Items to Share: 15 June 2014

Education Focus

• Leave The Laptops At Home, Kids « The Dish (Full New Yorker article here): 'I banned laptops in the classroom after it became common practice to carry them to school. When I created my “electronic etiquette policy” (as I call it in my syllabus), I was acting on a gut feeling based on personal experience. I’d always figured that, for the kinds of computer-science and math classes that I generally teach, which can have a significant theoretical component, any advantage that might be gained by having a machine at the ready, or available for the primary goal of taking notes, was negligible at best...' but see also: Three issues with the case for banning laptops  - The Chronicle of Higher Education .

Other Business

• The Turing Trick – The Chronicle of Higher Education 'On Monday morning, the news was everywhere that the famous Turing Test—in which a computer program tries to convince people that it is a human being carrying on a normal conversation—had been passed for the first time.' 

• Writing In The 21st Century | Edge.org 'Steven Pinker begins by stating his belief that "science can inform all aspects of life, particularly psychology, my own favorite science. Psychology looks in one direction to biology, to neuroscience, to genetics, to evolution. And it looks in another direction to the rest of intellectual and cultural life— because what are the arts but products of the human mind which resonate with our aesthetic and emotional faculties? [...] There's no aspect of life that cannot be illuminated by a better understanding of the mind from scientific psychology. And for me the most recent example is the process of writing itself [...]'