Items to Share: 26 June

Apologies for the delay

Education Focus

• Pragmatic Education: "[This] blog tries to moves the education debate beyond the quality of teaching, which we all agree is the most important factor we control in a school system, onto what drives improvement in the quality of teaching: leadership, training, the behaviour system, curriculum, assessment and ideas."

• The superior nature of understanding | Webs of Substance What do we understand by "understanding"--with particular reference to teaching maths.

• “Teaching” Critical Reflection | Gavan P.L. Watson --I happened to attend a session by Stephen Brookfield on this yesterday--I'll add my thoughts later.

• BPS Research Digest: Clinical psychology trainees outperform experienced therapists on knowledge and skills  "Conducted in Germany, this study pitched undergrad psychology students, postgrad clinical psychology trainees and experienced psychological therapists against each other on tests of psychological knowledge and skills. The slightly worrying result is that the trainees aced it, outperforming not just the students (on most tests) but also the experienced therapists. "The picture is not so bright" for the seasoned therapists, the researchers said. "Our results point to a decrease in knowledge and variability in clinical competence."

• Stick to the master plan | Opinion | Times Higher Education  Plagiarism (or not?) in Japan  

Other Business

• Life after Google Reader: GigaOM’s guide to the best options — Tech News and Analysis I'm playing with Feedly and The Old Reader at the moment, but the best of the lot is the G Reader app for Android

• How typeface influences the way we read and think - The Week  And why everyone hates Comic Sans MS. Do you award better grades to assignments printed in Georgia? Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the link.

• Unintentional Knowledge - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education  "... Incidental knowledge may not be of immediate use, but it will become the fuel that powers acts of creativity and discovery to come. Students can see the [library] holdings and make decisions for themselves instead of allowing an algorithm to decide for them." And of course it is the basis for this blog...

• Wine-tasting: it's junk science  "Hodgson's findings have stunned the wine industry. Over the years he has shown again and again that even trained, professional palates are terrible at judging wine." (Thanks to 3 Quarks Daily for the link.)

• Margaret Wertheim – The limits of physics  "On the one hand, then, physics is taken to be a march toward an ultimate understanding of reality; on the other, it is seen as no different in status to the understandings handed down to us by myth, religion and, no less, literary studies."

• Daniel Dennett: Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking  (Video)

• The Cambridge Online Survey of World Englishes: The Cambridge Online Survey of World Englishes  What do you call a fizzy soft drink? The crusty stuff which gunges up your eyes when you wake up? A traffic management device where several roads meet and traffic follows rules for giving way? Fascinating, (and time-wasting) results with maps showing distributions of usages, and of course you can take the survey, is continually changing its content.

• The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science — Editor's Picks — Medium  Good introduction to cognitive dissonance.

• ... and the other side of the story: How Inviting the Unknown Helps Us Know Life More Richly | Brain Pickings on negative capability among other ideas.

• Milk's Crowning Moment - NYTimes.com  The coronet effect when a drop of milk splashes into a larger quantity--now taken a stage further (video). 

• Awe « The Dish  Video of a storm "supercell" in Texas.