Tales of the Undead…Learning Theories: The Learning Pyramid | ACRLog

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This is one of many theories I was given to study when I did my PhD. What we didn’t do was pick them apart or question whether or not they were reasonable. That would have made learning about them WAY more fun AND it might even have prompted us to come up with some new theories. Instead, I was routinely DIScouraged from developing my own theories – who did I think I was anyway! There are plenty of theories already out there by far weightier people than me. I was just a PhD candidate.

Here’s what I always think of when I hear “Cone of Learning”: csilence1

Tales of the Undead…Learning Theories: The Learning Pyramid | ACRLog.

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Here Are 22 Startups That Are Massively Useful For Students | College Info Geek

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Looks like an interesting list:

Here Are 22 Startups That Are Massively Useful For Students | College Info Geek.

Feel free to comment – have you tried any of these? What do you like? What do you not like?

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Where I’ve Been Online (Mar 22, 2014)

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  • A Quick Look at Google’s New Add-Ons for Documents – Ed Techsploration

    “A Quick Look at Google’s New Add-Ons for Documents
    3/12/2014
    There is a lot of buzz about Google’s recent unveiling of its Add-Ons for Documents and Sheets. While Google’s online applications have a lot going for them, especially in regards to sharing and collaborative writing, people often miss many of the features of the vastly more powerful Microsoft Word and Excel programs. This is now partly balanced with Google’s new add-ons – third party, use-specific apps that can be selected and installed from a “Google Play” like collection and then triggered directly within a Google Doc or Spreadsheet.

    They are easy to install. The new “Add-ons” menu item appears automatically now. Click on it, then on “Get add-ons” to open a window with multiple apps to choose from. Simply follow the directions for the particular add-on (they vary slightly) and the new add-on will then appear in the drop-down menu.”

    tags:schools google add-ons googledocs

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Alberta Education shrugs off concerns from teachers and parents that there’s something very wrong with Alberta’s new math curriculum | Edmonton Journal

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Alberta Education shrugs off concerns from teachers and parents that there’s something very wrong with Alberta’s new math curriculum | Edmonton Journal.

So, big surprise!! Too much emphasis on “discovery” learning results in kids who don’t understand the fundamentals.

Clearly, they are consulting with the WRONG people on education. Hint: consulting w/ oil and tech companies is NOT the answer either.

A big part of the problem comes from the Education faculties who teach the teachers, and often have an undeserved share of the voice in education reform. Too many people in Education only know about teaching education. Too few have experience actually teaching some THING – especially something that people tend to struggle with.

Not surprisingly, folks at the U of Calgary are all over this, justifying what they’re doing and using all kinds of flowery phrases to say, well, nothing really.

Phrases like “important work is moving forward”, “learn in active and engaged ways”, and this:

The goal of education is to enable all students to achieve four transformative outcomes: to be engaged thinkers and ethical citizens with an entrepreneurial spirit; to strive for engagement and excellence in their own learning; to employ literacy and numeracy to construct and communicate meaning; and to discover, develop and apply competencies across subjects and discipline areas for learning, work and life.

This is simply a mission statement. Most mission statements are bullshit, and this one’s no exception. It may sound all Rainbows and Unicorns, but there’s really no way to implement any of this, and there’s absolutely no way to determine whether or not you’ve achieved any of it. It is so subjective that anything can be made to fit.

I don’t think people should qualify as advisors of curricula for a subject until they’ve actually been teaching THAT subject for many, MANY years.

I had ALL kinds of ideas about how CS *should* be taught when I first started teaching, but it wasn’t until I’d actually been teaching for over a decade that I started to have any real idea about what worked, and what didn’t, OR what was easy and what was hard. Some of my initial ideas were in fact good ones, but some were not.

Oh, and just because you have experience does not automatically mean you will have wisdom.

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What Keeps Students Motivated to Learn? | MindShift

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What Keeps Students Motivated to Learn? | MindShift.

A good summary:

  • Integrated Projects
  • Interest-Based and Relevant
  • Authentic Choice
  • Make It Hands-On
  • Knowing Teachers Care
  • High Expectations and Strong Support from Teachers
  • Encourage Them to Learn From Mistakes
  •  Opportunities for Feedback

 

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Call for Papers | 4th Irish Symposium on Game-Based-Learning (iGBL)

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Call for Papers | IGBL.

The Cork Institute of Technology, in partnership with SEGAN network, will host the 4th Irish Symposium on Game-Based-Learning (iGBL) as a one-day event hosted in the Cork Institute of Technology on Friday 6th June 2014.

