Items to Share: 25 January 2015

Education Focus

• Donald Clark Plan B: Boko Haram (Western Education is sinful) a look behind the slogan 'Boko Haram means ‘Western Education is sinful’. What does that mean or at least signify? Why have they targeted education in particular? Why the gender war? Surely education is a universal good? Well, we must look behind the horror to see what’s happening there, as education, in particular our model, is NOT seen as a universal good by all.'  

• A defence of the fixed mindset | David Didau: The Learning Spy 'The growth mindset has been so universally heralded as ‘a good thing’ that it’s in danger of becoming one of those memes we think with rather than about. A number of commentators have been critical of the way mindset theory has been uncritical adopted and unthinkingly applied, but what if growth isn’t always good? What if sometime we might be better off to be ‘fixed’ in our attitudes and beliefs?' 

• Thinking Aloud: Expectations | Teaching at the Edge of Chaos 'I do feel that as a society we are too fond of attaching labels to people, only for them to meet the negative expectations that come with such tags. Likewise once tagged, many appear to expect and rely on entitlements that they don’t necessarily need.' 

• Well-being programmes in schools might be doing children more harm than good (Kathryn Ecclestone) 'Apocryphal depictions of an unprecedented crisis in young people’s mental ill-health and their general vulnerability have been accompanied by increasingly alarmist claims that only schools can address this social “ticking time bomb”. [...] There have been calls[...] for schools to appoint heads of well-being. Yet there is little evidence that programmes aimed at improving children’s emotional well-being are having any impact.'

• The College of Teaching: if not now, when? - Tom Bennett - TES Community Welcoming the idea—with some provisos. Presumably it's just intended for the compulsory sector?

• Keeping Students on Board with Concept Maps | Faculty Focus 'The benefits of concept maps are well established. They encourage students to organize knowledge and do so in ways meaningful to them. [...] Students can also use concept maps to forge relationships between new knowledge and what they already know. [ ] But students don’t always see these benefits when first introduced to concept maps, and as the authors of the article referenced below discovered, how concept maps are used in a course directly affects student perceptions of their value.'

• The Rules for Essay Exams – Lingua Franca - The Chronicle of Higher Education Geoff Pullum's excellent advice on tackling exams.

• The Silent Teacher | Blogger, interrupted… 'I had no voice. [...] Like many of us, I had heard tales of laryngitic teachers of yore, venturing forth voiceless amongst the multitudinous hordes of Y11; I too wanted to join this mythological brethren. Silent teaching? Bring it on. [ ] And my lessons were affected – but not in the way I had expected.'

• Five mini book reviews: - Daniel Willingham Concise reviews, but US-centric texts.

 Other Business 

• How the Tudors invented breakfast | History Extra 'Most medieval Brits ate two meals a day: dinner around 11am, supper around 5pm. But in the 16th century everybody started eating breakfast, and the three-meal day fell into place. Why the change? Probably because standardised jobs became more commonplace in the 16C, and with them “working hours”. Pushing back dinner and supper allowed for a longer working day, but it also made breakfast an essential starter (2,600 words)' [via the Browser]  

• BPS Research Digest: When our beliefs are threatened by facts, we turn to unfalsifiable justifications 'It's great to have facts on your side. The fundamentalist is delighted by the archaeological find that tallies with scripture, just as the atheist seizes on the evidence that contradicts it. But when the evidence goes against us, we're less likely to change a belief than to criticise the validity or provenance of the evidence. Now, research suggests that the mere prospect of a factual threat leads us to downplay how much our belief depends on such evidence at all. We become attracted to other, less falsifiable reasons for believing.' 

• 31 Rolls of Film Taken by a World War II Soldier Get Discovered & Developed Before Your Eyes | Open Culture 'Levi Bettwieser runs the Rescued Film Project, which salvages undeveloped rolls of film from around the world, all shot somewhere between the 1930s and the late 1990s. They have the ability “to process film from all eras. Even film that has been degraded by heat, moisture, and age. Or is no longer manufactured.” And why do they take on these projects? Because, at some point, every image was special for someone. “Each frame captured, reflects a moment that was intended to be remembered.”' 

• Ben Goldacre's "I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That" - Boing Boing 'Over the past decade, the woo-busting, pharma-fighting Dr Ben Goldacre has written more than 500,000 words of acerbic, entertaining, enlightening and fearlessly combative science journalism and commentary, busting bad math, manipulative abuse of statistics, institutional corruption, media distortion, and new age rubbish of all descriptions.' A review by Cory Doctorow. 

• Reducing Laboratory Dissonance | Genealogy of Religion On cognitive dissonance and real world research in psychology

Items to Share: 18 January 2015

Education Focus

• Donald Clark Plan B: Why Finland is finished as a role model in education 'Everyone in education, from politicians to teachers it seems, is a fully paid up member of the Finland Fan Club. Finland has been portrayed as an educational paradise, topping or near topping the PISA tables, with a strong economy that makes it the envy of Europe. Big problem – it’s not true.' Also Donald Clark Plan B: Vocational learning – unwanted child, used and abused? 'How many Secretaries of State have been responsible for ‘vocational skills’ in the last three decades? [61] The skills sector has been subjected to every half-baked whim and fancy for that period. It’s treated like an unwanted child, handed off into care then bounced around the system, itself dysfunctional, used and abused, until the next election comes along.'

• What to avoid when teaching | Monkeymagic 'While it would be wonderful to think there is a simple, step-by-step formula to a perfect lesson, I’m not at all convinced it exists. In fact, I tend to think any complicated scenarios [...] preclude those sorts of plans beyond the “Stay in touch, keep moving and head for the high ground” heuristics. One of the sections that caught my eye, though, was a list of things that don’t work. That instantly appeals.' (Sourced via the Echo Chamber: an excellent portmanteau source for education blogs.)

• Practical considerations for busy teachers to investigate their own practice Just a word of caution about finding the default Education Research Methods text on-line (link in the piece); it is standard reading on Master's course, where it is offered with guidance, in small portions. It is quite indigestible, so raid it rather than read it. Chapters are also of quite variable quality. And see A research journal for teachers by teachers | David Didau: The Learning Spy About an initiative to set up a journal of practice-based research, seeking funding on Kickstarter. I've chippped in my penn'orth. (www.kickstarter.com  Journal of Applied Education Research )

• Why I Hate Highlighters! - HuntingEnglish 'Ok – so perhaps highlighters aren’t the biggest problem in education, but [...] For me, highlighters can represent how our habits of teaching and learning can go unexamined and how we can too easily waste time and money each year by not being truly critical about our practice in the classroom.'

• Another week, another Ofsted story | Musings and Mutterings of an Idiot Scribe 'Firstly, Ofsted is, and I apologise for my bluntness, bollocks. [  ] Its inspection practices are not evidentially-based and, while much of what it recommends has some proven validity in terms of classroom practice, because of the ridiculous pressure [...] on educational leaders, what should be presented as part of a range of pedagogical practices is instead presented as orthodoxy and dogma.

• Education is valuable. Just because... — Love Learning Ideas 'Nine reasons to value academic education'

• Effective Ways to Structure Discussion | Faculty Focus 'The use of online discussion in both blended and fully online courses has made clear that those exchanges are more productive if they are structured, if there’s a protocol that guides the interaction. This kind of structure is more important in the online environment because those discussions are usually asynchronous and minus all the nonverbal cues that facilitate face-to-face exchanges. But I’m wondering if more structure might benefit our in-class discussions as well.' 

