Pseudoteaching

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[PT] Pseudoteaching: MIT Physics | Action-Reaction.

Here’s a lovely label I’ve been wanting for years.

Pseudoteaching is something you realize you’re doing after you’ve attempted a lesson which from the outset looks like it should result in student learning, but upon further reflection, you realize that the very lesson itself was flawed and involved minimal learning.

I think it doesn’t go far enough. Pseudoteaching is also practiced (sometimes willfully) by people who either can’t teach well or who don’t care. Far too many faculty in “research institutions” fall into the latter category. Most of those never get to the ‘further reflection’ phase of the process, and so they never improve. I’m sure the not caring part is a factor.

The key idea of pseudoteaching is that it looks like good teaching. In class, students feel like they are learning, and any observer who saw a teacher in the middle of pseudoteaching would feel like he’s watching a great lesson. The only problem is, very little learning is taking place.

Here’s the kicker: Some of these pseudoteachers manage to earn teaching awards. Really, all they are doing is merely looking good and making their students feel good.

This is far easier to do than actually teaching well. Sadly, many of the students who have been cheated out of a good education this way don’t even know it.

If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; but if you really make them think they’ll hate you. ~Don Marquis US humorist (1878 – 1937)

Perhaps the same can be said of teaching.

 

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Screen Time For Kids: Is it Learning or a Brain Drain? | MindShift

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Screen Time For Kids: Is it Learning or a Brain Drain? | MindShift.

For me, it all boils down to just a few things:

1. In all things, moderation. And balance. Technology is great and kids should have access to whatever their parents can offer, but they should also get to go outside and play in the mud. Also: DON’T schedule every minute of their day. Give them time to stare out the window.

2. Talk to your kids. I mean BECOME interested, don’t just say, “How was your day?” or “What’d you do in school today?” and then go back to reading your email while the kid talks to the side of your face or the top of your head. Watch TV together (at least sometimes); look at stuff on youtube – together – and talk about it.

3. Remember Sturgeon’s Law. It holds true for just about EVERYTHING. Games. Webpages. The Internet. Movies. Music. Everything.

4. Remember that only half of the people will be above average. Even fewer will be exceptional. That includes teachers.

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The Ludologist » Gamification Backlash Roundup

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Nice summary.

The Ludologist » Gamification Backlash Roundup.

For me the most important comment is this one:

Sebastian Deterding’s Pawned. Gamification and Its Discontents:

“Games are not fun because they are games, but when they are well-designed.”

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Having Conviction in Your Thoughts

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Amid the unrelenting march into the digital age, we get this:

The Digital Generation Rediscovers the Magic of Manual Typewriters – NYTimes.com.

My father's Hermes. Bought sometime in the 1950's.

I like it. We have a whole generation of people who have probably never experienced a manual typewriter. I don’t know whether it matters or not, but it DOES reveal a little piece of how we are changing.

“It’s about permanence, not being able to hit delete,” he explained. “You have to have some conviction in your thoughts. And that’s my whole philosophy of typewriters.”

I hadn’t thought of it that way.

It wasn’t all that long ago that we had numerous Selectric typewriters in the department office where I used to teach. It was pretty cool when they came up with typewriters that could ‘erase’ (using a strip of white-out that ran along side the strip of ink).

Mostly, I think it’s a good thing to have a backspace, but now that he mentions it, it probably does affect how we write. After all, you can always delete it if you don’t like it. Perhaps, over time, it also erodes our standards. Little by little, we delete less and less, until eventually, any old crap seems to be OK to publish.

Perhaps, if we knew what we typed was going to be a pain to change, we think a little more before we hit return.

Also, there is something quite satisfying about hearing your words hitting the paper. Feels like you’ve actually done something.

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iPads for College Classrooms? Not So Fast, Some Professors Say. – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education

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There. It’s been said.

iPads for College Classrooms? Not So Fast, Some Professors Say. – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

early studies indicate that these finger-based tablets are passive devices that have limited use in higher education.

professors cannot use them to mark up material on the fly and show changes to students in response to their questions, a type of interactivity that has been a major thrust in pedagogy.

For their online final exam, 39 of the 40 students put away their iPads in favor a laptop, because of concerns that the Apple tablet might not save their material.

 

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Doing it Right on the Web – NYTimes.com

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I sometimes complain about how poor design is on the web:  like here, and here so I would also like too point out places where they get it right.

