Items to Share: 29 June 2014

Education Focus

• You do not need an LMS in order to teach with technology. (Jonathan Rees' 'More or Less Bunk') 'LMS' is American for VLE.

• Another Education Neuromyth Debunked [discovermagazine.com] Lectures aren't as totally useless as you thought. Quite... 

• The beauty of annotating | Pragmatic Education 'Like dewdrops on a dragonfly, annotations are microscopic, fragile and beautiful. I’ve come to believe that they’re the most important secret for teaching literature; a hidden treasure trove, waiting to be discovered. '

• Big Dog, Little Dog: Bloom's Revised Taxonomy: Cognitive processes and levels of knowledge matrix Bloom's Revised Taxonomy (Remember - Understand - Apply - Analyze - Evaluate - Create) not only improved the usability of it (using action words), but perhaps also made it more accurate. However, probably the best feature — the matrix — is often left unnoticed.

• The dip | Teaching In Higher Ed 'When I shared “the dip” that I had experienced in wrapping up each semester, [my colleague] shared that he, too, had that pattern throughout all of his years of teaching. He has been teaching more than 25 years and said that every class he taught had the frustrating time toward the end of it, when it seemed like the end just couldn’t get here fast enough.'  My own slightly different take is here.

• I Hate Training Days | Sam Shepherd 'You probably have training days in some form or another, if you are a teacher, and you probably spend several days of your academic year student free and attending various workshops and presentations about one thing or another. Now, let’s be perfectly honest, in your life, how many of these have genuinely stuck with you? How many of the workshops have been so strikingly informative that you can measure their impact in your day to day practice?' 

• dy/dan » Blog Archive » Don’t Personalize Learning 'a lot of fun learning in math class – argument, discussion, and debate chief among them – is impossible when you aren’t learning it synchronously with a group.'

Other Business

• A spook’s guide to the psychology of deception « Mind Hacks '...a plausible psychological framework for practical deception and influence online. It draws on a mix of persuasion psychology from marketing, studies on scammers and con-men, the social psychology of trust and disclosure, studies of how stage magic works psychologically, and work on what makes organisations work effectively and what degrades their performance.'

• You Have No Idea How Wrong You Are | Neurobonkers | Big Think (Link to video) Lecture on YouTube about the ubiquity of error—and embracing it. 

• List With Legs – Lingua Franca - Blogs - The Chronicle of Higher Education Seven grammar rules you really should pay attention to, from Ben Yagoda

• Is America’s Personality Changing? A Decline in the Willingness to Conform » Sociological Images On Asch's group pressure experiments; '[...] then there was Vietnam and anti-war protesters, hippies and free love, the women’s and gay liberation movement, and civil rights victories. By the 1960s, it was all about rejecting the establishment, saying no, and envisioning a more authentic life. Things changed. And so did this experiment.'