SEN

• Does ADHD exist? | David Didau: The Learning Spy On the contested definitions and incidence of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

• Dyslexia Can Deliver Benefits - Scientific American 'These findings raise the intriguing possibility that dyslexia involves certain advantages. The research hints that people with dyslexia exhibit strengths for seeing the big picture (both literally and figuratively) that others tend to miss. And if this is true, the work reinforces the larger idea that differences that people might perceive as a source of difficulty in some domains can become a source of strength in other contexts.' 

Other Business

• The golden ratio has spawned a beautiful new curve: the Harriss spiral | Alex Bellos | Science | The Guardian 'Inspired by the golden ratio, mathematician Edmund Harriss discovered a delightful fractal curve that no one had ever drawn before. But it’s not just a pretty picture, it contains some lovely theory – and brings the golden ratio into a family of perfect proportions.'

• BBC Radio 4 - Mindfulness: Panacea or Fad? 'In little more than a few decades mindfulness has gone from being a specialist element of Buddhist teaching to the front cover of Time magazine.'

On knowing too much to teach...

This post was originally a comment on a comment on this post on another blog, which got a bit out of hand—

'it is hard to see how knowing less about the thing being taught can make you a better teacher of the thing being taught.'

This may well be the case in schools—my experience is limited. But in post-compulsory (further/higher/adult) education, one of the most formative learning experiences I have ever had was probably a conversation with colleagues in the canteen of the (then) Salford Technical College, killing time before the start of evening classes (c. 1970). The leader of the Marketing courses posed the question, 'Can you know too much about a topic to teach it well?'

A great question, and Tom had recently joined the college (why, goodness only knows) directly from a senior position in marketing in the private sector, so he was picking up this teaching stuff from scratch (on a sink or swim basis in those days) but he did bring with him his native perspective on consumer behaviour, which implies a (limited) degree of empathy with them, which he extended to students.

45 years later I don't recall the details, but I do remember that my position then was "no". Obviously the more you know about something the better you can teach it!

I was wrong. As a jack-of-many-subjects (but all of them rather "soft" and vague) I was not yet aware of how little I knew about any of them; so I had not actually come up against the problem, but later on I did get to the stage of knowing too much in a few areas.

There are two main problems with knowing too much;

• One is that of bounding one's own knowledge—confining it to the course curriculum and not wandering off into abstruse detail which serves only to confuse the students. This is a particular problem when teaching introductory courses, when you know that what you are teaching is not exactly wrong, but is drastically over-simplified and does not consider all the exceptions to a rule. The temptation is to explain them, and in so doing to lose sight of the broad picture or rule of thumb which is an essential part of scaffolding the teaching. And there is also the perpetual temptation to show off.

• And then there is the failure to appreciate students' difficulties. This is of course the root of the traditional caricature of the punitive teacher, who really cannot understand why students do not—or, it seems will not—understand. And it is a particular problem in relation to threshold concepts, because as the term suggests, once they have been grasped it is difficult to see how one could have ever done without them. The teacher is forever on the other side of the threshold from the learner, and has to make a conscious effort to grasp the learner's lack of comprehension. But of course there is no point in trying to teach without having passed the threshold(s). This is a variant of the curse of knowledge, so effectively explored by Steven Pinker in his wonderful The Sense of Style (Allen Lane; 2014).

But it is not merely about knowing too much—it is if anything more of a problem in respect of skills, partly because as Reynolds (1965) suggests, habituation makes it difficult even to remember one's first floundering attempts to master a skill.  (The 'Unconscious Competence' stage of the popular model.)

The title of one of my sites is based on Seneca 'Homines dum docent discunt' ('men learn while they teach' Letter VII to Lucilius On Crowds); it is important to be learning in order to be continually reminded of what it is like to be ignorant or incompetent, in order to get alongside our students. Ignorance is a fragile fruit.

Items to Share: 11 January 2015

Education Focus

David Didau special!

• Thanks to you… David Didau | A Skeptical Teacher 'David skilfully explores why it really pays to be aware of the inherent problems of research in the field of education and wary of the conclusions we draw from said research. [...] I felt fairly self-assured that I was not overdoing the ‘Yes but education research shows that…’ line of argument. I’d like to thank David for pointing out several interesting issues that I hadn’t been aware of and reminding me of the somewhat shaky ground that some of my claims rested on.' 

• Laudation: a review of ‘The Secret of Literacy’ by David Didau | Whatonomy 'As a summary of what is current and considered in not just literacy but teaching and learning, it is nothing short of marvellous'. 

• Do we really have a growth mindset? | David Didau: The Learning Spy 'This is my bottom line: It is morally reprehensible to expect teachers to sacrifice their home lives on the altar of professional responsibility. If we really valued a growth mindset approach to education we’d make damn sure it was safer for teachers to learn from failure.' 

and...

• My New Favorite Word - Teach Like a Champion My new favorite word is ‘pause’- especially when it’s used in place of the word ‘stop.’

• Do Learners Really Know Best?.pdf (Kirschner and van Merrienboer, 2013) 'This article takes a critical look at three pervasive urban legends in education about the nature of learners, learning, and teaching and looks at what educational and psychological research has to say about them. The three legends can be seen as variations on one central theme, namely, that it is the learner who knows best and that she or he should be the controlling force in her or his learning. The first legend is one of learners as digital natives [...] The second legend is the widespread belief that learners have specific learning styles [...] The final legend is that learners ought to be seen as self-educators who should be given maximum control over what they are learning and their learning trajectory. It concludes with a possible reason why these legends have taken hold, are so pervasive, and are so difficult to eradicate.'

• Eight SoTL articles that deserve a place on your reading list | Faculty Focus 'based on my pedagogical reading throughout 2014, I’ve identified eight top articles, listed below in alphabetical order.'

• A Guide to the Flipped Classroom - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education 'We've compiled a booklet, downloadable [...], designed to serve as a quick primer on this growing—and sometimes controversial—teaching approach. It contains several recent articles and essays from The Chronicle, along with a list of links for further reading. Downloading is simple: Just fill out [a] form, and the booklet is all yours.

• There Are Learning Styles, But… | SurrealAnarchy '…the learning styles that most people think of when we use the phrase are bunkum'

• Lesson Study as a way of Enabling Scholarship of Teaching and Learning | HE Reflections 'Lesson Study' is a shared approach to action research across the pond, sometimes a bit too cumbersome, but worth looking at. 

Other Business

• Getting Grief Right - NYTimes.com 'When I was trained, in the late 1970s, the stages of grief were the standard by which a grieving person’s progress was assessed. [...] That model is still deeply and rigidly embedded in our cultural consciousness and psychological language. It inspires much self-diagnosis and self-criticism among the aggrieved. This is compounded by the often subtle and well-meaning judgment of the surrounding community. A person is to grieve for only so long and with so much intensity.' Kubler-Ross has much to answer for!

