Items to Share: 26 July 2015

Education Focus

• Memory is more than Ebbinghaus | Donald H Taylor

• Building a Better Discussion - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education '[W}hat I found was something new, illuminating, and provocative: a research-based approach to understanding the classroom as a social space, and an awareness of how the norms of that social space can help or inhibit classroom discussion. Howard’s book should be essential reading for any faculty member who wants to hear students speak up in the classroom, real or virtual.'

• What Fitness Bands Can Teach Us about Classroom Assessment [facultyfocus.com] 'Although fitness bands are cool tech tools, their “magic” is rooted in the continuous feedback they provide on one’s progress toward fitness goals determined by age, height/weight, and activity level. [ ...] Watching her response and seeing her success have caused me to revisit what we know about the power of formative assessment as a learning tool.'

• ‘Growth mindset’ – Panacea or double-edge weapon? | The Language Gym 'The principles embedded in Carol Dweck’s Growth mindset theory have played a great role in my life, especially in recent years. They are inspiring, motivating and reassuringly universal. However, they are nothing new. [...] In the realm of social learning theory, Bandura’s (1994) produced very similar findings and his self-efficacy theory overlaps with Dweck’s work in many ways. [...] Finally, at the risk of trivializing the present discussion, Rocky Balboa’s famous ‘motivational’ speech to his son, in Sylvester Stallone’s movie, could be seen as a forerunner of many of Dweck’s principles… [ ] So why all the fuss now? Why is ‘Growth mindset’ all the rage in the business and education world at this moment in our history? Why do, these days, so many diagrams displaying Carol Dweck’s commandments pop up in so many Tweets and Facebook posts day in day out?'

• Why Plagiarism Doesn’t Bother Me At All: A Research-Based Overview of Plagiarism as Educational Opportunity | Teaching & Learning in Higher Ed. 'But once we begin to view plagiarism not as an atrocity, an evil misdeed, a crime, but as a mistake, an error in judgment, a lapse, a misstep, a miscalculation, then, knowing how important trial-and-error and revision are at all levels of learning, we begin to recognize that plagiarism can be an opportunity for learning.'

Other Business

• Furlongs Per Fortnight: Interesting Thing of the Day 'something moving at the speed of one furlong per fortnight (f/f) would be moving very slowly indeed. Interestingly enough, though, 1 f/f is almost exactly equal to 1 centimeter per minute; therefore, furlongs per fortnight would be a good unit of measurement for a snail’s pace, which ranges from a bit less than 1 f/f to about 30.5 f/f.'

• I’ll Give it to Mary With Love – and other songs banned by the BBC | The Dabbler Nige recalls some vintage songs banned by the BBC – including some, like a ditty by Cliff Edwards – with good reason…

• Web Design - The First 100 Years 'Brilliant funny provocative talk about technology and design. The first third argues that civil aviation design flatlined after the Boeing 747 because the 747 was good enough for getting round the world fast. The second third argues that the Internet has reached the same stage of development: It’s done. The third third takes issue with software and AI visionaries who claim that the digital revolution is only just beginning (6,600 words)' Thanks to The Browser

• Does Mindfulness Mean Anything? : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR 'We are in the middle of a mindfulness revolution. According to Time, The Huffington Post and a host of other media outlets, mindfulness and meditation are having their moment in the spotlight. From hospitals to corporate wellness programs, mindfulness is — supposedly — a new path to relieving stress, lifting depression and increasing happiness. But, depending on your perspective, the advent of mindfulness and meditation in America is either a milestone in the evolution of the culture — or a mighty avalanche of hype.'

• We Are Ruled by Professors [Victor David Hanson, Sept 8 2010] 'Since we seem now to be ruled during this administration by former professors, here is a rant about what I have learned of the university...'

• Daniel Kahneman: ‘What would I eliminate if I had a magic wand? Overconfidence’ | Books | The Guardian The psychologist and bestselling author of Thinking, Fast and Slow reveals his new research and talks about prejudice, fleeing the Nazis, and how to hold an effective meeting.

• Video: How to cook an egg perfectly in just 3 seconds - Boing Boing But it does remind me of a camping trip in Scotland in 1960... with my brother and his room-mate from university (later Speaker of the Norwegian parliament). We didn't have a primus stove, so we borrowed Dad's blowlamp instead, which proved capable of charring the bottom of a fried egg to a cinder and leaving the top totally raw, in about the same length of time.

Items to Share; 19 July 2015

Education Focus

• You can keep your magic beans, or why I got over SOLO | MrHistoire 'What is troubling [...] is that zeal with which I and many others approached SOLO as some kind of structrual saviour, gloriously guiding us up just five short steps before opening the six-sided gates of success. What does this say about us? What does it say about a profession which is so keen to find an easier way? Everything we do isn’t wrong and I, of course, do not object to helping students follow a path. But that path is not generic and there isn’t a shortcut to be found. You can keep your magic beans, Jack – I’ll stick to my subject.'

• Lesson Study 101 | barrydunn 'Lesson Study is a professional learning cycle where 2 or more teachers identify a challenge to learning, research possible solutions, plan a lesson together using this knowledge, observe the lesson and reflect upon their findings. This cycle is then repeated until all members of the group have delivered a collaboratively planned lesson and their finding are often delivered to colleagues or others to share their learning.'

• Cooperative Learning Structures and Deep Learning [facultyfocus.com] 'The results of the research support a conclusion at odds with much of the writing about cooperative learning. “Changing the instructional methods is in itself not enough to discourage a surface approach and promote a deep approach to learning.” (p. 183) Students won’t engage in deep discussions with peers unless they see the value of those exchanges in terms of their own achievement. It boils down to this simple fact: many students don’t believe they can learn content from and with their peers. Much evidence verifies that they can, but they first need to be convinced. '

• Will at Work Learning: New Scientific Review of Learning Styles '[A] new research review by Daniel Willingham, debunker extraordinaire, and colleagues.'

• Parlez-vous professeur? What teachers really mean - Tom Bennett  - TES Community 'The gap between what we say and what we mean is often the loneliest, longest space. Language, properly used, should shatter Jericho with its precision and economy.'

• Chimp implants, Amazonian pungency and sub-human scholars – exam howlers return | Times Higher Education

• Why do we demand evidence for our research, but teach on instinct? | the academic teacher 'One thing I want is to get this aspect of professional practice included in my job description – at the moment despite being on a full-time teaching contract I have no obligation to embed evidence based practice into my teaching! However, even if I don’t manage this I will still continue with it – I would never want to go back to a point where I wasn’t fully assessing how my learners and my teaching interact as I have already learned so much from it. I now firmly believe science educators have a responsibility to embed respect for evidence in their teaching just as much as they do in their research, and should be supported by their institutions to do so.'

• Let's not abandon the humble lecture quite yet [The Conversation] 'Before we all abandon the lecture, let us fully examine the potential that it has to make learning a social event and a strength, a place where we can all learn together. [ ] “A thrilling, action-packed, emotionally-enriching blockbuster lecture! Coming Soon to a lecture theatre near you!”

• What’s worse than a Ref for teaching? An Ofsted for universities | Higher Education Network | The Guardian 'The more we measure in education, the more invisible the learners become. We see our measures are inadequate so we measure more stuff. In schools things are done and policies are made on the grounds it will be “good for Ofsted”, and not because it is good for the children who attend the school. [ ] In universities, we’ll change things because “it’s good for the Tef”. We’ll fail to make improvements as “it’s not in the Tef”. But the main victims of the Tef will be the students. And with the lure of the right to charge more fees, what could possibl[y] go wrong?'

