Items to Share: 20 July 2014

Education Focus

• Stop this educational madness [spiked] (Kathryn Ecclestone) 'Beyond the trivial or cynical claims being made with regard to mental health, more people seem to find everyday life and education a constant source of distress. The idea that almost all people are psychologically and emotionally vulnerable is everywhere, and we need a wider debate about what impact this has had on how we teach and how we relate to people. We need to resist calls for more support and more intervention and start rethinking how education and other meaningful activities can lead to a world outside the self.'

• Hard Evidence: at what age are children ready for school? [theconversation.com] 'When are children “ready” for school? There is much debate about when the transition between play-based pre-school and the start of “formal” schooling should begin. The trend in the UK primary school curriculum over recent decades has been towards an earlier start to formal instruction, and an erosion of learning through play. [] But the evidence from international comparisons and psychological research of young children’s development all points to the advantages of a later start to formal instruction, particularly in relation to literacy.'

• Direct Instruction and the teaching of reading [theconversation.com] 'Direct Instruction is a teaching method developed in the United States in the 1960s, focused particularly on the needs of children with learning difficulties. Building on behaviourist learning theory, Direct Instruction breaks each learning task down into its smallest component and requires mastery of simpler skills before proceeding to more difficult skills. Students are grouped according to their achievement, teachers are provided with closely scripted lesson plans, students respond to the teacher orally and as a group, and the group does not move on until everyone understands the material.'

• For lecturers, there is life beyond Death by PowerPoint  [Times Higher Education] 'By harnessing the power of images, academics can fully exploit students’ learning potential, says David Roberts.'  But my reason for selecting this is that it is totally unoriginal. People knew all this in the days of hand-written "overheads" (transparencies) and even using the black- green- white-board... And the Higher Education Academy are interested in his work? What does this say about the dissemination of the scholarship of teaching and learning, however banal?

• Talent vs. Practice: Why Are We Still Debating This?  [Scientific American Blog Network] 'sheer amount of deliberate practice does not, in fact, explain most of the differences in expert performance. Additionally, there were huge differences between fields, with effects for education and professions much smaller than for games, music and sports...' It's the 10k hours stuff again.

• The pros and cons of giving praise to children – Carlin Flora – Aeon  ...and here's another piece on Dweck and mind-sets.

• BBC News - Barrowford school's KS2 'proud' letter to pupils goes viral Yuck! (Apparently it originally came from a US source—it's partly a cultural thing.)

Other Business

• Why so many domesticated mammals have floppy ears [theconversation.com] 'Take a look at several domesticated mammal species and you might spot a number of similarities between them, including those cute floppy ears.'

• McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Unused Audio Commentary By Howard Zinn And Noam Chomsky, Recorded Summer 2002 For The Fellowship Of The Ring DVD. Part One. OK, for afficionados only, probably, but a great spoof!

• The Etiology of Turgid Drivel – Lingua Franca — The Chronicle of Higher Education '[Microsoft's] near-monopolistic hold on personal computing, together with its creepy ability to foist bloated yet sluggish software on users whether they want it or not, has made [the CEO] one of the most powerful men on earth. Too powerful, it seems, for anyone to edit. Nobody dares tell him that his writing is vague, dishonest pothering, or that his memo should have been ruthlessly pruned and tightened, and given a content transfusion.' (from Geoff Pullum.) (And then he laid off 18,000 staff.)

• How to talk like an estate agent – seven tips | Books | The Guardian  I just happen to be having lots of dealings with them at the moment: I did think about doing a blog-post on their weird patois in their advertisements, but this saves me the bother.