• How Diversity Makes Us Smarter - Scientific American 'Being around people who are different from us makes us more creative, more diligent and harder-working' 

• RSA short "What Do We Need To Know?" - Boing Boing [John Lloyd]Animated excerpt from talk (2:21)

Items to Share; 4 January 2015

Education Focus

• Donald Clark Plan B: My tech prediction for 2014 - two small letters… 'AI'

• The Literacy Blog: Dr Helen Abadzi 'Fundamentally, what she is advocating is that when we are teaching young children to read and spell or do basic arithmetic, we need to introduce new knowledge a bit at a time and we need to practise the skills particular to the manipulation of that knowledge to automaticity' [via the Echo Chamber]

• Text Savvy: Education-Ish Research '[R]esearcher Deborah Ball (along with co-author Francesca Forzani) provide some measure of validation for many educators' frustrations, disappointments, and disaffections with education research. In a paper titled "What Makes Education Research 'Educational'?" published in December 2007, Ball and Forzani point to education research's tendency to focus on "phenomena related to education," rather than "inside educational transactions". My own take is here.

• Changing up a game-changer: Teach Like A Champion 2.0 – A (Brief) Review | Improving Teaching ' “It shouldn’t take a dozen years of brutal trial and error, suffering, and fatigue” for teachers to solve problems which are ‘endemic’ in schools. At some point all teachers answer “What do you do when a student gives up and simply won’t try? How do you know what the student who hides silently in the corner is learning?” The 2010 edition of Teach Like a Champion shared solutions; revised and reorganised, Version 2.0 is published this month.'

• Ofsted: the problem of the ignorant inspector | Clio et cetera 'My argument in this post is that Ofsted inspectors who are not specialists in a subject are poorly placed to make judgements about whether progress is being made by pupils in that subject.'

Other Business

• Just For Fun: The Trouble with p » Sociological Images 'In statistics, a little star next to a coefficient generally means that the result is statistically significant at the p<.05 level. In English, this means that there is only a 1 in 20 chance that the finding just popped up by pure random chance. In sociology, that’s generally considered good enough to conclude that the finding is “real.” [...] If one investigates a lot of relationships, however, this way of deciding which ones to claim as real has an obvious pitfall...'

• Are some diets “mass murder”? | The BMJ 'From low fat to Atkins and beyond, diets that are based on poor nutrition science are a type of global, uncontrolled experiment that may lead to bad outcomes, concludes Richard Smith'

• It's 2015, and You're in the Future | Wait But Why Just a reminder to up-date oneself. We're almost one-sixth of the way through the century.

• Lake Superior State University :: Banished Words List :: 2015

• John Cleese on How Stupid People Have No Idea How Stupid They Are (a.k.a. the Dunning-Kruger Effect) 

• Restored forests are fighting climate change [Kottke.org] 'And now some potential good news about climate change. Efforts to restore the world's rainforests have gained traction and are having small but definite effects on the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.'

• Banking Culture Encourages Dishonesty - Scientific American 'Research in moral psychology and behavioral ethics, [...] suggests that the dishonesty may be due something more basic: money and number crunching are an important part of the banking industry. When people are focused on money, research shows, they behave in self-interested ways. Even thinking about money leads people to be less helpful and fair in their dealings with others, to be less sensitive to social rejection, and to work harder toward personal goals. In fact, money can make us so focused on our selfish motives that it can even lead to unethical behavior.'

Items to Share: 28 December 2014

Education Focus

• A review of 2014 | David Didau: The Learning Spy  In terms of his most popular posts, etc.

• Shopping lists and other cognitive tools | Webs of Substance 'Standard algorithms are the mathematical equivalent of phonics. Unless statutes require them to be taught then there are ideologues who will willfully neglect them. [...] Of course, there are occasions when standard algorithms are not appropriate or efficient (80 plus 12 or when completing mental maths) but, for any given problem, there will always be a most efficient strategy. And for most pencil-and-paper operations involving two-digit numbers or more, the standard algorithms are the best.' OK, as long as you understand the principles well enough to know whether ot not the answer is plausible.

• Never Mind The Data, Feel The Noise (or, seek the signal, young Jedi) [e=mc2andallthat]  'I believe that the search for a signal should be central to any examination of data, and that this is best done with a human brain through the lens of professional experience. And, given the inevitability of noise and uncertainty in any measurement process, with a generous number of grains of statistical salt.'

• What does an expert teacher need to know? | Clio et cetera — in the case of history. It's not obvious.

• Some experiences of life at Imperial College London. An external inquiry is needed after the death of Stefan Grimm [dcscience.net] A very disturbing report from David Colquhoun on what is happening to research at one of the UK's (and the world's) premier research institutions.

Other Business

• What Freud Got Right « The Dish Extract from a 1953 essay by W H Auden. 

• Gabriele Oettingen Turns Her Mind to Motivation in ‘Rethinking Positive Thinking’ - NYTimes.com 'In her smart, lucid book, “Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation,” Dr. Oettingen critically re-examines positive thinking and give readers a more nuanced — and useful — understanding of motivation based on solid empirical evidence.'

• Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine - The Long Now Fascinating piece on working with Feynman, and his approach to problems.

• A Tablet for Africa? | AfriGadget  'The Betabook is a portable whiteboard, which can be used with a smartphone for archiving, content creation, and social media sharing.'

• Tim Harford — Article — You really, really, shouldn’t have . . .  'There is a vast discrepancy between how we see the world when giving gifts and when receiving them'

• Christmas Gift! - The American Interest 'What makes this holiday so irresistible and global, yet also so particular and controversial? Why do so many people love Christmas while rejecting or in some cases actively hating Christianity? And why do so many others hate Christianity so deeply that they want to suppress all public celebration, however secular, of the symbols of Christmas? [...] For that matter, why do so many followers of the man who famously blessed the poor celebrate his birthday with the greatest spending sprees the world has ever known? How did the birthday of a crucified religious teacher become an excuse to drink egg nog?'

Items to Share; 21 December 2014

Education Focus

• Teaching and subject expertise: let’s not fall for genericism again | Clio et cetera The author discusses the subject-specificity of teaching in relation to the welcome interest in practitioner research. It's an issue of particular interest in the post-compulsory sectors, where teaching courses and qualifications are generic, with both benefits and costs.

• Our 14 Most Popular Articles of 2014, Part 2 | Faculty Focus Part 1 of a 2-part series. Our 14 Most Popular Articles of 2014 | Faculty Focus Part 2

• MOOCs and the distance-learning mirage | ROUGH TYPE [Nicholas Carr] 'Now that we’ve begun to talk of MOOCs retrospectively, I think the time has come to update my previously published survey of the history of hype that has for more than a century surrounded distance-learning technologies. I am adding a new entry to the list. I suspect it won’t be the last addition.'

• Christine Rosen for Democracy Journal: Automation for the People? 'Early in the book, [Nicholas]  Carr describes his youthful experience of learning to drive a standard (manual) transmission car. After many stalls and slipped clutches and grinding gears, he gained competence and, eventually, mastery. Unlike the explicit knowledge one obtains from step-by-step instructions, the tacit knowledge he acquired exists in a “fuzzy realm” far different from but no less crucial than the well-defined processes that characterize explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is the reason you can still remember how to ride a bicycle after a 20-year hiatus.'

• A Meditation on the Art of Not Trying - NYTimes.com... or at least, not too hard.

• Teacher Use of Academic Research | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice 'The central question that drives "From the Ivory Tower to the Schoolhouse" is straightforward: what explains that some scholarly ideas, and not others, appeared in classrooms practices?' It's clear that it has little to do with their validity.