• What are the Best and Worst Ways to Prepare for an Exam? - Scientific American Daniel Willingham's answer

• We’re not mentally ill – we’re teenagers | Education | Mental health | Parents and kids | spiked 'I do think [the school] has helped to create an environment in which young girls, in particular, are encouraged to think of themselves as having emotional and mental problems. Often it feels like, after having their pretty normal teenage worries and concerns labelled as serious anxieties, my friends eventually come to think of themselves as being emotionally broken. [ ] This is not my friends’ fault. Nor is it the fault of their parents and the environment they have at home. The professionals in our schools are to blame – they are claiming to be solving problems, when really they are creating them.

• Can neuroscience solve the mystery of how students learn? | Teacher Network | The Guardian  Educational neuroscience burst onto the scene with the hope of explaining how we learn. But the jury is still out on whether it’s useful for classroom practice

Other Business

• Apparently There Are 4 Kinds of Introversion -- Science of Us 'Introversion, thanks largely to Susan Cain's 2012 best seller Quiet, is having something of a cultural moment. Once a mostly misunderstood personality trait — and often considered a behavioral defect when it was considered at all — it's now the subject of countless other books and online listicles [...]. And as more regular, non-scientist types started to talk about introversion, psychologist Jonathan Cheek began to notice something: The way many introverts defined the trait was different from the way he and most of his academic colleagues did.' 

On a time-saver

My first computer was a "Joyce", in 1985. Joyce was apparently the name of Alan Sugar's secretary at the time, and became the colloquial label for the Amstrad PCW 8256. (256k of memory, one floppy drive —taking extortionately priced 3" discs which never caught on—with a formatted capacity of just under 180k, a green-screen monitor and an included dedicated 9-pin dot matrix printer...) It revolutionised my work, and made possible the production of a book and my doctoral thesis.

It came with a dedicated word-processing package called LocoScript. Among its many features (including an add-on mail-merge facility which was a simple programming language in its own right) were its ability to store phrases, which were each associated with a letter, and were relatively permanent features such as names and addresses and simple commands so that paragraphs could be numbered or laid out consistently; and blocks which were clipboards associated with numerals. So you had a capacity for 26 phrases and 10 blocks.

When I had to move on to a PC I was dismayed to lose all that functionality—just one clipboard for everything! I've played around with many substitutes over the years, including work-arounds incorporated in office suites, but so far encountered none with the simple elegance of phrases and blocks.

I'm happy to say it is back (although I'm a bit behind the curve—it's apparently been back for more than a decade) now in the form of applications called Breevy (highly intuitive—free 30-day trial, £24.20 to buy)  and PhraseExpress for Windows (free for personal use, but too bloated and cluttered with features I'll never use, for me) and another (compatible) package called TextExpander for Mac. There is/was another, simpler, variant called Texter for Windows, but although I have downloaded the installer, it won't play with Windows 8.1. Reviews here.

PhraseExpress also has a cut-down Android app. which I haven't looked at.

So why do I think this is worth drawing your attention to? Marking and feedback. We are continually being called upon to raise our game in this area (although the weak link is often getting students to pay attention...) We try to personalise comments, of course, but it is in the nature of the beast that many of the phrases we use are standard and repetitive; "Referencing!", "Evidence?", "Well-made point." ...And even when we can scrawl on scripts, our remarks are often less than helpful because of the sheer time they take to write—they become so cryptic that we think that they convey something useful, but to students unversed in our restricted code they may be meaningless.

Move to electronic submission and commenting via an office suite, and the process is even more cumbersome. Of course you can use codes to point students to standard points—but my experience  has been that they just find it too much hassle. Yes, that is indeed their loss...

Years ago, I attempted to grapple with this issue with a semi-automated marking shell, using a spreadsheet and a mailmerge to generate personalised but also standardised feedback. it was pretty clunky then, and it is only still on the site because I put so many hours into devising it—and who knows, someone may resurrect it. (I once did something similar with a simulation scenario in social care based on a spreadsheet. I realised I couldn't take it any further and wound it up by sending it to a newsletter/journal, [“Computer-aided Learning and Experiential Learning” New Technology in Human Services vol 9 No 1, 1996] Some years later it was picked up by some diligent scholar and led to several years of fascinating consultancy and learning at the Open University.

But if your feedback can be expanded to a full paragraph from typing only a half-a-dozen characters? You can't make your students read and act on it. but you can make it more likely, and save effort at the same time. I think it's called win-win.

Items to Share: 12 July 2015

Education Focus

• 'Banning the bullet’ in student presentations | The Higher Education Academy Official Site 'Students can often take the easy way when generating a presentation, creating lists of bullet points from a source text, without thinking about the effectiveness (or not) of such approaches or how close they may be to plagiarism of the source. As educators who are seeking to develop students transferable skills we need to facilitate the acquisition of more imaginative approaches to oral presentations by students.' “Reconstructing” the source information to create something more visual may itself facilitate learning.'

• Are Oxbridge tutorials still the best way to teach students how to think? [theconversation.com]

• My vote for the top 10 tools in learning 2015 [teachinginhighered.com] Digital, of course.

• Sucking the life out of the academy | Education | spiked 'The new universities minister wants more meddling and micromanagement.'

• Lesson Study – the best type of CPD you can do in school! | mhorley 'Last week, I joined two colleagues to carry out a Lesson Study looking at Decimal Place Value with Year 7. I[...] this is just a quick reflection on the process.

• Seven rules the Teaching Excellence Framework should follow | Higher Education Network | The Guardian 'A new way to measure teaching quality in universities could soon be on the cards. Here’s how to get it off to a good start'

Other Business

• The powers that be are taking the pop out of Bubble Wrap because they hate us [mashable.com]

• The American Scholar: It Takes a Laboratory - Sam Kean On the growth of large teams of experimenters in science.

• Small talk dies in agonies | joe moran's words 'I do not regard small talk as a vice. I think of it as a vital life skill, but in my case acquiring it seems to be the work of a lifetime.'

Items to Share: 5 July 2015

Education Focus

• Educationists have forgotten the power of knowledge | Education | spiked 'What follows from a vision of providing each and every pupil with access to powerful knowledge is that those of us based in faculties of education have to rethink our roles as specialist educational intellectuals or theorists. We should stop telling teachers what to do, and start supporting them instead. We should be helping them to think through what they do, to think the unthinkable and the not-yet thought. Lastly, we have to convert our education faculties into spaces for thinking and debate. Evidence of what works is important, of course. But more vital still is a willingness to question educational practices, and to learn from discussions and debates. It will be a long road, but it is the only worthwhile one. '

• Will the University of Adelaide's lecture phase-out be a flop? [theconversation.com] 'The University of Adelaide is planning to completely phase out lectures. In their place will be online materials and small group face-to-face sessions. According to University of Adelaide Vice-Chancellor Warren Bebbington, the lecture is dead – and it is not coming back. Lectures have been around for hundreds of years. They have survived other technological revolutions, including the printing press and the motion picture. Adelaide will be the first university in Australia to break with tradition and eliminate them entirely. But is this change good for learning?

