Iterms to Share: 14 September 2014

Education Focus

• Game designers are beating teachers at their own game (The Conversation) 'Why do kids prefer playing video games to doing homework? The easy answer is - it’s more fun to play games than do homework. The real answer is much harder to stomach - game designers have become better at education than schools.'

• Why Most Behaviour Management Advice Doesn’t Work | Scenes From The Battleground 'I’ve worked at a lot of different schools, and learnt that my effectiveness at behaviour management seems to vary massively between the schools. [...] This is why I am outraged about many of those snake oil salesm[e]n who offer individual teachers a “magic bullet” solution to behaviour, usually built around platitudes about winning kids over.'

Other Business

• The myth about social mobility in Britain: it’s not that bad, says new report (Stephen Gorard for the Conversation) 'Considerable effort and funding is [...] being put into a solution to a problem that does not appear to exist – perhaps because good news in not so popular as bad. But there is a real opportunity cost. Real problems for the most educationally disadvantaged in the UK, such as adults without prior qualifications and low levels of literacy, are being ignored.'

• Creativity Creep - The New Yorker  'To today’s creativity researchers, the “self-styled creative person,” with his inner, unverifiable, possibly unproductive creativity, is a kind of bogeyman; a great deal of time is spent trampling on the scarf of the lone, Romantic genius. Instead, attention is paid to the systems of influence, partnership, power, funding, and reception that surround creativity—the social structures, in other words, that enable managers to reap the fruits of creative labor.' This piece is a useful counterpoint to Ken Robinson's waffle.

• Dumber and Dumb – Lingua Franca — The Chronicle of Higher Education Prescriptivist vs. descriptivist approaches to questions of grammar. (Yes, Jim, Pinker features again!) 

• First-World Problems – Lingua Franca — The Chronicle of Higher Education