• Archimedean leadership (2): What are leverage observations? Or, how would Yo-Yo Ma feed back? | Improving Teaching

Other Business

• The Game of Life: a beginner's guide | Science | The Guardian

On presents and the wisdom of the ancients...

Even in the UK, it appears that practically every day after Thanksgiving (not our holiday) to Christmas has a label. Apparently today was panic Saturday (I heard someone on the radio christen [appositely?] next Monday, "Manic Monday"). What a countdown.

I last got excited about Christmas in 1957. I remember "Last Train to San Fernando" as a hit at that time, and I looked it up... Don't bother.

Son and grand-daughter (11) called round today. They had tried to go shopping, but town was a maelstrom, and so they were wondering what to do for the afternoon which did not involve crowds. They checked out the cinema, but while son was really up for going to see Paddington, grand-daughter thought it childish. And she is clearly embarking on a campaign for a TV in her room (to add to the iPad and...)

So it goes. They did settle on getting a DVD to watch. For some reason my suggestions about a walk—it was cold but bright and still—were not well received.

My presents for birthday and Christmas always include (or may consist entirely of) books. But it did strike me this afternoon that the books son, his partner, and her daughter will receive will be for individual consumption. Grand-daughter is beyond the age of the bedtime story (one of the great downside losses of children growing up), and her iPad fixation and desire for a TV in her room—they are all about doing things on her own (or with peers, probably virtually).

I've never been one for packaged video; I owned just one VHS video (Educating Rita—to use clips for teaching purposes). A few years ago, I started to receive boxed sets as presents; despite my admiration for the series, I only ever watched one episode of the West Wing on DVD—the very first one, which I missed on first showing. But I have to admit that a family can watch and enjoy them together.

So, what about making presents of them?

But. Given that son and family are apparently regular buyers, how to avoid duplicating their collection? The line plugged by the distributors is of course to get the latest releases.

But I have an advantage. I remember Last Train to San Fernando. Like all other artefacts and history in general, they grow. And however dodgy, our senescent but not senile memories are still the best access to choice—if trivial—gems from the past. I am totally ignorant about current cinema, but I was a keen follower until the mid-70s, and there is a treasure-house of not merely vintage but currently entertaining material, readily available as never before...

With some reluctance, because I am far from a fan of the fluvial behemoth, I went online. What might all three of them enjoy, but not know they had missed? Bringing up Baby. And that's bundled with... and other buyers bought...

But it took my seed knowledge to get this search going. As Daisy Christodolou argues (she's not the first, of course, but probably the most accessible today. This is a recursive argument!) it takes a foundation of sheer knowledge to build connotations and context and connections and ...

In other words: how would I have started to build a list of potentially enjoyable old movies without an initial exemplar? (First- or second-hand?)

Actually, I would have set out the conditions and run the search and then reviewed the results in search of... an instance which could act as an exemplar. Clumsy.

Even so: I may well have got it all wrong.

Why do we bother?

At the risk of getting (non-doctrinally, equal opportunity shame/guilt/non-specific miserable) pious it's the effort which matters.

Items to Share; 14 December 2014

Education Focus

• The Growth Mindset : Telling Penguins to Flap Harder ? | Disappointed Idealist 'My objection is to the way in which Dweck’s conclusions are rapidly metamorphosing into something completely different, and thus reinforcing the set of existing bonkers principles which are largely shaping education policy. Dweck’s well-meaning and perfectly reasonable research may well end up producing toxic outcomes if we don’t nip it in the bud.'

• Colour coded self-assessment | Teaching: Leading Learning 'this term I have been working with colleagues from Maths and Languages on using self-assessment to improve redrafting. The concept is based on [...] the principles of improving work over time through specific feedback. This is best encapsulated by his famous “Austin’s Butterfly” example – mandatory viewing for all teachers! Just in case you haven’t seen it...'  

•  WizIQ Launches e-Learning Tool to Create Video Lectures | Faculty Focus
  

• Fear and anxiety are the enemies of learning.pdf [seda.ac.uk] by Graham Gibbs. Also touches on my own stuff on learning as loss. 

• Donald Clark Plan B: VR is a medium not a gadget: 7 learning principles that work in VR 'Virtual Reality is a medium not a gadget; but how appropriate is it for education and training? I’ve spent a lifetime using technology in learning but am no technological determinist. [...] However, the first time I tried an Oculus Rift, it blew my mind, not just with its total immersion but its possibilities in learning. Before we get carried away with the sheer joy of the toy, what does the psychology of learning tell us about VR?' 

• Shimer College: the worst school in America? | Education | The Guardian 'This tiny, eccentric institution in Chicago was just voted the worst place to study in America. But does Shimer, which shuns lectures and has no societies or clubs, deserve such an accolade?'

Other Business

• Science News Fail: How NOT to Illustrate Your Story » Sociological Images 'Mainstream media outlets such as the Today Show, Marie Claire, and Huffington Post have been reporting on a new scientific study that claims “women talk more than men.” These media outlets report there’s new “biological evidence to support the idea that women are more talkative than men.' [...] Not quite!

• World-beating email EULA - Boing Boing 

• Watch: How to very, very, very finely chop an onion - Boing Boing by Marco Pierre White. On the radio.

• Parable of the Polygons - a playable post on the shape of society  

• Study supports the theory that men are idiots [eurekalert.org]

• Why all research findings are false | The Devil's Neuroscientist

• How risk factors drive medical overtreatment – Jeff Wheelwright – Aeon

• An exploration of the basis for patient complaints about the oldness of magazines in practice waiting rooms: cohort study | The BMJ 'No gossipy magazines were harmed in this study (although we were tempted). Some recipe pages were torn out. Please be assured that clinical staff did not remove magazines during this study, so none incurred the death penalty.' [via the Browser]

• Ronald Blythe...: Glorious tombs and an old pub draw Ronald Blythe to a small town Advent and holly and a sense of history.

• More Stormscapes 'flat-out incredible, by far the best of its kind.' Video

Items to Share: 7 December 2014

Education Focus

• FE and Dr Who | dancing princesses And the linked piece by Frank Coffield is well worth watching, too.

• Urban Myths & Comic Sans | Sam Shepherd and dyslexia.

• Is the Feedback Your'e Giving Students Helping or Hindering? | Learning Sciences Dylan Wiliam Center 'In 38% of well-designed studies, feedback actually made performance worse—one of the most counterintuitive results in all of psychology. [...] If there’s a single principle teachers need to digest about classroom feedback, it’s this: The only thing that matters is what students do with it. No matter how well the feedback is designed, if students do not use the feedback to move their own learning forward, it’s a waste of time. We can debate about whether feedback should be descriptive or evaluative, but it is absolutely essential that feedback is productive'

• The Future Part 7a: Whats a Digital Native? 'A few years ago I sat through an INSET where we were shown pictures of a couple of everyday items and asked what they were called. The wrong answer was “a digital camera and a mobile phone”. Apparently, to our students, they would simply be “a camera and a phone”. This shows that our students are fundamentally different to us as they are “Digital Natives” and, [...] have to be taught according to all the usual progressive education methods of discussion, discovery learning and groupwork. Or at least that’s what we were told.' but...

• Digital Natives Like a Good Lecture, Too - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education 'A large part of the value that we bring to the classroom is that of the "sage on the stage," rather than the "guide on the side." We have the qualifications and skill, and for students, being in the same room as an expert is an valuable part of university experience. [...] Students don’t enroll at brick-and-mortar colleges because they want a distance-learning experience. Instead of trying to offer both and ending up with neither, let’s play to our strengths.'