• FE Culture: Professional Status 'More than four million 14 to 19‑year‑olds and adults are educated and trained through the FE system each year. Courses and options are numerous and encompass a fully comprehensive range of students. FE does not discriminate – why? It has a range of highly skilled, professionally trained and continually developing lecturing staff. [ ] The government proposes to halt this, to remove the requirement for lecturers in FE to be professionally qualified, through its draft deregulation bill. The key driver for this is on the first page: “Publication of the draft Bill is the latest step in the Government’s ongoing drive to remove unnecessary bureaucracy that costs British businesses millions”.'

• Speaking for a reason: the Last Proper Class of 2014-2015 | Sam Shepherd 'Conversation, broadly, falls into two categories: transactional, where the participants are trying to achieve something, and interactional, where the people involved are engaging in social bonding, what I think of as a human parallel to chimpanzees picking fleas out of each other’s fur. Interactional conversation is about forming and developing social and personal interactions, rather than trying to make something happen. The second one is much harder, I think, to achieve in a second language: the social and interpersonal nuances are much harder to follow. This is why “talk to your partner about…” so often bombs: students aren’t sure what the point of the conversation is, aren’t clear about what the conversation is trying to achieve.' 

Other Business

• In Defense of Ethnography - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education (David Perlmutter) 'Controversy over the sociologist Alice Goffman’s On the Run, a study of young people on the margins of society, has put ethnography on trial. Lost in the accusations and rebuttals, I fear, is the reality that ethnography is one tool among many but too valuable to dismiss or ignore. Like other methodologies, it has strengths and weaknesses, but it complements other approaches in crucial ways.'

Items to Share: 28 June 2015

Education Focus

• Can inclusive education do more harm than good? [theconversation.com] 'Recently, a teacher expressed his misgivings about the “inclusion at all costs” ideology of modern education. Despite being well supported by his school and hugely in favour of inclusive practice, he outlined his difficulties in managing a young fellow with Down Syndrome whose behaviour in the classroom was extremely difficult, and increasingly dangerous. This resulted in children and staff leaving the school, citing concerns about their safety and psychological health. [ ] The article attracted derision from many, but also a sigh of relief from other teachers and a surprising number of parents of children with a disability.

• More Physics Clangers | e=mc2andallthat By the examiners. '[T]hose who call for rigour should display rigour.'

• The crisis in non-fiction publishing | Books | The Guardian  'When it comes to high-calibre non-fiction, risk-averse trade publishing houses are producing too many copycat ‘smart thinking’ books that promise more than they deliver. But praise should be given to the university presses.'

• Which Reasoning Style Best Describes The Way You Think? [io9.com] Duck! Bullsh*t incoming!

• BPS Research Digest: Is dyslexia associated with exceptional visual-spatial abilities?

• It's not PowerPoint's fault, you're just using it wrong [theconversation.com] Up to a point...

• Sir Ken Robinson versus Nick Gibb: The Battle of the Subjects | @katie_s_ashfor

• Why universities should get rid of PowerPoint and why they won't [theconversation.com] 'An article [...] recently argued universities should ban PowerPoint because it makes students stupid and professors boring. I agree entirely. However, most universities will ignore this good advice because rather than measuring success by how much their students learn, universities measure success with student satisfaction surveys, among other things. [...] Overreliance on slides has contributed to the absurd belief that expecting and requiring students to read books, attend classes, take notes and do homework is unreasonable. [ ] Courses designed around slides therefore propagate the myth that students can become skilled and knowledgeable without working through dozens of books, hundreds of articles and thousands of problems.' 

Other Business

• The impossible world of MC Escher | Art and design | The Guardian 

• The Internet Accused Alice Goffman of Faking Details In Her Study of a Black Neighborhood. I Went to Philadelphia to Check. [3quarksdaily.com]  

• Negotiation Tactics: 31 Techniques and Strategies [nickkolenda.com] Substantial (7k words) and practical article. 

Items to Share: 9 — 21 June 2015

Education Focus

• Why the ‘false growth mindset’ explains so much | David Didau: The Learning Spy '...Dweck then dropped a bombshell. She’s identified a phenomenon she calls the ‘false growth mindset’. Because we’ve unanimously agreed that having a fixed mindset is egregious and a growth mindset makes you a better all-round human being, no one wants to fess up to being ‘fixed’. When asked, we tend to say, “Yes of course I have a growth mindset,” because the alternative is to say, “No, I’m afraid I’m a terrible person.” It seems reasonable to suggest teachers are at least as prone to this as anyone; we tend to know more about the perceived benefits of growth mindset than most other people and so there’s a huge social pressure to fall into line. But just saying you have a growth mindset does not (quelle surprise!) mean you actually have one. What you actually have is a false growth mindset. This goes some way to explaining why schools are so bad at allowing teachers to behave in a way consistent with the growth mindset....' 

• And see also: 20 psychological principles for teachers #12 Goal setting | David Didau: The Learning Spy ' [...] Trouble is, the evidence appears to be vastly overstated. King and Burton argue that goals only works in the narrowest of circumstances: “The optimally striving individual ought to endeavor to achieve and approach goals that only slightly implicate the self; that are only moderately important, fairly easy, and moderately abstract; that do not conflict with each other, and that concern the accomplishment of something other than financial gain” otherwise, research indicates that “goal investment, goal structure, and goal content may all lead to negative outcomes.”...'

• And: It’s the shape of the bell curve, stupid!  David Didau: The Learning Spy Useful thoughts on effect sizes. 

• By freeing prisoners from cycle of crime, education cuts re-offending 'Teaching inside a prison takes patience. Not because the students are difficult or dull, they are not. On the contrary, you are unlikely to meet a more highly motivated and interesting group of adult learners. It does take time, however, to have your fingerprint scanned, to pass barefoot and beltless through the metal detectors, to have your personal identification, criminal history and biometric data checked. [ ] A prison teacher also needs to be flexible. When visiting incarcerated students, be ready to roll with the unexpected. If you arrive on a family visits day, or during an emergency lockdown, or when students can’t make it to the education block, your own sense of time warps and stretches.'

• Cheating with essay mills: an extension of students asking each other for help?  [theconversation.com]

• Giving Bad Whiteboard | Sam Shepherd '[H]ere, in proper controversial style, is a list of the things that I try to remember when I am freestyling on a whiteboard. You can call them “dos and don’ts” if you like, or God forbid, good practice. But I’ll stick with “stuff I try to remember”.

• Give students diagrams before the lecture - Futurity 'Giving students illustrative diagrams that show relationships among key concepts before a lecture can boost their learning and recall, say researchers.' Big deal!

• More than sums: Hannah’s Sweets – a great time to be a maths teacher! Excellent commentary on the "notorious" GCSE question.

• Average Master's thesis lengths charted by discipline - Boing Boing (US data of course)

• What does the word ‘engagement’ mean to you? An interview with Roger Kneebone, National Teaching Fellow | The Higher Education Academy [From the HEA] 'In this post Roger Kneebone (HEA National Teaching Fellow) talks to Jenni Carr about his use of simulations in learning and teaching and the relationship between public engagement activities and learning and teaching. [ ] Roger is Professor of Surgical Education & Engagement Science at Imperial College London (r.kneebone@imperial.ac.uk).'

