Items to Share: 22 December

Education Focus

• Inkfish: How Science Education Changes Your Drawing Style (fieldofscience.com) Hay (author of study) thinks students need to internalize scientific concepts before they can play around with them and make their own hypotheses. "Scientists do not simply know information," he says; "they put information to work to discover something new."

• Teacher Educators are Teachers First by Practicing What They Teach (artofteachingscience.org) 'This is the first of several posts that will be published here about the art of teacher education. There is a rich body of research on teacher education, and I will make use of recent work that shows that teacher education is a vibrant and energetic field that is being led by a new cadre of educators who are willing to get out there and do it.' 

• Autistic Answers Question the Questions — DYSKE.COM The linked piece is very funny, but not only funnly: 'A lot of these answers are actually not “Wrong”. Most of these answers show autistic tendencies. In any given situation/question, kids on the spectrum would see all possibilities as being equally valid. This actually makes them less prejudiced than the average people. But this also makes them naive. [...] The teachers who wrote many of these questions are relying on the kids to have this type of prejudice that would instinctively detect their intentions without spelling them out. But when autistic kids do not take anything for granted, and consider all possibilities, the teachers’ assumptions or prejudice are revealed.' 

• Our Top 13 Teaching and Learning Articles of 2013 | Faculty Focus (facultyfocus.com)
  

Other Business

• Good judgment in forecasting international affairs (washingtonpost.com) '[...] the Good Judgment Project forecasters have demonstrated the ability to generate increasingly accurate forecasts that have exceeded even some of the most optimistic estimates at the beginning of the tournament.' Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner are involved, and they both have great form in this area. 

• In Our Time - Complexity (bbc.co.uk) Melvyn Bragg's consistently brilliant In Our Time discussion (Radio 4, 10.00, Thursdays) with the best introduction you can get to complexity theory in 45 minutes.

• The 12 days of Pascal's triangular Christmas (theconversation.com) The wonders contained in the triangle. 

• A Poor Apology for a Word - NYTimes.com 'The English “sorry” is a marker not of grace and decorum, but rather of a belief that one magic word has the power to decontaminate the world even as it both pacifies and reproves those who pollute it. “Sorry” is a mixture of decayed piety and passive-aggressive guile.'

• Full of Interesting Strangers – Rands in Repose 'Your conference experience starts when you check in, and for very good reasons, conference organizers often provide you [with a] ton of schwag. Take the badge, politely decline the schwag. You don’t want it. Trust me. [...] The badge is the only schwag you need because a badge connects you with the rest of the conference and its design quietly affects how much you’ll get out of the experience.' How to thrive at academic conferences.

• RandomiseMe: our fun new website that lets anyone design and run a randomised controlled trial. – Bad Science (Ben Goldacre)

And very best wishes for Christmas and the New Year!