• It's A Hard Smock Life [Andrew Sullivan] Is art school vocational?

• Whats the Story on Learning Styles? [facultyfocus.com] A nuanced discussion; I still think that on balance the very idea is pernicious.  And Jim Crawley has posted a link to this VARK site; that says it all: VARK | a guide to learning preferences.  No, it's not ironic.

• What Are They Learning? And How? | Vitae [chroniclevitae.com] 'What we’re looking for here are practical ways to elicit and make use of quality student feedback. We want to learn from students the information—about what they knew beforehand, what they’ve learned from us, and what they still don’t understand—that will help us teach more effectively. Providing students with ways to give us that information not only helps us tailor our teaching, it helps them become more aware of themselves as learners.'

• How to Start or Improve a Podcast – ProfHacker - Blogs - The Chronicle of Higher Education Useful advice and links.

• “This will revolutionize education.” | i-Biology | Reflections Video. Plus ca change...

• Brain Training Doesn’t Make You Smarter - Scientific American "The strong consensus of this group is that the scientific literature does not support claims that the use of software-based “brain games” alters neural functioning in ways that improve general cognitive performance in everyday life, or prevent cognitive slowing and brain disease." 

• Unlocking the Mystery of Critical Thinking | Faculty Focus ''As the instructor, you [...] provide a key learning experience by serving as a role model. Students need to see you demonstrating the courage to question your own beliefs and values, the fair-mindedness to represent multiple perspectives accurately, and the open-mindedness to give viewpoints opposed to your own their due. In such instances, you should point out to students that you are practicing critical thinking.'

Other Business

• An immigration lawyer reviews Paddington | Free Movement 'Paddington stows away and deliberately avoids the immigration authorities on arrival. He is [...] an illegal entrant and as such commits a criminal offence under section 24 of the Immigration Act 1971 [...] punishable by up to six months in prison. [...] [F]or offering a home to Paddington — or harbouring him, as the Home Office would have it — Mr and Mrs Brown could potentially face prosecution under section 25 of the Immigration Act 1971, [...] The maximum sentence is 14 years.

• Tim Harford — Article — Learn from the losers 'It’s natural to look at life’s winners – often they become winners in the first place because they’re interesting to look at. That’s why Kickended (site about failed Kickstarter bids) gives us an important lesson. If we don’t look at life’s losers too, we may end up putting our time, money, attention or even armour plating in entirely the wrong place.  

• There is no language instinct – Vyvyan Evans – Aeon 'Chomsky’s idea dominated the science of language for four decades. And yet it turns out to be a myth. A welter of new evidence has emerged over the past few years, demonstrating that Chomsky is plain wrong.' 

• Alain de Botton's School of Life Presents Animated Introductions to Heidegger, The Stoics & Epicurus [openculture.com] 'Do the dead European philosophers of ages past have helpful tips for our mundane 21st century existence, and do de Botton’s videos do any justice to the quality of their thought?' Well, the actual images are a gratuitous distraction.

• XKCD's What If: "Dear Abby for Mad Scientists" in bookform (and XKCD vs hand-wringing about what texting does to kids'literacy) 

• Possibly the most genius don't-text-and-drive PSA ever [boingboing.net] PSA=Public Service Advertisement/Announcement

Items to Share: 30 November 2014

Education Focus

• The crisis in adult education | The Learning Age '[T]here is a growing crisis in adult participation in education and training, with stark implications both for our economy and our democracy. If the trend continues it will soon be necessary to reinvent from scratch a part of the education system which has taken over a century to build up.

• Why ‘triple marking’ is wrong (and not my fault) | David Didau: The Learning Spy  '[T]eachers should not [mark] students’ work for accuracy. If we point out their mistakes, there is no impetus to complete work accurately first time round. By insisting that the minimum expectation for written work is that it be proofread before it’s handed in, we make committing careless errors burdensome. If they know they will be expected to correct these mistakes before you are prepared to mark their work then they will learn that it easier to write correctly first time round. And if they don’t know how to correct an error then they will be requesting feedback at the point that they are ready to learn. Any input we give is far more likely to have impact than any amount of unsolicited advice.'

• Lynda Barry's Wonderfully Illustrated Syllabus & Homework Assignments from Her UW-Madison Class, "The Unthinkable Mind" | Open Culture Note that in the US, a "syllabus" is akin to a module handbook. It's also interesting to note the detailed rubrics, such as graduated penalties for non-attendance. And then there is the artwork and style. De-construct it and see what kind of hidden curriculum is embodied.

• Older people may be better learners than we think '“The take-home message the study authors gave was that healthy older people are good at learning,” said Professor Henry Brodaty, co-Director of the Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing (CHeBA) at UNSW. “They have the same plasticity, but they’re not as good at filtering out other information.”[...] The brain needs to be able to easily learn new information (plasticity), and filter out irrelevant information (stability). The experiment was designed to test whether ageing affects the brain’s plasticity, stability, or both.' 

• Psychophysiology of blackboard teaching | Mathematics under the Microscope (Alexander Borovik) 'Mathematics teaching is not a science. It is an art. [...] Moreover, it is a performance art, like drama or ballet, and should be treated as such. Unsurprisingly, ballet dancers are very fussy about the state of the stage floor: they need a surface with just right level of friction, support and spring. Normally, we are very fussy about the quality of the blackboard surface -I can tell a lot on that subject. Unfortunately, we are reduced to fighting for continuing existence of our old blackboards; we do not even dare to raise the issue of their quality.' [This is an old post which I have just re-discovered, but still worth sharing.]

• The “New” Professional Standards | Sam Shepherd (for teachers in FE) 'There is a general sense that the best development comes not from some advanced practitioner/consultant/manager telling you what is “best practice” (a phrase happily absent in the standards, you will note) but rather through working together. This places the emphasis on action research, peer observations, and raises the value of those staff room discussions about what is and isn’t working in class. To my mind, this shift from top down cascading of “best practice” to critical joint practice development is no bad thing at all.' 

Other Business

• Leonard Cohen and smoking in old age | OUPblog 'Leonard Cohen’s decision to take up cigarettes again at 80 reveals a well kept secret about older age: you can finally live it up and stop worrying about the consequences shortening your life by much.'

• A working Lego particle accelerator [kottke.org] 

• Scientific Paper Of The Day « The Dish A polite attempt to leave a mailing list. (It was published.)

• What do fans of Spotify and meat pies have in common? [theconversation.com] 'Before the era of big data we believed that the inter-relationships between cultural preferences were esoteric, idiosyncratic, and very difficult to predict. The YouGov profiler indicates that they are anything but. I’m off now to find out what meat pie lovers have in common with jazz fans.'

Items to Share: 23 November 2014

Education Focus

• What if we started trusting teachers? | David Didau: The Learning Spy ... and it's not just school-teachers...

• The List of Further Education Bloggers (Version 2.0) | The Echo Chamber

• Robert Coe, Daisy Christodoulou and Doug Lemov. Reviews. - John Bald/language and literacy  The author used to review for the weekly and daily press education sections, but they are retrenching so he is doing it on his blog.