Every now and then I come across a site that makes me think, “these guys know how to use this medium.” The New York Times is one that seems to do this well on a regular basis.
Satellite Photos – Japan Before and After Tsunami – Interactive Feature – NYTimes.com.

Below are the ‘ordinary’ photos. Go to the article to see what they’ve done with them. Not a big change perhaps, but the effect is big.

Before

 

Here another example:

Forecast for Plume’s Path Is a Function of Wind and Weather – Interactive Feature – NYTimes.com.

This time they used a slider to control the animation.

Very nice.  I’d love to know where their people were trained, or, if they are not formally trained, what their background is because they really do seem to understand how to turn a newspaper into something live on the web.

Oh, and just so you know, I am purposefully avoid talking about the disaster. Nothing I could say would be enough and my heart goes out to all people affected by it.


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Killing an animal to eat it isn’t cruel. Making it live a miserable existance is.

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Why Don’t Farm Animals Get the Respect Pets Do? – NYTimes.com.

This article is well worth the read. It makes me sick to see animals living like the ones in the HSUS video. Now, understand that I do not trust the HSUS one bit – their agenda is to eliminate ALL animal ownership FOREVER. No more animals used in medicine, no more animals used as beasts of burden, not more farm animals, and NO MORE PETS. However, cruelty is cruelty and in North America (life for many animals is FAR FAR worse elsewhere in the world) I would say that the animals who are doomed to live the most miserable of lives are pigs and chickens. Think about that when you eat eggs, or bacon, or the next time you go to KFC.

Birds being let out to pasture in the morning.

The truth of the matter is, it doesn’t have to be that way, and we can STILL enjoy bacon, eggs, and chicken soup. Sure, it will probably cost more, but then again it SHOULD. We pay FAR too little for our food. The only way to bring food to the store that cheaply is to do it badly: treating animals like stuff, and pouring loads of pesticides and artificial fertilizers on our plants – and don’t even get me STARTED on GM foods.

You may think, yea, well, it’s not my problem. What can I do about it anyways? Well, the truth of the matter is that the sad and miserable lives these animals are forced to lead IS YOUR FAULT. You keep buying this crap. You demand cheap meat.

Are you willing to stop buying pork from factories? Eggs? Chicken? Ever eat veal? That’s another horror story. Do you know how they manage to get the meat to look so pale and be so tender? The calves live in the dark, have no room to move around, and are fed a liquid diet (i.e. they have diarrhea their entire, short, depressed lives). Yum, eh? I quit eating veal years ago.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I do actually eat KFC from time to time. I also eat bacon, and wieners, …. So here’s the thing, if we all ate LESS meat from animals that are cruelly raised, and MORE meat from animals that are humanely raised, things would in fact change. The market will respond. Isn’t that what they keep telling us is the magic of capitalism?

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Easy-Bake Oven Is About to Become Hard to Use – DailyFinance

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Easy-Bake Oven Is About to Become Hard to Use – DailyFinance.

AND…. home-made incubators. I have instructions for building your own incubator that relies on the fact that light bulbs give off heat.

You also can’t use the ‘new’ bulbs to heat baby birds in a brooder. I am now stockpiling 40-watt bulbs – especially the red ones – they are perfect for providing just a little bit of extra heat for baby ducks, chicks, and turkeys when they are raised in the house. (The red ones provide a more subdued light so that the babies actually sleep at night.)

Obviously, Morticia the kitty likes the heat too. (Digit’s thinking “Wanna Play?”)

I’ve also gone back to using regular Christmas light strings around the farm because the others don’t provide enough light. I prefer the 5 watt ones (and could probably get away with 3 or 4 watts per bulb). Those LED ones simply don’t provide enough light to do ANYTHING by.

Also, isn’t it time we stopped trading one environmental problem for another? I’d be happy to switch, if we could find something that worked as well, AND that didn’t also polite the environment…. AND when they find something that is not classified as toxic waste when it no longer works.

We really need to look at the WHOLE cost of something – and not just the bit that happens while WE have it in our hands. What does it cost to MAKE, USE, and GET RID OF? For example, by that measure, it is far better for the planet to continue to maintain and use an existing older car than it is to buy a brand new one, no matter HOW energy efficient it claims to be.

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