• The Semmelweis Reflex: Why does Education Ignore Important Research? | chronotope

Other Business

• How to design a metaphor – Michael Erard – Aeon 'Can metaphors be designed? I’m here to tell you that they can, and are. For five years I worked full-time as a metaphor designer at the FrameWorks Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC, whose clients are typically large US foundations (never political campaigns or governments). I continue to shape and test metaphors for private-sector clients and others. In both cases, these metaphors are meant to help people to understand the unfamiliar. They aren’t supposed to make someone remark: ‘That’s beautiful.’ They’re meant to make someone realise that they’ve only been looking at one side of a thing.'

• Crowdsourcing the Serengeti: how citizen scientists classified millions of photos from home  'Snapshot Serengeti’s success demonstrates the enormous potential for citizen science to help researchers tackle bigger questions than ever before. Camera traps provide a way to collect the ecological data necessary to answer bigger questions about the world around us, but citizen science is what provides a way to turn this data into new scientific knowledge, enabling research at a scope and scale otherwise impossible.'
  
  Seven Books Bill Gates Thinks You Should Read This Summer [farnamstreetblog.com] 'Bill Gates is out with his annual summer reading list and, while longer than last year’s, it’s a great place to kick off your summer reading. [ ] “Each of these books,” Gates writes, “made me think or laugh or, in some cases, do both. I hope you find something to your liking here.”'  

Items to Share: 7 June 2015

Yes, I know it's late! So?

Education Focus

• Gallery Critique | Class Teaching '[Peer assessment is] not always that useful. In fact, it can often be damaging and compound misconceptions. Gallery critique, where students spend an extended period of time reading and assessing the work of their peers, as well as giving high quality feedback, seems to be a far more purposeful alternative.'

• Desperately Seeking Sir: Empathy, Behaviour, Excuses and Reasons 'I have taught two children that were killed by other children. One was stabbed and one was shot. I have taught children who have killed other children. I have taught a number of children that have been stabbed. I have taught a number of children who have stabbed other children. I have taught one child who said he 'couldn't remember' how many people he'd stabbed. I have taught children who have been convicted of rape. I have taught children who have been abused. I have taught a child who believed a small person lived inside their head and gave them instructions. I have taught a number of children who have battled suicidal thoughts. I have taught one child who attempted suicide but did not quite succeed. I have taught children who have had to be educated in high security units. I have taught children who have had to be forcibly committed to mental health institutions. I have, by necessity, wiped the arse of a child with severe special needs when taking him on a day trip to a theme park as he had made a bit of a mess of it...'

• Fail again. Nicky Morgan on Academies | SurrealAnarchy 'So on, somehow on marches ‘Academisation’, all business values and managerialism, being brought into an education sector that is itself falling for business values and managerialism without the need to be turned into academies but we’re sick of the either so we’ll try the other… Whether it works or not… But what works is our mantra, that Blairite creed: “What counts is what works…” has now turned into “What counts is what we say works…” which it always was but…'…

• Learning Styles are NOT an Effective Guide for Learning Design - The Debunker Club 'Special Note: This Month (June 2015) the Debunker Club is targeting the Learning Styles Myth in a special debunking effort'

• I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me - Vox [US] 'Things have changed since I started teaching. The vibe is different. I wish there were a less blunt way to put this, but my students sometimes scare me — particularly the liberal ones. [ ] Not, like, in a person-by-person sense, but students in general. The student-teacher dynamic has been reenvisioned along a line that's simultaneously consumerist and hyper-protective, giving each and every student the ability to claim Grievous Harm in nearly any circumstance, after any affront, and a teacher's formal ability to respond to these claims is limited at best.'

• Closing the feedback loop | The Higher Education Academy  'Getting students to engage with feedback can be a challenging task and in this post Leah Marks [...] shares her experience of a method for encouraging students to use the feedback. To encourage students to engage, they were asked to write feedback reflections and assignment grades were witheld until this was done. Increased engagement with feedback resulted in improved writing and students found the reflective approach helpful.'

• Cognitive Load Theory and its implications for instruction | Filling the pail

• All academic metrics are flawed, but some are useful [theconversation.com] 'Why are bean counters so fixated on counting? Why are universities overrun by metrics? Are we heading for a world where we know the cost of everything and the value of nothing? [ ] Is an obsession with metrics really corrupting science?

• The Hydra | Esse Quam Videri On the surprising acceptance of spurious junk "research" in apparently respectable policy debates...

• Making a difference in education: What the evidence says | British Politics and Policy at LSE 'Research suggests that who teaches you matters much more than what school you go to. Yet a major proportion of educational spending has gone on fostering Academies and Free Schools. The Academies formed up to 2008-9 have been evaluated, and found to have positive results; but improved outcomes were mostly confined to better-achieving students, with little or no benefit to the lowest achieving. At the time of writing, there was no comparable research on Academies founded after that, though an Ofsted survey of 2012-13 found half those inspected ‘requiring improvement’ or ‘inadequate’. There has been little research on Free Schools or primary Academies, though DfE data do not show them to be providing more progress than local authority primaries.'

Other Business

• ‘Cheeky Nando’s’ – Lingua Franca - The Chronicle of Higher Education '[W]hat I’m really getting is that slang can go wonderfully deep — with intricate, subtle, and sometimes hilarious notes of class, gender, and group identity. And also that “cheeky Nando’s” won’t be coming to America any time soon.

• Offline: What is medicine's 5 sigma? [Editorial in the Lancet] 'The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. As one participant put it, “poor methods get results”. '

• Consciousness Began When the Gods Stopped Speaking: Julian Jaynes’ Famous 1970s Theory Long introduction to Jayne's maverick and intriguing "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"  

• The Spy Who Billed Me | Atlas Obscura 'It might be incongruous to think of spies having to account for expenses, like any old suit on a business trip, but in reality, people working for intelligence services do have to keep track of the money they're spending, file expense reports, and even hound their company (the Company, in this case) to reimburse them. "They're the same as the reports any businessman would submit after meeting a client," says Chris Lynch, former FBI and CIA counterintelligence officer and author of The C.I Desk. "Meals, miles, parking, small gifts, other expenses, receipts if they had them, some kind of 'certification' if they didn’t."

Items to Share; 31 May 2015

Education Focus

• A Don’s Life: Exams, and dumbing down 'Students aren't smarter, but they work harder. And we probably teach them better too. But dumbing down?? No.' But Mary Beard teaches at Cambridge...

• The Education Myth by Ricardo Hausmann - Project Syndicate 'In an era characterized by political polarization and policy paralysis, we should celebrate broad agreement on economic strategy wherever we find it. One such area of agreement is the idea that the key to inclusive growth is, as then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair put in his 2001 reelection campaign, “education, education, education.” If we broaden access to schools and improve their quality, economic growth will be both substantial and equitable. As the Italians would say: magari fosse vero. If only it were true.'

• A Small Victory in a Bigger Battle – The End of Graded Observations in FE Inspections | Perspectives on professional development 'If, [...] attaching a grade to a one-off, episodic event like a lesson observation is no longer deemed fit for purpose, this inevitably raises the question of why stop at observations? Why not extend the removal of grades to the inspection process as a whole? There is a strong case for moving towards an assessment framework that simply operates on a ‘good enough/not good enough’ basis.'

• The Trick of Teaching - HuntingEnglish   We know a great deal about the human memory, but there is still so much more to know. Much of what we learn is counterintuitive and unveils the idosyncratic of our mind and memory. One such quirk is that when students expect to teach new material that they remember it so much better.

