Items to Share: 10 November

Education Focus

• Criticising the Obviously Wrong | Scenes From The Battleground 'However, there is a problem in education research that there is no agreement over epistemology; no identified methodology which we can expect educationalists to use. That does mean one can never assume beforehand that an educationalist has ever paid any attention to the logic of, or empirical evidence for, their position in a way we might expect from academics in some other fields.' (My own take in this area is here.)

• ...and When Big Data goes bad: 6 epic fails including Ken Robinson's cavalier use of incomplete statistics, through to Cyril Burt's fabrication of data on IQs. A must-read for anyone who has to engage with what passes for educational "research".

• How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses | Wired Business '[...] young children, motivated by curiosity and playfulness, teach themselves a tremendous amount about the world. And yet when they reach school age, we supplant that innate drive to learn with an imposed curriculum. “We’re teaching the child that his questions don’t matter, that what matters are the questions of the curriculum. That’s just not the way natural selection designed us to learn. It designed us to solve problems and figure things out that are part of our real lives.”' (Highly hyped, based on Sugata Mitra's strange ideas about leaving computers lying around for kids to figure out how to use for themselves, but interesting nonetheless.)

• The problem of deep structure | Webs of Substance 'there is a tendency to assume that we can identify the characteristics of expert performance and simply teach these characteristics as a short-cut to expertise. For instance, perhaps we find that expert writers of history essays plan their essays better than novices. Should we try to teach the novices how to plan essays? Perhaps. I suspect that most history teachers would do this. However, it is worth wondering about the arrow of causation here. Perhaps experts are experts because they have greater content knowledge to marshal.' This post (recommended on 1 September) also explores the limitations of a head on approach. 

• “I’m not a real professor. I just play one on the Internet.” | More or Less Bunk 'While we can never go back to a non-existent free and happy time when professors were only in it for the sake of education, at least we can go back to a free and happy time before administrators and the people who want to sell them expensive edtech treated disruption like a positive good, no matter how many people it hurts in the process.' 

Hints and Tips

• A Problem Based Learning Starter Kit | emergent math  

• Three Types of Assignments that Speed Feedback, Boost Student Engagement

Other Business

• Performative Verbs: Interesting Thing of the Day 'Performatives sound a bit mystical at first, like a spell or incantation. But in fact such verbs are quite commonplace. If you’ve ever said, “I promise” or “I apologize,” you have performed those actions by the simple act of saying them. You’re not talking about doing these things or stating that you’re doing them; you’re actually doing them. The same is true when you say, “I bet,” “I invite,” “I request,” or “I protest,” for example.' ("Performative" is a good and comprehensible word to cover J L Austin's "perlocutionary" and "illocutionary" aspects of language use, which I refer to tentatively here. This piece has set me going again on that train of thought, including the relevance of Lakoff, whom I am reading now.)

• Anyone can learn to be a polymath – Robert Twigger – Aeon 'Science, for example, likes to project itself as clean, logical, rational and unemotional. In fact, it’s pretty haphazard, driven by funding and ego, reliant on inspired intuition by its top-flight practitioners. Above all it is polymathic. New ideas frequently come from the cross-fertilisation of two separate fields. Francis Crick, who intuited the structure of DNA, was originally a physicist; he claimed this background gave him the confidence to solve problems that biologists thought were insoluble. Richard Feynman came up with his Nobel Prize-winning ideas about quantum electrodynamics by reflecting on a peculiar hobby of his — spinning a plate on his finger (he also played the bongos and was an expert safe-cracker). Percy Spencer, a radar expert, noticed that the radiation produced by microwaves melted a chocolate bar in his pocket and developed microwave ovens.'

• A Small Town Boy In Berlin (andrewsullivan.com) Lovely (being kind to the singer) but the Woody Allen clip is priceless!

• "Huh" is the universal word - Boing Boing '"Huh" is not innate (other primates don't say it), but the circumstances of its use (needing to quickly and briefly prompt another speaker to repeat herself) are universal, so languages that share no commonalities still converged on this word.' 

• For Joni Mitchell’s 70th Birthday, Watch Classic Performances of “Both Sides Now” & “The Circle Game” (1968) 

• Dabbler Book Club Review – Part Two – The Broken Road by Patrick Leigh Fermor   A brilliant conceit--Leigh-Fermor and Tolkein. I've recently read Artemis Cooper's biography of Paddy, which I find marred by pedestrian passages full of name-dropping in a social milieu about which I know nor care anything--but here is an image I can relate to.