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Gary Brown

Education ambivalence : Nature : Nature Publishing Group - 1 views

  • Academic scientists value teaching as much as research — but universities apparently don't
  • Nature Education, last year conducted a survey of 450 university-level science faculty members from more than 30 countries. The first report from that survey, freely available at http://go.nature.com/5wEKij, focuses on 'postsecondary' university- and college-level education. It finds that more than half of the respondents in Europe, Asia and North America feel that the quality of undergraduate science education in their country is mediocre, poor or very poor.
  • 77% of respondents indicated that they considered their teaching responsibilities to be just as important as their research — and 16% said teaching was more important.
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  • But the biggest barrier to improvement is the pervasive perception that academic institutions — and the prevailing rewards structure of science — value research far more than teaching
  • despite their beliefs that teaching was at least as important as research, many respondents said that they would choose to appoint a researcher rather than a teacher to an open tenured position.
  • To correct this misalignment of values, two things are required. The first is to establish a standardized system of teaching evaluation. This would give universities and professors alike the feedback they need to improve.
  • The second requirement is to improve the support and rewards for university-level teaching.
  • systematic training in how to teach well
  • But by showering so many rewards on research instead of on teaching, universities and funding agencies risk undermining the educational quality that is required for research to flourish in the long term.
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    Attention to this issue from this resource--Nature--is a breakthrough in its own right. Note the focus on "flourish in the long term...".
Theron DesRosier

Nature: Science blogging - 0 views

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    Blogs related to scientific topics from Nature.
Peggy Collins

The enterprise implications of Google Wave | Enterprise Web 2.0 | ZDNet.com - 1 views

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    "What Google has done with the Wave protocol is essentially create a new kind of social media format that is distinctively different from blogs, wikis, activity streams, RSS, or most familiar online communication models except possibly IM. Both blogs and wikis were created in the era of page-oriented Web applications and haven't changed much since. In contrast, Google Wave is designed for real-time participation and editing of shared conversations and documents and is more akin to the simultaneous multiuser experience of Google Docs than with traditional blogs and wiki editing. Though Google is sometimes criticized for missing the social aspect of the Web, that is patently not the case with waves, which are fundamentally social in nature. Participants can be added in real-time, new conversations forked off (via private replies), social media sharing is assumed to be the norm, and connection with a user's contextual server-side data is also a core feature including location, search, and more. The result is stored in a persistent document known as a wave, access to which can be embedded anywhere that HTML can be embedded, whether that's a Web page or an enterprise portal. Users can then discover and interact with the wave, joining the conversation, adding more information, etc. Google has also leveraged its investments in Google Gadgets and OpenSocial, two key technologies for spreading online services beyond the original boundaries of the sites they came from. All in all, Google Wave is a smart and well-constructed bundle of collaborative capabilities with many of the modern sensibilities we've come to expect in the Web 2.0 era including an acutely social nature, rapid interaction, and community-based technology."
Theron DesRosier

Top five science blogs : Article : Nature - 0 views

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    "Weblogs written by scientists are relatively rare, but some of them are proving popular. Out of 46.7 million blogs indexed by the Technorati blog search engine, five scientists' sites make it into the top 3,500. Declan Butler asks the winners about the reasons for their success."
Theron DesRosier

To blog or not to blog? : Article : Nature Geoscience - 0 views

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    "Scientists know much more about their field than is ever published in peer-reviewed journals. Blogs can be a good medium with which to disseminate this tacit knowledge."
Gary Brown

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

  • 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.
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    Read it and weep.
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    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.
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    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

Daniel Rosenberg - Early Modern Information Overload - Journal of the History of Ideas ... - 1 views