• Ivan Pavlov in 22 surprising facts | OUPblog 'An iconic figure of 20th century science and culture, Ivan Pavlov is best known as a founding figure of behaviorism who trained dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell and offered a scientific approach to psychology that ignored the “subjective” world of the psyche itself. [ ] While researching "Ivan Pavlov: A Russian Life in Science", I discovered that these and other elements of the common images of Pavlov are incorrect. The following 22 facts and observations are a small window onto the life of a man whose work, life and values were much more complex and interesting than the iconic figure with whom we are so familiar.'

• BPS Research Digest: How guessing the wrong answer helps you learn the right answer It's well known that taking tests helps us learn. The act of retrieving information from memory helps that information stick. This seems intuitive. More surprising is the recent discovery that guessing aids subsequent learning of the correct answer, even if your initial guess was wrong.

• Resourceaholic: Ideas from Shanghai On teaching maths at secondary level, but also applicable for functional skills etc.

• Teaching Practices Inventory Helps You Examine Your Teaching | Faculty Focus 'It’s an inventory that lists and scores the extent to which research-based teaching practices are being used. It’s been developed for use in math and science courses, but researchers Carl Wieman and Sarah Gilbert suggest it can be used in engineering and social sciences courses, although they have not tested it there. I suspect it has an even wider application. Most of the items on the inventory are or could be practiced in most disciplines and programs.'

• Index to series on Hattie’s Visible Learning | docendo discimus This blog is embarking on some promising posts engaging in critical discussion of Hattie's Visible Learning meta-analysis. Worth following, I think.

• Does brain training really work? | Loony Labs 'Ever wonder if you could be the next Einstein if only you could do some brain training? Well as it turns out, while computer based ‘brain training’ can boost memory and thinking skills in older adults, many programs promoted by the $1 billion brain training industry are ineffective.'

• Students don't know what's best for their own learning [theconversation.com] 'Two recent studies of student evaluations [...] looked at student evaluations and learning. Both came to the same conclusion: university students evaluate their teachers more positively when they learn less.' 

Other Business

• Why do pigs oink in English, boo boo in Japanese, and nöff-nöff in Swedish? | Education | theguardian.com 'It’s not just pigs, the onomatopoeia we apply to most animal sounds varies delightfully across different tongues. What does this reveal about our relationship with language?' 

• The Secret Life of Passwords - NYTimes.com 'We despise them – yet we imbue them with our hopes and dreams, our dearest memories, our deepest meanings. They unlock much more than our accounts.'

Items to Share: 16 November 2014

Education Focus

• 'Education Is the Inculcation of the Incomprehensible Into the Ignorant by the Incompetent' | Quote Investigator

• University courses for prisoners could reduce re-offending rates [theconversation.com] 'Those prisoners who had successfully completed at least one higher-level course while in prison developed a positive student identity, resilience and hope with realistic aspirations for a crime-free life after release. Those who had not engaged with learning lacked these qualities and most returned to prison. Of the 28 adults I traced, only four had not engaged with learning – and three of them returned to prison. Of the other 24 former prisoners I traced who had studied while in prison, only two returned to prison – and one of those was on a technicality.'

• The Problem with Learning Technology | Vitae [chroniclevitae.com] 'It now seems important, as it didn’t 10 years ago, to keep things simple: to focus on the humans in the room, the literature we’re reading, the tools that help us make sense of the texts. Students experience much of their contact with other people by making things happen on a screen. What feels fresh and immediate to them now is a real conversation, in real time, over pieces of paper that can be held in the hand.' 

Other Business

• The Decline of Grammar Education – Lingua Franca - The Chronicle of Higher Education (Geoff Pullum) 'Google fetches more than 300,000 hits for the term "grammar quiz"; yet if quizzes on chemistry were as uninformed as those on grammar, they would ask silly questions on peripheral topics (“Who is the Bunsen burner named after?”), and would make no reference to the periodic table, or atoms or molecules. The web’s grammar quizzes deal in minor pieces of puristic flotsam with roots in dimly understood 18th-century grammatical analysis.'

• Explainer: the pitch drop experiment [theconversation.com] 'Something strange is happening within the world-famous pitch drop experiment with the latest drop forming much faster than the last couple of drops. There have been nine drops so far and all attention is now on trying to observe the tenth, expected sometime in the 2020s. The actual experiment began in October 1930 and is now recognised by Guinness World Records as the longest-running laboratory experiment – and in all that time no one has ever witnessed a single drop of pitch to fall. But what started as a simple lecture demonstration has captured the interest of tens of thousands of people worldwide'

• Download 110 Free Philosophy eBooks: From Aristotle to Nietzsche & Wittgenstein | Open Culture openculture.com 

• We Are All Confident Idiots - Pacific Standard: The Science of Society 'What’s curious is that, in many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something
  that feels to them like knowledge.'

• Kurt Vonnegut Explains "How to Write With Style" | Open Culture 'If you feel the need for tips on developing a writing style, you probably don’t look right to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ journal Transactions on Professional Communications. You certainly don’t open such a publication expecting such tips from novelist Kurt Vonnegut, a writer with a style of his own if ever there was one. But in a 1980 issue, the author of Slaughterhouse-Five, Jailbird, and Cat’s Cradle does indeed appear with advice on “how to put your style and personality into everything you write.” ' 

• The Great Psychologists: Sigmund Freud As a commenter puts it, ' A great introduction to a man who was about as troubled as all of us. A reminder that we are all quite mad, and everyone else is a degree of crazy.' 
•  

On Keynotes and Standup

I've done a few "keynote" presentations in my time. (A keynote is a major presentation at an academic conference/symposium/ or staff development session.) Not many, and it may say something that I haven't been asked back!

But there is something of a "circuit" of speakers and consultants in the field, rather like that of "standup" comedians. I'm not going to refer to any individuals in this post, and it is purely observational rather than critical; but last Saturday, sitting in the audience for yet another well-honed performance, I began to wonder about mission drift.

It's an occupational hazard. Successful presenters may do several a week, over several years. One of our deservedly popular regulars has probably been doing it since her first book came out 15 years ago. If she does one hundred a year now, having built it up over the years she will certainly have done her more popular performance more than a thousand times. I'm sure she reviews and revises it regularly, but there is a process of natural selection going on; the best bits get more prominence and more polish, and the less successful ones fade away.

Of course there is a process of incremental change. Recently there was a TV show about the comedian Peter Kay; it was a promotion for his new tour purporting to be a behind-the-scenes look at the preparations, and it was quite interesting to see the rehearsals with live audiences which refine the material in fine detail. But in that case the criterion for the inclusion of the material was simple—did it make the audience laugh?

Keynotes usually have a few laughs as well, but that is by no means their raison d'etre. It must be quite a challenge for the speaker to keep her or his eye on the ball, and to go beyond Kirkpatricks' first level of evaluation.

A colleague who couldn't be there asked me after the keynote what I thought of it. I said it amounted to less than the sum of its parts. Its arguments and coherence seem to have been weakened in favour of its set-pieces, whether one-man reconstructions of teaching encounters, or games with a group of the audience. They all made their points, but not a coherent whole.

It can happen with more mainstream lecturing; I developed a model for understanding aspects of residential homes in the mid-70s, and lectured on it for about 15 years (albeit only a few times a year). A version of it is here, in case anyone is interested. Except that in the early 90s, I realised that some of the anecdotes which provided the accessible evidence had taken over. Instead of a theoretical model it had become a string of stories, and it didn't mean anything any more. Even to me. I stopped using it, but I'm re-discovering aspects of its applicability to teaching.