• SEDA - Blog Post: Motivating Students is not Magic One of a series of pieces commissioned by Graham Gibbs. (See side-bar for links to others)

• Stress levels of teaching professionals in FE are increasing due to constant change | Teacher Support Network 'A degree of stress is to be expected in any professional role but this survey clearly suggests there is now a very serious cause for concern in further education. It has pinpointed some of the prime causes of stress and it’s now for colleges to respond to those challenges and work with us to start to reverse this worrying decline in wellbeing' (by Sally Hunt of UCU)

• The case against inquiry-based learning | Education in Chemistry Blog 'Writing recently in The Irish Times, William Reville, emeritus professor of biochemistry at University College Cork, stated that newer teaching methods employed in the UK and Ireland are ‘sharply inferior to the older teaching methods they supplanted’. His article highlighted a 30% difference between educational scores in China, where whole-class teaching is employed, and those locally, where child-centred methods are used.'

• Laurie Taylor on academics v administrators | Times Higher Education 'Managers and administrators who once had a mute background presence are now a noisy part of the daily life of every scholar. Their ranks continue to swell even though the UK is already one of the very few countries in the world where non-academic staff already outnumber academics [...] No wonder that my weekly [...] column is no longer stuffed with professors and readers but with directors of corporate affairs and human relations and the heads of research excellence framework strategy, overseas recruitment, research impact, fundraising, external relations and brand management. No wonder that what used to be a mildly patronising relationship between dons and their administrative servants has now become more and more like a battle for control.'

• And in similar vein: Bureaucracy: why won’t scholars break their paper chains? | Features | Times Higher Education 'We spend more and more time assessing what we do, and fewer and fewer hours doing it - just to give administrators something to do for their gold-plated salaries

• Evidence Based Educational Leadership: Do all good ideas need to be researched? - A response to David Didau An interesting rejoinder from Gary Jones to a recent post, leading to a stimulating exchange in the comments... 

Other Business

• ‘Cheeky Nando’s’ – Lingua Franca -  The Chronicle of Higher Education 'Humility is always a good thing. I got a dose of it recently, courtesy of a BuzzFeed article posted to Facebook by a friend of mine, an Anglo-American journalist. The article was called “Americans On Tumblr Are Trying To Find Out What A ‘Cheeky Nando’s’ Is And Are Struggling” and concerned a meme that had become popular in England.'

• Players with more Time | More Intelligent Life 'Slowing time is linked to a state of flow, or being in the zone. Playing cricket for Kent one July morning in 2003, I made 149 runs in about three hours. I scored faster than ever before, but felt in no hurry to get anywhere, even to a hundred. I felt the rhythm of the ball in sync with the downswing of the bat. My mind revved at the same pace as the game. There was no sense of rush (the ball arriving too soon) or impatience (wanting it sooner). There was a suspension of ambition that was rare for me. The innings didn’t feel like a stepping-stone, even though it turned out to be, but an end in itself. I felt very clearly, that high summer’s day, that my job was not to get in the way—to be the conduit rather than the agent. [ ] The match was not rushing forwards, opportunities were not slipping by, and I understood, just that one time, a line from Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”: “Though we cannot make our sun/Stand still, yet we will make him run.” '

Items to Share: 24 May 2015

Education Focus

• How should I revisit past content? | Bodil's blog The three part lesson; the 5 minute lesson plan; the 7 Es lesson structure; the countless other lesson planning proformas I’ve encountered. What do they all have in common? Despite being wildly popular, they place no emphasis on recalling and revisiting prior learning. Memory deserves far more love and attention than this. [ ] Recaps should be a nonnegotiable part of practically every lesson.

• No, Smartphones Aren't Making Children Autistic | Big Think

• What's the best, most effective way to take notes? [theconversation.com] 'If it feels like you forget new information almost as quickly as you hear it, even if you write it down, that’s because we tend to lose almost 40% of new information within the first 24 hours of first reading or hearing it. If we take notes effectively, however, we can retain and retrieve almost 100% of the information we receive.'

• The Literacy Blog: i.t.a: a great idea but a dismal failure 'Talk to anyone today who was taught to read through i.t.a. (Initial Teaching Alphabet) and they will almost invariably tell you how they’ve never been able to spell correctly since. [ ] As i.t.a. was more or less abandoned in the sixties/early seventies (though it did cling on for much longer in some places), many of today’s generation of teachers will never even have heard of it except from their parents or grandparents! So why write a blog posting about it?'

• Feedback from teachers doesn't always help pupils improve [theconversation.com] 'What looks feasible in controlled experiments or in theory may not work so well in practice. Once the researchers with their extra funding have gone away, and the intervention moves away from the enthusiastic schools volunteering to take part in the study, perhaps the “effect” of feedback on attainment drops. When rolled out across the board to all pupils and all schools, any advantage may be reduced or even lost because of the challenges, such as time pressure, that teachers face in implementing feedback strategies in the classroom. Some teachers may also exhibit sullen resentment at being told how to do something that seems so basic.'

Other Business

• Competence, Performance, and Climate – Lingua Franca - Blogs - The Chronicle of Higher Education [Geoff Pullum] 'Noam Chomsky’s distinction between competence and performance has been controversial in linguistics and psycholinguistics for 50 years. The proponents of generative grammar presuppose it and rely on it, and have tried explaining the distinction many times, often unsuccessfully. I recently came across a neat way to encapsulate it that comes not from a linguist but from a mathematical meteorologist.'

• How One Psychologist Is Tackling Human Biases in Science [nautil.us] 'Sometimes it seems surprising that science functions at all. In 2005, medical science was shaken by a paper with the provocative title “Why most published research findings are false.” Written by John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, it didn’t actually show that any particular result was wrong. Instead, it showed that the statistics of reported positive findings was not consistent with how often one should expect to find them. As Ioannidis concluded more recently, “many published research findings are false or exaggerated, and an estimated 85 percent of research resources are wasted.”'

• TYWKIWDBI ("Tai-Wiki-Widbee"): The shortest scientific paper ever published  

• Most people want to know risk of overdiagnosis, but aren't told [theconversation.com] 'An Australian survey released today has found a large majority of people report they’ve never been told by doctors about the danger of being overdiagnosed – and an equally large majority say they want to be informed. [ ] This is the first time anywhere in the world the general community has been asked about their knowledge and views on the “modern epidemic” of overdiagnosis, which happens when someone is diagnosed with a disease that won’t actually harm them. Being overdiagnosed means you’re likely to be over-treated, and potentially suffer the harms of that treatment without getting any of its benefits.' 

Items to Share: 17 May 2015

Education  Focus

• How One Psychologist Is Tackling Human Biases in Science [nautil.us] 'Sometimes it seems surprising that science functions at all. In 2005, medical science was shaken by a paper with the provocative title “Why most published research findings are false.” Written by John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, it didn’t actually show that any particular result was wrong. Instead, it showed that the statistics of reported positive findings was not consistent with how often one should expect to find them. As Ioannidis concluded more recently, “many published research findings are false or exaggerated, and an estimated 85 percent of research resources are wasted.”'

• Five Common Misconceptions about Learning | Filling the pail

• Donald Clark Plan B: Deficit model in education: a dangerous conceit? 'If only we filled our minds up with even more knowledge, even more skills, GDP will dog-leg upwards, productivity will soar and all will be well. The conceit of education is that the answer to bad schooling is always more schooling. The glass is always half empty, even when the data suggests it is close to the brim. We always seem to have deep deficits and divides; digital divide, digital skills, maths, 21st C skills, qualifications, even happiness!'