  • During the early modern period, and especially during the years 1550-1750, Europe experienced a kind of "information explosion." I emphasize the word "experience" as this is an essential element to the arguments presented here. There is ample evidence to demonstrate that during this period, the production, circulation, and dissemination of scientific and scholarly texts accelerated tremendously. In her essay, Ann Blair notes that over the course of this period, a typical scholarly library might have grown by a factor of fifty, while Brian Ogilvie demonstrates an equivalent acceleration in the production and consumption of texts in the domain of natural history; and there is a large literature to back both of these arguments up. But the fact of accelerated textual production and consumption is not what is principally at issue here. What is essential is the sense that such a phenomenon was taking place and the variety of responses to it.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      info overload 1550-1750 -- rom printed books
  • She examines the varieties of textual practices "deployed by early modern scholars" in response to a perceived "overabundance of books" during the period between 1550 and 1700, and she argues that historians have paid disproportionate attention to what she calls "literary reading" and not enough to other modes of encountering and engaging textual materials ranging from browsing and skimming to buying and collecting to annotating, cutting and pasting, and dog-earing. For Blair these other modes of acting upon texts are important in all historical moments, but in situations where readers feel themselves overwhelmed by information, they become all that much more crucial and telling.
  • "By the 1580s," Ogilvie writes, "the botanical tyro had to master a tremendous number of words, things, and authorities." And during this period botanical literature increasingly sought to address precisely this concern. Already in the 1550s, with the work of Conrad Gesner and Remert Dodoens, Ogilvie observes a shift from an older form of botanical treatise, descended from the alphabetical materia medica, to a new form organized around "tacit notions of similarity" among different natural types. Not that all of these developments were useful. As Ogilvie notes, the move toward similarity was not a direct move toward scientific taxonomy, and in different works vastly different categorical schemes applied, so that the same plant might be grouped with "shrubs" in one and, in another, with "plants whose flowers please." Eventually, with Caspar Bauhin at the end of the sixteenth century and John Ray at the end of the seventeenth, Ogilvie notes the rise of a new class of scientific literature aimed not only at describing and organizing natural facts but at doing the same work for scientific texts themselves.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      organization strategies. see the TED talk Theron bookmarked recently, new tools to navigate the web by grouping similarly tagged pages
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  • The old encyclopedia of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance based its prestige on its claim to comprehensiveness. But by the middle of the sixteenth century, these claims had become very difficult for any single author or work to support. Ironically, as the plausibility of the old claims weakened, demand for the genre intensified. This is attested to by the great commercial success of the Cyclopaedia and by the still greater success of the renowned Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert. For the latter, just as for Chambers, the indexical format of the encyclopedic dictionary speaks to an epistemological urgency. In a world of rapid change, quick access to knowledge becomes as important as knowledge itself.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      quick access as important as knowledge itself. Filtering as a modern tool, and powerful search
  • Taken together, these papers suggest that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries factors such as an increasing production and dissemination of books, developing networks of scientific communication, discoveries and innovations in the sciences, and new economic relationships all conspired to produce such quantities of new information that a substantial reorganization of the intellectual world was required.
Nils Peterson

The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet | Magazine - 0 views

shared by Nils Peterson on 18 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Milner sounds more like a traditional media mogul than a Web entrepreneur. But that’s exactly the point. If we’re moving away from the open Web, it’s at least in part because of the rising dominance of businesspeople more inclined to think in the all-or-nothing terms of traditional media than in the come-one-come-all collectivist utopianism of the Web. This is not just natural maturation but in many ways the result of a competing idea — one that rejects the Web’s ethic, technology, and business models. The control the Web took from the vertically integrated, top-down media world can, with a little rethinking of the nature and the use of the Internet, be taken back. This development — a familiar historical march, both feudal and corporate, in which the less powerful are sapped of their reason for being by the better resourced, organized, and efficient — is perhaps the rudest shock possible to the leveled, porous, low-barrier-to-entry ethos of the Internet Age. After all, this is a battle that seemed fought and won — not just toppling newspapers and music labels but also AOL and Prodigy and anyone who built a business on the idea that a curated experience would beat out the flexibility and freedom of the Web.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      An interesting perspective, goes along with another piece I diigoed in Educause Review that was exploring the turning of the tide against EduPunk. What is problematic with the graphic at the lead of this article is that it does not account for the volume of traffic, its all scaled to 100%. So while web's market share is falling as a percent of total packets, and video market share is growing, its not clear that web use (esp for tasks related to learning) is declining.
  • You wake up and check your email on your bedside iPad — that’s one app. During breakfast you browse Facebook, Twitter, and The New York Times — three more apps. On the way to the office, you listen to a podcast on your smartphone. Another app. At work, you scroll through RSS feeds in a reader and have Skype and IM conversations. More apps. At the end of the day, you come home, make dinner while listening to Pandora, play some games on Xbox Live, and watch a movie on Netflix’s streaming service. You’ve spent the day on the Internet — but not on the Web. And you are not alone.
  • This is not a trivial distinction. Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display.
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  • A decade ago, the ascent of the Web browser as the center of the computing world appeared inevitable. It seemed just a matter of time before the Web replaced PC application software
  • But there has always been an alternative path, one that saw the Web as a worthy tool but not the whole toolkit. In 1997, Wired published a now-infamous “Push!” cover story, which suggested that it was time to “kiss your browser goodbye.”
  • “Sure, we’ll always have Web pages. We still have postcards and telegrams, don’t we? But the center of interactive media — increasingly, the center of gravity of all media — is moving to a post-HTML environment,” we promised nearly a decade and half ago. The examples of the time were a bit silly — a “3-D furry-muckers VR space” and “headlines sent to a pager” — but the point was altogether prescient: a glimpse of the machine-to-machine future that would be less about browsing and more about getting.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      While the mode is different, does that mean that the independent creation of content and the peer-communities go away because the browser does? Perhaps, because the app is a mechanism to monetize and control content and interaction.
Nils Peterson