Just for once, this may be an argument for using technology, so that the session does not have to be repeated live. Otherwise, the incremental drift may end up like those religious statues—initially polished by the hands or lips of pilgrims, but eventually worn away by them.

Items to Share; 9 November 2014

Education Focus

• How to make teaching great [theconversation.com] [Higgins and Coe] 'Defining effective teaching is not straightforward. But it must surely be something like: “effective teaching is that which leads to high achievement by students in terms of valued outcomes”. Many current ways of assessing children, particularly those used in high-stakes exams or in existing research studies, do not fully reflect the range of important outcomes that a child’s education is trying to achieve.' 

• Why do we overestimate the importance of differences? | David Didau: The Learning Spy 'The idea that we’re all either visual, auditory or kinaesthetic learners and we can only really be expected to learn when instruction is tailored to these specific needs is codswallop. We might well have a preference for seeing, listening or doing, but if we believe that the best way to learn the shape of a map of Australia is to listen to a description of it, that the best way to learn how the piano is just to bash away at the keys, or that we should learn to play tennis by watching Wimbledon, then we’re very clearly and sadly wrong.'

• A 'no-consequences' education produces unemployable graduates [theconversation.com] 'A research centre in the UK recently found that lavishing praise on students, particularly low-attaining students, may be counter-productive. By providing a no-fail, no-consequences environment in which the top priority is to make everybody feel good about themselves, we are doing little more than setting young people up to fail.'

Other Business

• Where Did Soul-Sucking Office-Speak Come From? | VICE | United States 'Office words. Words like " deliverables," "upskill," and "learnings." Bilious conjoined twins of acidic gibberish like "drill-down," "value-add," and "catch-up." Wretch-inducing parcels of email Polyfilla like "moving forward," "enablers and barriers," and "quick wins." '

• Johnson: Pronouns: It's not you | The Economist If you say “It’s not you, it’s me,” you are probably a native speaker of English or someone with a good command of how native speakers actually speak. If you say “It’s not you—it’s I,” you will quickly achieve the goal of making the other person not want to spend any more time with you. Yet this bizarre formulation is just how Nathan Heller of the New Yorker would have you speak.

• Writing Instructors: Your Pain Is Felt – Lingua Franca - The Chronicle of Higher Education (Geoff Pullum) [R]eading an unbroken procession of agentless passives that could have been actives is like being hit on the head over and over again with a mallet labeled “I REFUSE TO TELL YOU WHO THE RESPONSIBLE PARTY IS.” And it’s boring! Theories will be discussed; grammars will be compared; aspects will be assessed; problems will be analysed–beam me up, Scotty! There is only one form of sentence construction down here! [ ] But it’s not the presence of passive constructions that’s the problem; it’s the writer’s tin ear.

• The Philosophical Implications of the Urge to Urinate - Scientific American 'What if I were to tell you, for instance, that belief in free will is negatively correlated with the desire to urinate? Those are the implications of a new study published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition by Michael Ent and Roy Baumeister. They predicted—and found—that the more people felt they needed to pee, the less they believed that humans are in control of their destinies.'

• You knew it was crap, but you bought it anyway. This is why. - Boing Boing 'David McRaney explores the sunk cost fallacy, a strangely twisted bit of logic that seems to pop into the human mind once a person has experienced the pain of loss or the ickiness of waste on his or her way toward a concrete goal. It’s illogical, irrational, unreasonable - and as a perfectly normal human being, you act under its influence all the time.'

Items to Share: 2 November 2014

Education Focus

• What is school like for a child with learning difficulties? [theconversation.com] 'The term “learning difficulties” is the hand grenade of education. Throw the terminology around and teachers, students, parents and school community members react widely and, at times, wildly. Some individuals ponder the term, others run frantically for a book to elicit a “definition” or “diagnostic term”, some consult with colleagues and professionals, yet others hide their heads in their hands or behind a desk.'

• Seven 'great' teaching methods not backed up by evidence [theconversation.com] 'We also think it is useful to look at what hasn’t been shown to work, even if this may seem a rather negative way to focus on improvement. Many ineffective teaching practices seem to be quite popular, even though most evidence is anecdotal and selective.'

• Donald Clark Plan B: 6 reasons why we don't need ‘mentors’ 'Mentoring has become a lazy option and alternative for hard work, effort, real learning and reflection. By all means strive to acquire knowledge, skills and competences, but don’t imagine that any of this will come through mentoring.'

• Donald Clark Plan B: Educational research largely useless - no costs, no bite 'The truth may be hard to bear here, but much educational research is meaningless in the sense of having no real chance of impact and change, as it does not carry through to Cost Effectiveness Analysis (CEA). [...] Without a truly rigorous Cost Effectiveness Analysis in education we will continue to spend huge amounts of money on fruitless research. The lesson is clear link effectiveness to costs. If you don’t the research will fall into the category of ‘inconclusive’. That means no evidence-based change will happen.'

• Donald Clark Plan B: ‘Mindfulness’ yet another mindless fad in education 'There’s a new fad on the block being forced on our kids – mindfulness. In truth, it’s not new at all. It goes back to Buddhism, Freud, then Rogers and the relentless effort to get therapeutic theory into education. But there’s plenty of reasons for rejecting this particular manifestation of mindful madness.'

• Donald Clark Plan B: Anders Ericsson: practice, practice, practice 'A welcome antidote to social constructivist theories, Ericsson focuses on the mind, memory and deliberate practice as the road to successful learning. Far from being an advocate of rote learning, he is an advocate of sophisticated, incremental steps in learning, with feedback and challenge, that lead to increased performance. This is all too often absent in learning, whether in the acquisition of knowledge or skills.'

• Teaching children how, not what, to think. | Webs of Substance Harry Webb argues that we can't teach children to think in a vacuum. 

• Turning the tanker: lesson grading | David Didau: The Learning Spy 'Grading individual lessons is a practice that simply must end. Ofsted have declared (and reiterated, twice) that they do not grade individual lessons. It is time for schools to follow suit. It is a process that is damaging to teachers, and therefore it is damaging to pupils and the profession. I am certainly not against appraising teaching – I think that it is a necessity to ensure standards – but all of the evidence tells us that grading lessons doesn’t appraise teaching accurately or effectively.'

• UNESCO Office in Bangkok: The Myth of Educational Reform Driven by Technology 1:1 computer initiatives are the latest iteration of the long-held mythical belief that education can be dramatically changed by the introduction of new technologies into the classroom.

• How the "culture of assessment" fuels academic dishonesty [3quarksdaily.com] ' We hear the phrase "academic dishonesty" and we immediately whistle for our moral high horse. But too much moralistic tongue-clicking can blind us to the ways in which we who constitute the system contribute to the very malady we lament. '
  

• Maximize In-Class Time by Moving Student Presentations Online [facultyfocus.com] '
  Student presentations [...] require a wealth of time for each student to present and get immediate feedback from peers and the instructor. Some classes are so large that in-class presentations may not be feasible at all. Or,[...] you would have to use several of your 50-minute class sessions to allow each student a chance to present his or her work. What’s more, some students have a difficult time listening to dozens of peer presentations in one sittings and may tune out after the first few presentations. [...] The answer for me is virtual student presentations, which allow students to research scholarly literature related to course content, present their findings, and receive peer feedback; all outside of class time.'