• Five ways universities have already changed in the 21st century [theconversation.com] 'Global higher education underwent a period of remarkable change in the first 15 years of the 21st century. Five key trends affecting universities around the world illustrate how, despite increased access to information, our understanding of higher education remains limited.

• University Readiness | The Traditional Teacher 'The problem isn’t spoon feeding: it’s hoop jumping. Pupils are trained to perform peculiar tricks for the benefit of examiners, while schools neglect to give them a proper grounding in the academic subjects. In fact, our pupils are not being fed enough. They are intellectually malnourished. But this is not inevitable, even within the current exam system. There are brave schools that are bucking the trend and focusing on core knowledge. They will find that their GCSE results are very good as well, because they will go far beyond the impoverished requirements of the GCSE curriculum.'

• researchED New York, part 2: Daniel Willingham persuades - Tom Bennett - Blog  'Willingham was doing something he's very good at, and many academics aren't: summarising and highlighting useful lessons that cognitive psychology can teach to teachers – all teachers, be ye progressive bringer of light or neo-trad axeman. He took pains to describe how these biases and filters affect everyone. In point one, above, he was at pains to say, "this is all of us, we all do this".'

• What’s the Point of a Professor? - NYTimes.com 'You can’t become a moral authority if you rarely challenge students in class and engage them beyond it. If we professors do not do that, the course is not an induction of eager minds into an enlarging vision. It is a requirement to fulfill. Only our assistance with assignments matters. When it comes to students, we shall have only one authority: the grades we give. We become not a fearsome mind or a moral light, a role model or inspiration. We become accreditors.'

• What is an “original contribution”? | patter Doctoral regulations invariably include a requirement that the thesis constitute an "original contribution" to knowledge. What does that mean? 'As David Lodge argues, originality is taking the reader, and I’m suggesting the thesis reader/examiner too, somewhere which is simultaneously familiar and not. Original thinking and writing defamiliarises and in doing so, recovers a newness about the topic no matter how well trodden it is. An original contribution to knowledge offers the reader a chance to re-view and re-think the event/text/phenomena in question. That’s the kind of original contribution I’m interested in.

• Do all good ideas need to be researched? | David Didau: The Learning Spy 'I was asked a very good question by Alex Wetherall. Basically – and I hope he forgives my paraphrase – he asked whether it would be worth conducting some ‘proper’ research on my good idea. I said no. It seemed as though this came as something of a surprise to the research literate audience. I’ve had a good think since and I stand by the justification I gave.'

• Ideas: Why Good Teachers Get Bad Evaluations '...an interesting piece of research on student evaluations of teachers. It judged the quality of teachers by how well their students did in later courses, compared the result to student evaluations of teaching quality, and found that the two anti-correlated. On average, good teachers get bad ratings, bad teachers get good ratings.'

Other Business

• Turning wood [kottke.org] 

• BBC - Future - Press me! The buttons that lie to you 'The tube pulls in to a busy station along the London Underground’s Central Line. It is early evening on a Thursday. A gaggle of commuters assembles inside and outside the train, waiting for the doors to open. A moment of impatience grips one man who is nearest to them. He pushes the square, green-rimmed button which says “open”. A second later, the doors satisfyingly part. The crowds mingle, jostling on and off the train, and their journeys continue. Yet whether or not the traveller knew it, his finger had no effect on the mechanism.'  

• Henry Marsh’s “Do No Harm” - The New Yorker Review of the much acclaimed memoir of a brain surgeon.

Items to Share; 27 April to 10 May 2015

Back again. Move went well, thanks. Now trying to get back on an even keel.

Education Focus

• What is an “original contribution”? | patter (In respect of the rubrics for a doctorate) 'As David Lodge argues, originality is taking the reader, and I’m suggesting the thesis reader/examiner too, somewhere which is simultaneously familiar and not. Original thinking and writing defamiliarises and in doing so, recovers a newness about the topic no matter how well trodden it is. An original contribution to knowledge offers the reader a chance to re-view and re-think the event/text/phenomena in question. That’s the kind of original contribution I’m interested in.'

• Do all good ideas need to be researched? | David Didau: The Learning Spy 'I was asked a very good question by Alex Wetherall. Basically – and I hope he forgives my paraphrase – he asked whether it would be worth conducting some ‘proper’ research on my good idea. I said no. It seemed as though this came as something of a surprise to the research literate audience. I’ve had a good think since and I stand by the justification I gave...'

• Ideas: Why Good Teachers Get Bad Evaluations '...an interesting piece of research on student evaluations of teachers. It judged the quality of teachers by how well their students did in later courses, compared the result to student evaluations of teaching quality, and found that the two anti-correlated. On average, good teachers get bad ratings, bad teachers get good ratings.'

• Conservative victory means England’s school system will look like few others in the world [theconversation.com] 'The Conservative education manifesto was long on aspiration. It promised that England would lead the world in mathematics and science; that there would be a place in a “good” primary school for every child; that every “failing” or coasting school would be turned into an academy to drive up standards; that universities would remain “world-leading”; and that further education would “improve”. But translating these – rightly aspirational – goals into policies will bring some difficult challenges...'

• How 'digital natives' are killing the 'sage on the stage' [theconversation.com] 'Make the lecture an entertaining performance piece on the area that causes the students to look into it more deeply. Recognise that students can get information from many places and embrace this by aiming for the lecture to be a highlight reel and a teaser rather than an expert at the pulpit. Yes, this means every lecture should be a special occasion, but is that really a bad thing? If it gets our students thinking, then hasn’t it done its job?'

• Ludwig Wittgenstein's Short, Strange & Brutal Stint as an Elementary School Teacher | Open Culture'Wittgenstein comes off, by many accounts, as an exemplary and almost unbelievably engaged teacher. He and his students, in Robins’ words, “designed steam engines and buildings together, and built models of them; dissected animals; examined things with a microscope Wittgenstein brought from Vienna; read literature; learned constellations lying under the night sky; and took trips to Vienna, where they stayed at a school run by his sister Hermine.” Hermine herself remembered the kids “positively climbing over each other in their eagerness” to answer their philosopher-teacher’s questions,'

• The Dvorak Keyboard Controversy: Interesting Thing of the Day 'All modern computers—Macs, PCs, and Linux machines—include the capability of switching into a Dvorak layout if that’s what you prefer (though the physical keys won’t match the characters they type unless you perform some minor surgery on your keyboard or put stickers over the existing letters). So if you want to try out Dvorak yourself, you need only consult your computer’s Help to find out how to change that setting. Chances are you’ll find that it takes a few weeks or so to retrain yourself to the point where you’re about as fast as you were using QWERTY. If you can tolerate the temporary loss in productivity, you may find the experiment useful.'

• What should written feedback look like? | David Didau: The Learning Spy  and The fetish of marking | David Didau: The Learning Spy 'I don’t really think marking is a bad thing, but I do think it comes at an appalling cost to teachers’ well-being. The fact that very many teachers seem reluctant to cast off their shackles shows the extent to which we’ve imbued marking with magical powers and superstitious awe. Teachers probably do need to mark some work, if only so they understand the process of assessment, but I don’t think the process needs to be nearly so onerous or widespread. Marking is only a proxy for what we actually want...'

