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Theron DesRosier

Debate Over P vs. NP Proof Highlights Web Collaboration - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...17proof.html

learning peerreview

shared by Theron DesRosier on 23 Sep 10 - Cached
  • The potential of Internet-based collaboration was vividly demonstrated this month when complexity theorists used blogs and wikis to pounce on a claimed proof for one of the most profound and difficult problems facing mathematicians and computer scientists.
  • “The proof required the piecing together of principles from multiple areas within mathematics. The major effort in constructing this proof was uncovering a chain of conceptual links between various fields and viewing them through a common lens.”
  • In this case, however, the significant breakthrough may not be in the science, but rather in the way science is practiced.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • What was highly significant, however, was the pace of discussion and analysis, carried out in real time on blogs and a wiki that had been quickly set up for the purpose of collectively analyzing the paper.
  • Several of the researchers said that until now such proofs had been hashed out in colloquiums that required participants to be physically present at an appointed time. Now, with the emergence of Web-connected software programs it is possible for such collaborative undertakings to harness the brainpower of the world’s best thinkers on a continuous basis.
  • collaborative tools is paving the way for a second scientific revolution in the same way the printing press created a demarcation between the age of alchemy and the age of chemistry.
  • “The difference between the alchemists and the chemists was that the printing press was used to coordinate peer review,” he said. “The printing press didn’t cause the scientific revolution, but it wouldn’t have been possible without it.”
  • “It’s not just, ‘Hey, everybody, look at this,’ ” he said, “but rather a new set of norms is emerging about what it means to do mathematics, assuming coordinated participation.”
  • Theron DesRosier on 23 Sep 10
     
    "The difference between the alchemists and the chemists was that the printing press was used to coordinate peer review," he said. "The printing press didn't cause the scientific revolution, but it wouldn't have been possible without it." "The difference between the alchemists and the chemists was that the printing press was used to coordinate peer review," he said. "The printing press didn't cause the scientific revolution, but it wouldn't have been possible without it."
Theron DesRosier

Obama proposes to raise academic standards by linking them to state benchmarks - washin... - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2010022202330.html

accreditation accountability standards

shared by Theron DesRosier on 22 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 22 Feb 10
     
    "President Obama announced Monday he will seek to raise academic standards across the country by requiring states to certify that their benchmarks for reading and mathematics put students on track for college or a career. "
  • Theron DesRosier on 22 Feb 10
     
    NCLB Revives.
Gary Brown

Wise Men Gone: Stephen Toulmin and John E. Smith - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...63649

critical thinking

shared by Gary Brown on 26 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Toulmin, born in London in 1922, earned his undergraduate degree in 1942 from King's College, Cambridge, in mathematics and physics. After participating in radar research and intelligence work during World War II in England and at Allied headquarters in Germany, he returned to Cambridge, where he studied with Ludwig Wittgenstein, the greatest influence on his thought, earning his Ph.D. in moral philosophy in 1948.
  • Toulmin moved to the United States, where he taught at Brandeis, Michigan State, and Northwestern Universities and the University of Chicago before landing in 1993 at the University of Southern California.
  • Toulmin's first, most enduring contribution to keeping philosophy sensible came in his 1958 book, The Uses of Argument (Cambridge University Press). Deceptively formalistic on its surface because it posited a general model of argument, Toulmin's view, in fact, was better described as taxonomic, yet flexible. He believed that formal systems of logic misrepresent the complex way that humans reason in most fields requiring what philosophers call "practical reason," and he offered, accordingly, a theory of knowledge as warranted belief.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Toulmin rejected the abstract syllogistic logic, meant to produce absolute standards for proving propositions true, that had become fashionable in analytic philosophy. Instead he argued (in the spirit of Wittgenstein) that philosophers must monitor how people actually argue if the philosophers' observations about persuasion are to make any sense. Toulmin took jurisprudential reasoning as his chief example in The Uses of Argument, but he believed that some aspects of a good argument depend on the field in which they're presented, while others are "field invariant."
  • Toulmin's "central thesis is that every sort of argumentation can in principle claim rationality and that the criteria to be applied when determining the soundness of the argumentation depend on the nature of the problems to which the argumentation relates."
  • But Toulmin, trained in the hard sciences and mathematics himself, saw through the science worship of less-credentialed sorts. He didn't relent, announcing "our need to reappropriate the wisdom of the 16th-century humanists, and develop a point of view that combines the abstract rigor and exactitude of the 17th-century 'new philosophy' with a practical concern for human life in its concrete detail."
  • Toulmin declared its upshot: "From now on, permanent validity must be set aside as illusory, and our idea of rationality related to specific functions of ... human reason. ... For me personally, the outcome of 40 years of philosophical critique was thus a new vision of—so to speak—the rhetoric of philosophy."
  • Gary Brown on 26 Jan 10
     
    FYI, Toulmin was the primary influence on the first WSU Critical Thinking Rubric. (Carella was the other philosopher.)
Peggy Collins

Clemson University e-portfolio winners - 3 views

www.clemson.edu/...news.html

shared by Peggy Collins on 28 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Peggy Collins on 28 Jul 10
     
    Students used different technologies, not one set mandated system for the e-portfolios. In 2006, Clemson University implemented the ePortfolio Program that requires all undergraduates to create and submit a digital portfolio as evidence of academic and experiential mastery of Clemson's core competencies. Students collect work from their classes and elsewhere, connecting (tagging) it to the competencies (Written and Oral Communication; Reasoning, Critical Thinking and Problem Solving; Mathematical, Scientific and Technological Literacy; Social Science and Cross-Cultural Awareness; Arts and Humanities; and Ethical Judgment) throughout their undergraduate experience.
Gary Brown