The iGBL conference is an international conference designed to share insight and experience with regard to the educational potential of games. The conference has always aimed to be as inclusive as possible, bringing together teachers, students, industry and researchers who share a common interest in using games for learning. The conference offers opportunities to present, discuss and network with other like-minded practitioners, as well as providing a great opportunity for those new to the area to learn more about the different development approaches and educational applications of games.

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Learning Theories Gone Wild – Urban Myths that Hurt Your Learning Designs

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This is an excellent summary of a few of the more popular myths. Check it out.

Learning Theories Gone Wild – Urban Myths that Hurt Your Learning Designs. by

  1. “People have different learning styles. We need to design learning to address a variety of them.”
  2. People only remember 10% of what they read; they will remember 90% of what they see, hear, and do.”
  3. We will forget 90% of what we learn within 3-6 days’ time without reinforcement.
  4. “Learners know best. For maximum engagement, let learners be self-directed. If we “force” learners down a linear path, we will de-motivate them.”
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Where I’ve Been Online (Mar. 8 2014)

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  • Inventor to Schools: ‘Let Kids Fail!’ | MindShift

    “We’ve heard the importance of failure and experimentation in learning. In this excellent interview on Science Friday, inventor James Dyson speaks about his direct experience with failures and schools’ need to accommodate it.

    “My life and my day are full of failures,” he says. “Failures are interesting.””

    tags:inventor schools kids Dyson

  • The Videogame That Finally Made Me Feel Like a Human Being | Game|Life | Wired.com

    ““No one wants to be a woman,” cartoonist and noted misogynist Dave Sim once said in one of his many screeds on the inferiority of the female gender. Judging by most video games, you’d think he was right.

    Although women make up nearly half of all gamers, only a fraction of videogame characters are female, and fewer still are playable. Maybe that’s why I felt so shocked when I played Left Behind, the newest chapter of the award-winning survival game The Last of Us.

    “I don’t understand how this is even happening,” I said over and over again.

    I was playing as Ellie, a 14-year-old girl who must venture out alone into a post-apocalyptic world of monsters and murderers armed with nothing but a pocket knife, desperately trying to find medicine for her badly injured friend Joel. But if battling mercenaries and zombies as a teenage girl weren’t interesting enough, the half of the game with no combat at all is more compelling. After flashing back in time, you spend your time walking around a mall with your best friend Riley, talking, playing games and trying to repair your friendship after a falling out.”

    tags:videogame wired life game

  • Nautilus Three Sentence Science: Eyewire: A Game to Map the Brain

    “Eyewire: A Game to Map the Brain
    Sebastian Seung’s neuroscience lab at MIT has created a game where players score points by correctly coloring in the connection pathways between retinal neurons in 3D cube simulations of tiny chunks of the brain. So far, players have colored in more than 2 million of the 3D cubes, allowing the lab to map the connections in 90 brain cells. The researchers hope that by mapping the connections in retinal cells, they may uncover the connections essential to motion perception and other visual perception. Eyewire”

    tags:nautilus sentence science game brain

  • Manjari Sharma Photography | Darshan

    “Darshan is an ongoing series consisting of photographically recreated, classical images of Hindu Gods and Goddesses that are pivotal to mythological stories in Hinduism. Most commonly used in the context of Hindu worship, Darshan is a sanskrit word that means “apparition” or a “glimpse.”. Lead by the experiential nature of a Darshan, this series explores the delicate relationship between photography and representation.

    Having left a ritual-driven community in India, my move to the U.S. precipitated an enormous cultural shift. It was this cultural paralysis that motivated me to use my one medium of worship–the camera–to study, construct and deconstruct the mythologies of my land. The goal was to turn multidimensional memories of sculptures and ornamental paintings of Hindu Gods, into two-dimensional photographs. For centuries, the way that we have experienced darshans (metaphysical connection established upon sight) is via laying gaze upon a molded figure, a carved statue or an illustration that represents a likeness to avatars described in Hindu scripture. This series of images invites the viewer to consider a photograph as means of spiritual engagement.

    To make the imagery for the series, exhaustive research on each character lead to the assemblage of a diorama, by a team of approximately thirty-five Indian craftsmen who created props, sets, prosthetics, make-up, costumes, and jewelry to exacting specifications. Printed on a massive scale, these photographs are presented in an elaborate installation that resembles the experience of a Hindu temple… complete with incense, lamps, and invocation.

    By bridging the gap between the significant ceremonies of my parents lives and my own mythology, this series has become my reason to immerse, question and push the boundaries of my faith, not only beyond my imagination, but beyond the very frame that surrounds the photograph.”

    tags:websites photography art

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