• I'll be back: TEDinator 2. A review of Ken Robinson's 'Creative Schools' Part 1 - Tom Bennett - Blog' [W]hat Ken does is point out that in many educational ecosystems, things are far from perfect. Life, too is far from perfect. And he does what all great politicians, circus barkers and medicine men have done for centuries: tells us he knows how to fix it. The map to Canaan is his. But pointing out to people that they're slaves in Egypt doesn't mean you're Moses. Sometimes it can make you Pharaoh.'

• Will at Work Learning: Excellent New Book Debunking Learning and Education Myths 'There's too much crap floating around the learning and education fields; too many myths, misconceptions, and maladaptive learning designs. [ ] I'm passionate about the need for more debunking. The need is great and the danger to learning and learners is dire. [ ] Fortunately, entering the world is a great new book by three researchers, [...] Their book is titled, Urban Myths about Learning and Education, and it's jam packed with a list of 35 myths that plague our field.

• What Rote Knowledge Isn’t – A short introduction to inflexible and flexible knowledge | …to the real. 'Almost inevitably, when talking about memory and memorisation, the notion of ‘rote knowledge’ came up more than once, but I’ve tended to find that what is meant by ‘rote knowledge’ is rarely well-defined. I’ve found that people generally have a notion of what rote knowledge might be, and that it’s bad… but that’s about it.'

• The Trials and Rewards of Teaching in Prisons | Academies Community 'Teaching in prisons is tough: not just mentally but also because of the insensitive system. However when teaching the most troubled and desperate of people can also come hand in hand teachers also experience the greatest amount of pride when their students succeed. It’s a mentally challenging rollercoaster.'

 Other Business

• The centenarian psychologist [apa.org] 'As he approaches his 100th birthday, cognitive psychology pioneer Jerome S. Bruner reflects on the past, present and future of psychology.' 

• Psychology of Pricing: A Gigantic List of Strategies [nickkolenda.com]  

• What Makes a Hero: Joseph Campbell’s Seminal Monomyth Model for the Eleven Stages of the Hero’s Journey, Animated | Brain Pickings 

No Items to Share: 26 April 2015

We're moving, so I'll be off-grid for a while.

Items to Share: 19 April 2015

Education Focus

• QTLS | Sam Shepherd Is it worth bothering to claim Qualified Teacher (Learning and Skills) status?

• Two exposes of emperor's tailoring from Donald Clark Plan B: Kirkpatrick 4-levels of evaluation: Happy sheets? Surely past its sell-by date? and Myers-Briggs – a useless ponzi scheme? 'Myers-Briggs is a multi-million dollar business, with over 2 million people taking the ‘test’ every year. Yet it may well be a complete waste of time, based on discarded 70 year-old theory, with no evidence that it is of any real practical use. In fact, there is evidence that it is plainly wrong and misleading, with no real predictive value.'

• How to Teach Adults: Get a Job; Plan Your Class; Teach Your Students; Change the World - Boing Boing '[A] lot of instruction amounts to giving students the confidence to slog on when they're in the wilderness, and to impart big-picture, overarching wisdom about the subject that they can use as a pole star while they are on their long march. But there are also the "stupid writer tricks": clever gimmicks and techniques that work reliably, produce quick dividends, and which can be transmitted quickly and relatively painlessly. These are just as important as the big picture stuff and not just because of how they boost morale. Anyone can learn and apply these techniques and produce readable material, but becoming an expert requires that you transcend them through extended practice, reflection and refinement.'

• McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: An Honest College Rejection Letter.

• In praise of Teaching as a Subversive Activity | Improving Teaching 'Writing in the late 1960s, [Postman and Weingartner,] the authors of Teaching as a Subversive Activity worked from two assumptions: society’s survival is under threat and something may – perhaps – be done about it. In response, they set out to challenge the foundations of the education system and invited teachers to reimagine schools to benefit students and society.'

• Why is this reading so hard? | patter 'Getting into a new area or mode of thinking is actually a bit like getting to know a new physical location. When you arrive in a new city you don’t expect to know how to get around straight away. You don’t expect to know a new place in the way you know your own home environment. You understand that you have to make several trips before you have a sense of what is where, and how to get from one place to another without looking at a map for general directions and/or reassurance.'

• An English teacher decided to mark a UKIP election flyer that came through her letterbox | The Poke

Other Business

• The Golden Ratio: Design's Biggest Myth | Co.Design | business design 'In the world of art, architecture, and design, the golden ratio has earned a tremendous reputation. Greats like Le Corbusier and Salvador Dalí have used the number in their work. The Parthenon, the Pyramids at Giza, the paintings of Michelangelo, the Mona Lisa, even the Apple logo are all said to incorporate it. It's bullshit. The golden ratio's aesthetic bona fides are an urban legend, a myth, a design unicorn. Many designers don't use it, and if they do, they vastly discount its importance. There's also no science to really back it up. Those who believe the golden ratio is the hidden math behind beauty are falling for a 150-year-old scam.' 
  

• The ingenious design of the aluminum beverage can 
  

• Scientists accidentally film sperm whale, get adorably excited - Boing Boing

• A Certain Closeness – Lingua Franca - Blogs - The Chronicle of Higher Education 'Taking advice on usage from Word is like taking advice on investments from Bernie Madoff. The grammar-checking tool is a chaotic, unreliable, inconsistent, brain-dead piece of junkware. It can’t tell what’s grammatical and what isn’t, yet still it presumes to query every passive or split infinitive, and advise you falsely on when to use an indefinite article and hundreds of other points.'

• WHO announcement on withheld clinical trials, and my commentary in PLoS Medicine – Bad Science 'This week there was an amazing landmark announcement from the World Health Organisation: they have come out and said that everyone must share the results of their clinical trials, within 12 months of completion, including old trials (since those are the trials conducted on currently used treatments). This is great news, but it’s not enough. The WHO announcement was in PLoS Medicine, with a commentary from WHO staff explaining their reasoning (it’s very good) and a commentary from me, explaining why we need to audit missing data, and act on that audit data.'

Items to Share: 12 April 2015

Education Focus

• Rubrics and peer feedback | You're the Teacher On peer review/peer feedback by students of each others’ work.

• 8 Tips for Arguing about Education | Filling the pail 'Let’s be clear: the point in engaging in a debate about education is not to get someone to admit that they are wrong. Few people have the self-confidence to be able to do this. Minds do change as a result of such discussions but usually over the course of many. It takes time and you’re unlikely to get any credit. Instead, you should be engaging in order to test out your own ideas. Do they stand up to scrutiny? Is there something you can learn? Is there a well-known criticism of your position that you need to take into account? To do this, you need to accept the right of others to challenge you.'

• Should you be a reflective practitioner? | …to the real. Actually it's more about the distinction between process oriented, the other is objective oriented mindsets. But it's an excuse for a link to my own take on this over-hyped nostrum. And in similar vein:

• Schools and the Mindless Mindset Meritocracy | SurrealAnarchy  'Mindset attracts schools because in a kingdom of the blind the one eyed man would be king. We think: ‘ah our kids can get higher grades if they have a growth mindset; our kids can be ‘kings’ and our school lauded as ‘kingmaker’! But in a kingdom of growth mindset ‘where all schools do it’ all the iniquities and inequalities remain. If I was to practise as much as Usain Bolt I doubt I would ever be as fast as him, even with the same coaching I would not be his equal.'

