible format than here.

• Liam Heneghan – Pooh bear and the ecology of childhood In part on the most egregious act of cultural vandalism of the last century--the disneyfication of Winnie-the-Pooh. 

• 'Dr. Garbage' Studies Local Tribe Many Prefer to Ignore - News - The Chronicle of Higher Education '"What do you dream to teach that no one else teaches?" an NYU administrator asked Ms. Nagle not long after she went to work there. The answer, it turned out, was trash, a fascination she traces to a garbage dump she encountered on a family camping trip when she was 10.' 

• Stanford Magazine - Seeing at the Speed of Sound - March/April 2013  Fascinating piece on lip-reading

• Protesting Too Much About #OverlyHonestMethods » Sociological Images More tweets about how research really works.  

• What Coke Contains — Kevin Ashton "The number of individuals who know how to make a can of Coke is zero. The number of individual nations that could produce a can of Coke is zero. This famously American product is not American at all."

• John Lanchester rides the London Underground | Books | The Guardian "Londoners treat the underground not as a stage set, a place where we're on display, but as a neutral space, one in which we don't overtly direct our attention at each other. People sneak glances at each other, of course they do, but the operative word is "sneak". They don't look openly, in the way they would elsewhere. The main focus of people's attention is inward. They go into themselves." 

• This Story Stinks - NYTimes.com  "Comments from some readers, our research shows, can significantly distort what other readers think was reported in the first place." (With 400 comments, some of which clearly support the hypothesis, even as they deny it.)