• How tests and wrong answers help us remember what we learn [theconversation.com] 'Common sense says if you practice making errors you learn to make errors. From this has grown a long tradition in psychology aimed at promoting “errorless learning”. On the other hand, common sense also says we learn most from making mistakes. So which is it?

Other Business

• Follow the Footnote: Ben Schott on the Value of the Ungoogleable and What Virginia Woolf Can Teach Us About Great Design | Brain Pickings [brainpickings.org] 'Celebrating the significance of small things and the iron bolts that hold butterfly wings together.'

• Professor Pinker and Professor Strunk – Lingua Franca - The Chronicle of Higher Education 'Pinker’s book The Sense of Style is subtitled “The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.” It is just that, and will be of real value to everyone sincerely interested in being a writer. The same cannot be said of The Elements of Style, the nonthinking person’s guide to writing in the 19th century.'

• Ikea: Peppered Caca for the holidays [upenn.edu] The code behind IKEA product names.

• Post-Structuralism Explained With Hipster Beards: Part 1 [buzzfeed.com]

• New Statesman | Growing old disgracefully: a deconstruction of death Review of Atul Gawande's Being Mortal, by Henry Marsh. 'By writing a book about death and dying, and the way in which modern medicine so often only makes the experience worse, he will, he concedes, be raising for some “the spectre of a society readying itself to sacrifice its sick and aged. But,” he asks, “what if the sick and aged are already being sacrificed – victims of our refusal to accept the inexorability of our life cycle? And what if there are better approaches, right in front of our eyes, waiting to be recognised?”'

• A Real Life Milgram Experiment [marginalrevolution.com] '
  discusses a real world Milgram “experiment” in which people obeyed an authority figure to an astounding degree, even when the authority figure was just on the telephone.
  

• For a Better Brain, Learn Another Language - The Atlantic

No Items to Share this week.

Sorry—been busy!

On Howard Becker's latest...

...and possibly his last. We hope not, but he is 86.

Times Higher Education review here, including:

This book is a delight. Howard Becker is that rarity: an academic writer who brings you into his presence, makes you comfortable, then entertains and educates you from first to last page. He is a writer who effortlessly communicates his enthusiasm and general glee with a career going back to the sociology department of the University of Chicago in the early 1950s, and still enthrals himself and his devotees as he approaches his tenth decade.

He's been a hero of mine—and every other aspirant sociologist of the era—ever since the '70s, when he wrote his seminal Outsiders; studies in the sociology of deviance, including his famous paper generally known as "How to smoke pot" (not as deviant as it sounds—it's a discussion of the social elements contributing to how the drug experience is interpreted).

Mnay times I've used his email conversation with Shirah Hecht about teaching a research methods course as an exemplar of informal mentoring,

And his classic 1972 article on "A School is a Lousy Place to Learn Anything In" which antedates all the situated learning (Lave and Wenger) stuff but makes the arguments so much more clearly. [It's not easy to access online for copyright reasons, but many thanks to David Stone, who wrote in 2011; "I was happy to discover that my institutional subscription gave me access to the original Becker article. Just in case others should be as lucky, here is the DOI link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/000276427201600109 "] The formal reference is (1972) “A school is a lousy place to learn anything in” American Behavioral Scientist, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 85-105,  reprinted in R J Burgess (ed.) (1998) Howard Becker on Education Buckingham; Open University Press.

 

(I've reserved the only copy at Heffers in Cambridge, so there!)

Items to Share: 19 October 2014

Education Focus

• The Missing Link | Webs of Substance 'I think that we can all agree that Bloom’s taxonomy is a terrible way of viewing learning. This is not because it really isn’t based on anything. Although it really isn’t; it’s just something that a committee of worthy people made-up. It is not even because Bloom’s tries to generalise the movement from simple to complex across widely different subjects. Clearly, different subjects proceed from simple to complex in their own sweet ways and Bloom’s just encourages whole-staff training meetings where people talk in vague and general terms. However, this is still not the main problem. Talking in vague and general terms might be a waste of time but it is not actively harmful.'

• Why Doctors Need Stories - NYTimes.com 'In the past 20 years, clinical vignettes have lost their standing. For a variety of reasons, including a heightened awareness of medical error and a focus on cost cutting, we have entered an era in which a narrow, demanding version of evidence-based medicine prevails. As a writer who likes to tell stories, I’ve been made painfully aware of the shift. The inclusion of a single anecdote in a research overview can lead to a reprimand, for reliance on storytelling.' So also for education?

• Brain baloney has no place in the classroom | Pete Etchells | Science | theguardian.com 'Unfortunately, because they’ve been around for so long, neuromyths have taken hold in a broad range of aspects of everyday life. Nowhere is this more problematic than in the education system. A new article in Nature Reviews Neuroscience this week has cast a critical eye on the issue, and reveals some worrying statistics about the extent to which brain baloney have infiltrated the beliefs of teachers around the world.'

• Educating the East End, episode seven: Exam fever - Tom Bennett - TES Community  A great piece—I've also added my penn'orth, here. 

• Instructional Design Based on Cognitive Theory | Faculty Focus '“Stop thinking as a subject matter expert and start thinking as a designer. Try to remember what it was like not to be an expert. I think that, at a certain point, if you know something so well, you almost assume everyone else does. [the 'curse of knowledge' (my insertion)] Sometimes you forget the struggles you had learning a particular concept. Oftentimes if you can step back from the subject matter expert role and think as an outside objective observer, a lot of these things take care of themselves,”

• Some Surprising Findings About Learning in the Classroom | Mempowered 'The quality of the teacher doesn't affect how much students learn (that doesn't mean it doesn't affect other factors — e.g., interest and motivation). Low ability students learn just as much as high ability students when exposed to the same experiences. More able students learn more because they seek out other learning opportunities. Tests, more than measuring a student’s learning, reflect the student’s motivation.'

• Happy Birthday, Oscar Wilde: A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated | Brain Pickings

• A Don’s Life: A Latin learning parable 'There is a bigger issue here about the whole basis of learning -- and the need to break the increasingly common assumption that you are only "learning" when you are "being taught", when actually you are learning best when your head hurts in the library (that's a fact that sits uneasily next to the idea that you should divide your £9k a year by the number of contact hours you are receiving....).

• The surplus model of school improvement | David Didau: The Learning Spy 'Great school needs great systems. And a system which fails to value the contribution of every member of its workforce is a long way from great. The deficit model recognises that some teachers ‘get it’. They comply, they’re able to juggle impossible demands and somehow perform the Monkey Dance on cue. They are rewarded. And everyone one else is under threat. But not because they’re not working hard, but because they’re not meeting the expectations of ‘experts’.

• The Surprising Problem of Too Much Talent - Scientific American  'For both basketball and soccer, [researchers] found that top talent did in fact predict team success, but only up to a point. Furthermore, there was not simply a point of diminishing returns with respect to top talent, there was in fact a cost. Basketball and soccer teams with the greatest proportion of elite athletes performed worse than those with more moderate proportions of top level players.

• Why is Singapore's school system so successful, and is it a model for the West? [theconversation.com] 'What then do Singaporean teachers do in classrooms that is so special, bearing in mind that there are substantial differences in classroom practices between – as well as within – the top-performing countries? What are the particular strengths of Singapore’s instructional regime that helps it perform so well? What are its limits and constraints?' See also here.