Items to Share; 14 April

Education Focus

• Successful Plagiarism 101 - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education  (It's satire.)
   
• Donald Clark Plan B: Keep on taking the tablets: 7 reasons why this is lousy advice A properly sceptical discussion of the use of tablets (as in computers) in schools.

• Moving up Bloom’s Taxonomy in an Introductory Course: What's Being Done | Faculty Focus  '“Of the 9,713 assessment items submitted to this study by 50 faculty teaching introductory biology, 93% were rated Bloom’s level 1 or 2—knowledge and comprehension. Of the remaining items, 6.7% rated level 3 with less than 1% rated level 4 or above.” (p. 437)' 

• The myth of learning styles | thInk Again... No reference to UK studies of course...

• Brain-Training Games Don't Actually Make You Smarter : The New Yorker 'Last year, the New York Times Magazine published a glowing profile of the young guns of brain training called “Can you make yourself smarter?” The answer, however, now appears to be a pretty firm no—at least, not through brain training. [Meta-analysis concludes] the games may yield improvements in the narrow task being trained, but this does not transfer to broader skills like the ability to read or do arithmetic, or to other measures of intelligence. Playing the games makes you better at the games, in other words, but not at anything anyone might care about in real life.' 

• The most commonly discovered approach to teaching | websofsubstance 'Discovery approaches may have a place with more expert students, but I worry that sometimes we end up choosing things that are easy to discover, or methods that we find fun over things that the students need to learn. And we also run risks that being straightforward and expository avoid.' and The Kirschner, Sweller, Clark (2006) Cycle of Papers  Why "minimal guidance" approaches to teaching do not work--and that's pretty well everything apart from direct instruction. It's a contested view! 

• It’s either a false dichotomy or a bathtub full of spinach | websofsubstance  --- well worth saying because false dichotomies are legion in what passes for educational "debate".

Other Business

• What was the most comforting condolence sentence you ever heard?  Not sure how I got here, but this is web 2.0 at its best... 

• Charles Crawford on Bruce Sterling as a modern orator--  very interesting analysis of a "free-wheeling" closing speech by a great author of SF.

• Tom Lehrer’s Mathematically and Scientifically Inclined Singing and Songwriting, Animated | Open Culture 'Nobody can deny the importance of learning how to subtract or how to tell one element from another, but we’d do well to keep Lehrer’s sharp human insights, present implicitly in all his music and explicitly in some of it, in mind. So put one of his records on the next time you have a birthday of your own, taking a bracing shot of his wit before you continue, as he put it in “Bright College Days", "sliding down the razor blade of life.”'  He's just celebrated his 85th birthday

• Anxiety and Avoidance - NYTimes.com  'When avoidance prevents one from dealing with life, it is maladaptive. But when avoidance is proactive and part of active coping and agency, it helps the person control the accelerator, brakes, and the track switches. It is a useful adaptive activity.' 

• Pakistani Musicians Play Amazing Version of Dave Brubeck’s Jazz Classic, “Take Five” | Open Culture 'How’s this for fusion? Here we have The Sachal Studios Orchestra, based in Lahore, Pakistan, playing an innovative cover of “Take Five,” the jazz standard written by Paul Desmond and performed by The Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1959. Before he died last year, Brubeck called it the “most interesting” version he had ever heard.' 

• NCBI ROFL: Left-handed people avoid using exact numbers. : Discoblog  (You can't always tell whether the articles referred to were intended to be taken seriously)

• Denver Airport Flash Mob - Neatorama  Swing!