Items to Share: 23 February 2014

Education Focus

• How Google Has Changed Research for Grad Students Infographic 

• Failure can be productive for teaching children maths [theconversation.com] 'Learning from mistakes, errors, and failure seems intuitive and compelling. Everyone can relate to it. But if failure is a powerful learning mechanism, why do we wait for it to happen? Why can’t we design for it, understand how and when it works? What if designing for failure while learning a new concept or skill could result in more robust learning?'

• Meet the Fockers: Ofsted talks to the Bloggers (Tom Bennett) includes the lesson grading question.Interesting Freudian slip: "nor is a team allowed to produce a teaching grade by aggravating grades".

• The Emotions That Fuel Our Teaching [facultyfocus.com]

• Teachers are Learning Designers | Edutopia Creating the conditions under which learning will occur.

• Marzano’s 9 Instructional Strategies Infographic | e-Learning Infographics 'Using research-based best practice instructional strategies can increase students’ learning outcomes. This guide provided by Marzano can help teachers stay focus and provide learning practices students need.' (Marzano's work is based on meta-analysis)

• Why Students Cheat—and 3 Ways to Stop Them | Vitae 'today I’ll discuss three indirect approaches—new ways to attempt to prevent cheating that come from new ways of thinking about students who cheat.'

Other Business

• What Is Color? | Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science “The Flame Challenge has grown from scientists trying to answer the question of one 11-year old (me) from many decades ago, to tackling questions on the minds of thousands of current 11-year olds from around the world,” said Alda. “I’m in awe of the scientists who can bring clarity to these questions and I’m in awe of the kids who keep the scientists on their toes.” 

• Afghan Bands [futilitycloset.com] Beyond Mobius

• PHD Comics: The Higgs Boson Re-Explained

• When Love Bids You Welcome Delightful piece on the poetry of George Herbert.

• Dilbert: work-life balance

• The Sweet Kisses of Embodied Cognition – The Chronicle of Higher Education 'Research on embodied cognition—the idea, basically, that the body strongly influences the mind in multiple ways we’re not aware of (though not everyone agrees with that definition)—is a fairly new field, and in the last few years it has produced a number of head-scratching results. For instance, there’s the 2009 study that seems to show that people holding heavy clipboards are more likely to disagree with weak arguments than people holding light clipboards. Or the study, also published in 2009, that found that people gripping a warm cup of coffee judged others as having a “warm” personality.