Items to Share: 17 March

Education Focus

• OFSTED Under Fire | Scenes From The Battleground "If inspectors have raked in the cash for telling schools “you must do groupwork, discovery learning and stop teachers from teaching” it makes it far less likely that they will then go into schools and act as if they have no preferred style of teaching." (Andrew Old) 

• How can we tell snake oil from science? | Pragmatic Education  ‘why is so much research in education purest snake oil?’

• Here’s my paper on evidence and teaching for the education minister. – Bad Science (Ben Goldacre)

• Seven Steps to Creating Screencast Videos for Online Learning | Faculty Focus

Other Business

• Google Reader Is Shutting Down; Here Are the Best Alternatives

• In the Digital Era, Our Dictionaries Read Us - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education "With the spread of digital technologies, dictionaries have become a two-way mirror, a record not just of words' meanings but of what we want to know. Digital dictionaries read us." 

• Jane Kramer: A History of Culinary Revolution : The New Yorker  Review of Bee Wilson's "Consider the Fork", which sounds fascinating. Ignore the first few self-indulgent paragraphs, though.

• Funny French toilet paper TV commercial - Boing Boing

• Obituary for Harry Stamps, 1932-2013  Who? Doesn't matter--clearly a great "character".

• Quite - Lingua Franca - The Chronicle of Higher Education  'How can a sensible word sometimes mean “absolutely” and sometimes mean “only moderately”?' (Geoff Pullum) 

• n+1: There Is Only Awe  On Julian Jaynes' strange ideas about the origin of consciousness. 'Richard Dawkins wrote that [his book] is “either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between!”' 

• Alfred C. Hobbs: The American who shocked Victorian England by picking the world’s strongest lock. - Slate Magazine

• Gorgeous, informative song about techy details of evidence based practice (Ben Goldacre)

• Why Don’t the French Speak English? - The Daily BeastThe Odd Story of C.S. Lewis, An Extremely Odd Man - The Daily Beast  What makes Lewis such a surprising figure is that he who understood so little about the emotional life can still, 50 years after his life, speak so eloquently to millions upon millions of human souls, not one of whom would have found him a soulmate if they had actually known him.

• Donald Clark Plan B: Negroponte: 10 reasons why his Ethiopian project smacks of Educational Colonialism  "These parachute interventions are easy but not at all informative. Indeed, they may well be counterproductive, leading to the wrong type of spend by Governments keener on photo-opps than real learning."