• Paulo Freire: Pedagogy of the Oppressed [digitalcounterrevolution.co.uk] 'Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed remains an inspiring work. The banking model of education he set himself against is now being replaced by an online shopping model of education (learning as the active, personal acquisition of disposable stuff you can find online), but what really inspires in Freire’s pedagogy has as much to say about the latter as Freire himself had to say about the former.'

• Digital aids: students reveal ‘benefits’ of technology | News | Times Higher Education 'High-tech resources are yet to transform the nature of university learning, and often it is the ‘mundane’ use of technologies that aid study.'

• A New Kind of Learning — The Synapse — Medium 'The program, part of a new institute in Paris called “Centre de Recherche Interdisciplinaire” (or Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity), has an equally vague sounding name: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Life Sciences. At first, the entire approach seems rather unfocused and a failure waiting to happen. In my 2nd year Master (called an “M2” here, in France), there are students from varying disciplines, not only in Biology, but Mathematics, Physics, and even Design. Last year, there was a student in Philosophy! All of us learn the same things, in the same classes, though it may seem like we don’t learn anything at all, especially considering our various interests and expertise.The trick is thatwe, as students, define what we want to learn. [   ] The curriculum isn’t catered for the students by the teachers, but rather by the students for the students. Of course, there are some guidelines, some limitations, but overall, we teach ourselves what we really want to learn and what we’re really curious about.

• Should all university lectures automatically be recorded? [theconversation.com]  'Universities across the world are considering whether to start automatically recording lectures. Some students are voting for it. And the IT industry has created some seductive products to record lectures, a process also known as “lecture capture”. Some onlookers expect a hesitant response from the higher education sector, which is often portrayed as cautious about taking up educational technologies. [...] Yet lobbing new resources into complex settings deserves caution. Our universities are rich human ecosystems and, as such, they can prove fragile in the face of interventions. A new technology such as the automatic recording of lectures does not just add something good to the learning context – it re-configures it, but in uncertain ways.'

• How Assignment Design Shapes Student Learning | Faculty Focus 'every kind of assignment influences the shape of learning. So, what would you say about how you’ve constructed exam experiences in your courses? Are they shaping learning in the ways you want? I once observed an instructor who, on the first day of class, asked students, “Are you worried about what’s going to be on the final?” Heads nodded. “Well, no worries in this course. You’ll find the final attached to the syllabus.” It was a page of essay questions. “You’ll be writing responses to some of those questions on the final and we’ll be dealing with content throughout the course that you can be using in your answers.” Would that approach change the way students take notes throughout the semester? Would it enable instructors to ask a different kind of exam question? Would students prepare for the final differently?'

• Donald Clark Plan B: Sir Ken Robinson: ‘Creative’ with the truth? 'So often in education, shallow unsubstantiated TED talks replace the real work of researchers and those who take a more rigorous view of evidence. Sir Ken Robinson, is, I suspect, the prime example of this romantic theorising, Sugata Mitra the second. Darlings of the conference circuit, they make millions from talks but do untold damage when it comes to the real word and the education of our children.'

• Those were the days… | dancing princesses 'Forty years ago I signed up to study an A Level in English Literature at my local FE College. I liked reading, but I wasn’t sure about the ‘Literature’ part, and was looking forward to finding out how it was different from ordinary books. My teacher had a kindly smile and twinkly eyes, and he seemed to know I was keen although I was painfully shy and never dared to ask or answer a question in class. Instead of directing a series of Socratic questions to probe and challenge, he let me be, and he certainly didn’t make me engage in embarrassing group-work or keep switching activities to maintain a brisk pace.'

• When 140 Characters Isn't Enough: The birth of a zombie statistic [Sam Freedman] 'Last week the "i" newspaper splashed on a startling statistic: "40% of teachers leave within one year". It has since been repeated in the Guardian, Times, Mail, Observer and probably hundreds of other places. [...] The only problem is that it's entirely untrue. 9% of teachers leave in their first year [...] It's been 9 or 10% a year every year for the last 20 years. This isn't particularly interesting; it isn't news; but it is true.

Other Business

• Ballad of a Pencil Junkie | Belt Magazine | Dispatches From The Rust Belt On pencils. I assume that a “No. 1” is what we would call a “B”, and a “No. 2” an “HB”. (20-minute read.)

• Can Matthew Crawford Deliver Us From Distraction? - The Chronicle of Higher Education Substantial review of Matthew Crawford's new book The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. Note that his earlier book referred to as "Shop Class as Soul Craft" appeared in the UK as "The Case for Working with Your Hands." 

Items to Share; 5 April 2015

A fairly fallow week this week...

Education Focus

• Can you win at anything if you practise hard enough? - BBC News 'If you had enough practice, advice and expert training, could you become a success at anything? How much is achievement based on natural ability and how much hard work? For instance, could an "unco-ordinated computer geek" become a table-tennis star in one year? In an international experiment, a table-tennis coach gave an "unsporty" adult an hour's coaching every day for a year in a bid to make him one of the top table tennis players in Britain.'  Related post here.

• The Ultimate Guide to Note Taking in Class Infographic - e-Learning Infographics

• 9-Year-Old Girl Epically Destroys The Case For Standardized Testing (Video) OK, perhaps only in the US, but we may watch re-runs in the run-up to the 2040 presidential race and say, “This is where it all started..”

• State of the Nation: impact of education reforms will take decades to play out [theconversation.com] 'David Bell, former chief inspector of schools and permanent secretary at the Department for Education, looks at the legacy of the coalition’s school and university reforms.'

• Will at Work Learning: People remember 10%, 20%...Oh Really? 'People do NOT remember 10% of what they read, 20% of what they see, 30% of what they hear, etc. That information, and similar pronouncements are fraudulent. Moreover, general statements on the effectiveness of learning methods are not credible---learning results depend on too many variables to enable such precision. Unfortunately, this bogus information has been floating around our field for decades, crafted by many different authors and presented in many different configurations, including bastardizations of Dale's Cone.' My own take is here.

• Does engagement actually matter? | David Didau: The Learning Spy 'I’m not saying engagement and motivation don’t matter at all – clearly they are important in all sorts of contexts – but the idea that there is any kind of direct link to achievement appears to be dubious. If you want to engage students because you want them to be more engaged, fine. But if you believe that engagement will automatically lead to better results you may well be mistaken.'

• Make 'em laugh: the humorous path to academic success [theconversation.com] 'Maybe academics themselves need to take a serious look at what frustrates them and what (perhaps simultaneously) makes them laugh. The best jokes always contain important insights, and that is as true in academia as anywhere. Humour broadens the audience for scientific research, and can show how science is relevant to our world. It also reminds scientists and their audience how fun science can be. An academic joke could start the journey towards tenure or a Nobel Prize. Or, if not, at least one can enjoy levitating frogs.'

• Product or Process? Teachers or Learners? | aplinglink Discussion of alternative models in the context of English Language Teaching.

• Adult education needs an urgent and radical rethink [theconversation.com] 'Somewhat apologetically, business secretary Vince Cable has started a consultation for employers and further education providers to review the country’s vocational education system. Such rethinking will not be enough to save adult education. What is needed is a re-imagining of adult education, before it is too late. A narrow, though important concentration on skills and economic improvement represents a short-sighted vision, as adult education is much more than that.'

 Other Business

• (In case you hadn't noticed) An Exciting Election Beckons in the U.K. [newyorker.com] This is a perspective from across the pond.