January 2012
19 posts
Keynes, Anti-Semite? Really?
Pardon the intrusion — but I find this interesting. There’s a diary entry of Keynes being circulated around that supposedly proves Keynes was an anti-Semite. This is meant to be a brilliant rebuttal to Paul Krugman’s “Keynes was Right” column on how Keynes’s theoretical model of macroeconomics has been vindicated.
In some ways it doesn’t matter. Milton...
December 2011
22 posts
Why the I Love Charts post is the most beautiful... →
There’s so much to like in this post. It starts with nuanced exploration of feminism, terminology, and privilege, but ends as a reflection of the difficulties of staying a good person on the internet, especially when you run a site.
Dealing with trolling makes you hard and reactive. Even non-trolls delight in deliberate misunderstandings. False outrage is the norm. As the level of...
2 tags
Klout wins for this year's stupidest bar chart
Check it out here:
http://blog.infoadvisors.com/index.php/2011/12/22/stupidest-bar-chart-of-2011-congrats-klout/
I’m not sure how you trust a company who claims to have some super-secret statistical insight when they put out things like this.
1 tag
A Herd Immunity to Nonsense
Mark Pagel on the internet and our cultural evolution:
A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we’ve seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What’s happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we’re being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We’re being domesticated by them,...
1 tag
Cognitive Bias and Education as a Public Good
A strange but true exhortation from Dan Kahneman, the guy who, with Amos Tversky, basically invented the field of cognitive bias. After forty years of looking into the weird world of bias he says the only effective way to get around your own biases is to create a society of people skilled enough to correct you:
From the end of Thinking, Fast and Slow:
What can be done about biases? How can we...
1 tag
Evidence-Based and the Marginal Cost of Zero
If you can conceive of a solution to a problem that has a marginal cost of zero due to cheap replication and economies of scale, then that’s good. If you’re doing that by going into the digital space, where cost of experimentation is low, even better.
Many elements of education are best seen through the marginal cost of zero lens, and it’s that dream of essentially free...
1 tag
Semantic Mapping vs. Pictorial Cues
From A Theory-Based Meta-Analysis of Research on Instruction by RJ Marzano:
The next two techniques displayed in Table 7.2 employed the information processing function of idea representation. Techniques that provided students with metacognitive strategies for using visual memory had an effect size of 1.04, indicating a percentile gain of 35 points. Presumably, these strategies help students...
1 tag
Stanovich on Conflict and Critical Thinking
Well, actually the Hitchcock review of Stanovich:
What types of people succeed in overriding interactional intelligence in conflict situations? As one might expect, subjects with greater cognitive ability (as measured by SAT Total scores) were more likely to do so. But so were those with the dispositions characteristic of an ideal critical thinker: even after controlling for differences in...
Openness as a Privilege Multiplier and the MIT...
This is pretty huge news:
Millions of learners have enjoyed the free lecture videos and other course materials published online through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare project. Now MIT plans to release a fresh batch of open online courses—and, for the first time, to offer certificates to outside students who complete them.
The credentials are part of a new,...
1 tag
Base Rate, Revisited
Reading Dan Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, and I can tell very early in it’s going to be excellent.
The following Kahneman insight is an old saw of research on statistical intuition by now, but was revolutionary when he and Tversky came up with it in the early 70s. I thought I’d share it for those not familiar with it:
As you consider the next question, please assume that...
1 tag
Moonwalking with Einstein
Just finished Joshua Foer’s book Moonwalking with Einstein, one of the most amusing books I’ve read in a while. I’d highly recommend it to anyone, just based on the style of his writing alone, which strikes me as Jonah Lehrer as written by Sarah Vowell (of The Wordy Shipmates period, not Assassination Vacation). But that probably doesn’t really capture it either.
You know...
1 tag
Higher Education is Already a Voucher System
Saw this about the K-12 online space today in NYT:
Some teachers at K12 schools said they felt pressured to pass students who did little work. Teachers have also questioned why some students who did no class work were allowed to remain on school rosters, potentially allowing the company to continue receiving public money for them. State auditors found that the K12-run Colorado Virtual Academy...
Badges
Yep.
As Rowin points out that badges ‘draw upon widespread use of badges and achievements in gaming‘ and as somebody who has many badges and achievements in various game systems I can’t help but wonder if some of the problems that have cropped up in games might cross over into the Open Badge Initiative.
David goes on to outline some historical problems with badges. I think badges may be useful...
“The idea that you can just put stuff out there, and that it will magically be...”
– Carol Twigg on Khan Academy
Openness as a Privilege Multiplier
…was the name of the presentation Jim Groom and I originally submitted to ELI 2011. It was going to investigate the tendency of “undirected and unregulated openness to exacerbate inequality both in and out of the classroom” and suggest that this tendency “undermined the social justice claims of openness”.
Jim’s remedy was going to be corporate regulation (and...
1 tag
A Statistical Literacy Concept Inventory
Been thinking lots about concept inventories. The key to a good concept inventory is that it tests intuitions, not terminology or formulas. It’s far too easy to pre-test students on a test with unfamiliar vocabulary, spend a semester on vocabulary, then act surprised that students do better at the end of the semester when they finally understand the questions.
A concept inventory should...
Active Learning Not Associated with Student... →
I’ve been collecting these sorts research examples and making an effort to read them thoroughly, partially because I think we’ve become a bit too self-congratulatory on active learning, and partially because you learn more from these failures than yet another paper confirming active learning/constructivism/engaged pedagogy works.
This one is particularly interesting for a couple of...
Juliette Culver is a Freaking Genius
I just decided to give Evernote another try, found my old account active, and spent a couple hours going through my old bookmarks from 2009.
One was to Juliette Culver’s blog, which I’d made a note to myself was brilliant. It is, but more importantly it’s just even-keeled and unpretentious in its brilliance. It cuts through hype like a hot knife through butter.
You should go...
1 tag
the briefing room: Canadian university considers... →
thebriefingroom:
Find out why some students are opposed
…That problem could be eliminated for future students at tiny Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, which is debating switching to a block plan where students would be taught one course at a time, rather than five at once.
The block plan…
A real paper really wrote this
From the NYT:
“In addition, Senate Republican leaders would go after “millionaires and billionaires,” not by raising their taxes but by making them ineligible for unemployment compensation and food stamps and increasing their Medicare premiums.”
It’s things like this that make me sign up for yet another semester teaching statistical literacy. The fact that this sentence...
“But this is what I see as the next wave: demonize the public schools, create...”
– Diane Ravitch, quoted by Will Richardson