The MetLife Survey of the American Teacher: Collaborating for Success ~ Stephen's Web - 0 views

www.downes.ca/53110

teaching

shared by Gary Brown on 13 Aug 10 - Cached
  • ccording to the study, teachers value collaboration, but do most of it outside the classroom. They believe they set high standards for students and believe core skills (mathematics and language, for example) are important. They believe all staff, rather than individual teachers, are accountable for student progress. They believe it would help a lot if students took responsibility for their own learning, but less than a third (compared to a very high percentage of students) believe students actually do.
  • Gary Brown on 13 Aug 10
     
    A majority of teachers and principals also believe that the following school- and classroom-centered factors would have a major impact on improving student achievement: Connecting classroom instruction to the real world; A school culture where students feel responsible and accountable for their own education; Addressing the individual needs of diverse learners; and Greater collaboration among teachers and school leaders.
Nils Peterson

U. of Phoenix Reports on Students' Academic Progress - Measuring Stick - The Chronicle ... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...27584

shared by Nils Peterson on 10 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • In comparisons of seniors versus freshmen within the university, the 2,428 seniors slightly outperformed 4,003 freshmen in all categories except natural sciences, in which they were equivalent.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 10 Dec 10
       
      This is the value added measure.
  • The University of Phoenix has released its third “Academic Annual Report,” a document that continues to be notable not so much for the depth of information it provides on its students’ academic progress but for its existence at all.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 10 Dec 10
       
      Provides a range of measures, inc. demographics, satisfaction, indirect measures of percieved utility and direct measures using national tests.
  • The Phoenix academic report also includes findings on students’ performance relative to hundreds of thousands of students at nearly 400 peer institutions on two standardized tests
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • University of Phoenix seniors slightly underperformed a comparison group of 42,649 seniors at peer institutions in critical thinking, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, and moderately underperformed the peer group in reading, writing, and mathematics.
Gary Brown

Learning to Hate Learning Objectives - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher E... - 4 views

chronicle.com/...49399

assessment outcomes faculty development

shared by Gary Brown on 16 Dec 09 - Cached
  • Brottman's essay is a dangerous display of educational malpractice. Those who argue that principles of good assessment intrude upon teaching and learning disclose the painful fact that many educators are not adequately prepared to teach.
  • Gary Brown on 16 Dec 09
     
    Read it and weep.
  • Ashley Ater Kranov on 30 Dec 09
     
    I think this reader comment captures it: Right--it's not about the students learning anything--it's about YOUR learning, and you let them come along for the ride. How could you fit that into learning objectives? Please. This is why people think all of us are navel-gazing, self-indulgent mopes.
  • Matthew Tedder on 13 Jan 10
     
    Doesn't it depend on the nature of the learning objectives? I mean, you could list a set of facts and skills levels students should have attained. You could specify a number of discrete facts and skills to be attained within certain areas of the course curriculum. Or, you could do something more creative such as measure the number of claims with evidence in student writing that is within the subject matter of the course to demonstrate a level of articulation.

    At CTLT, I never did become fully settled on certain subject types though, like mathematics and natural sciences. Depending on the subject matter, specific facts like natural laws and methods must be discretely learned and learned perfectly. And, indeed in some subjects, there is such a thing as perfect understanding where anything even slightly less is failure to learn. This is rigid, yes.. But I do not see the alternative in some subjects and teachers of those subjects certainly don't either. I do think that sometimes there can be more flexibility in the order of learning of discrete fundamentals. Learning out of order often convinced me of the importance of things skipped, causing me to go back and study more comprehensively on my own, in my own time, and according to my own interest.
Nils Peterson

The New Digital Underclass - Forbes.com - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...mnists-trevor-butterworth.html

digital divide education

shared by Nils Peterson on 11 Mar 10 - No Cached
  • At a certain point in the 17th century, the known world suddenly became, in one particular and peculiar sense, unknowable. This seems, on the face of it, counter-intuitive: This was, after all, a time when modern science came into existence, when mathematics and methodology reorganized the capacity and reach of thought, when thinkers such as Descartes, Galileo and Newton altered the conceptual fabric of the universe, and gave the woozy gauze of what had been imagined the hard contours of what could be measured. But at the same time, this period of immense, almost incredible, transformation meant the end of homo universalis; if man could now measure everything, he was no longer the measure of everything.
  • Who was the last universal genius, the last person to grasp the entirety of knowledge? The most famous candidate is Gottfried Leibniz, whose research and achievements are asthma-inducing in breadth--and extend to studying Chinese and writing poetry. Less well-known, but no less interesting, is the Jesuit priest Anasthasius Kircher, who, over 72 volumes, analyzed everything from Egyptian hieroglyphics to harmonics.
  • But by the turn of the 18th century, this kind of panoptic vision was increasingly impossible; there was simply too much to know; and the deaths of Kircher in 1680 and Leibniz in 1716 marked the beginning of a new era in conceptual history, one that might be seen as the flip side of the rise of specialization
Theron DesRosier

The n-Category Café - 0 views

golem.ph.utexas.edu/category

blog mathematics physics science math philosophy Garrett Lissi NoP

shared by Theron DesRosier on 14 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 14 Apr 09
     
    The n-Category Café\nA group blog on math, physics and philosophy This is one of the blogs Lissi used to discuss his "Simple Theory of Everyting"
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