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

  • 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
       
      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
       
      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
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  • 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.
Theron DesRosier

Half an Hour: The New Nature of Knowledge - 0 views

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    The very forms of reason and enquiry employed in the classroom must change. Instead of seeking facts and underlying principles, students need to be able to recognize patterns and use things in novel ways. Instead of systematic methodical enquiry, such as might be characterized by Hempel's Deductive-Nomological method, students need to learn active and participative forms of enquiry. instead of deference to authority, students need to embrace diversity and recognize (and live with) multiple perspectives and points of view. I think that there is a new type of knowledge, that we recognize it - and are forced to recognize it - only because new technologies have enabled many perspectives, many points of view, to be expressed, to interact, to forge new realities, and that this form of knowledge is emerged from our cooperative interactions with each other, and not found in the doctrines or dictates of any one of us.
Theron DesRosier

THE FUTURE OF EVERYTHING: - 0 views

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    "In the face of an economic crisis of unprecedented and in many ways still not fully understood dimensions, there is a natural inclination to retrench, to stop considering what the next new thing might be, to slow down on innovation and experimentation. This is a mistake. This is the moment when we must confront the core assumptions of our educational enterprises, and to ask hard questions about why we do what we do, and how we can change in order to survive and perhaps even thrive. This symposium, which is part of the Future of Everything project hosted by Academic Commons (http://academiccommons.org/futureofeverything/), brings us together to consider the possible futures of a host of interconnected topics: the book, the library, our system of scholarly communication, classroom technology, software distribution, the lecture, the seminar, existing and future business models,and ultimately, the college and the university. You'll have a chance to hear from leading practitioners who are creating the next generation tools, resources, spaces, and policies, and to engage in on-line dialogue before, during, and after the event. The work of the symposium will be used to inform the publication of an on-line reader that we hope will be broadly useful for all engaged in re-imagining future services, facilities, and policies on campus. Date: May 19, 2009 Place: Norwood, MA"
Joshua Yeidel

Tagaroo » about - 0 views

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    Calais is an initiative by Thomson Reuters to connect the world's content by providing automated metadata (let's just call it tagging) services. The Calais service takes your text and uses sophisticated natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to extract the people, organizations, companies, geographies and events hidden within it.
Theron DesRosier

Publish in Wikipedia or perish : Nature News - 0 views

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    Wikipedia, meet RNA. Anyone submitting to a section of the journal RNA Biology will, in the future, be required to also submit a Wikipedia page that summarizes the work. The journal will then peer review the page before publishing it in Wikipedia.
Ashley Ater Kranov

Why Liberal Arts Need Career Services - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 1 views

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    Quote: "In doing so, my students move from superficial to elegant observations about their majors. English majors, who previously said they read literature and wrote papers, come to understand that an English major is also about perspective, and is simultaneously classical and progressive. History majors, who initially discussed reading and research skills, discovered that a prerequisite to the major is being "audaciously curious" and on a search for "truth," despite its elusive nature. They ponder how different the nightly news would be if newsrooms were fully staffed with history majors instead of communication majors. Most important, my students consistently tell me it's the first time they've ever focused on their education-what they've learned and how their majors have influenced their mind-sets, perceptions, and ways of thinking. Once they've had that epiphany, it's amazing how simple it is to teach them to articulate their knowledge to an employer or graduate-school admissions officer."
S Spaeth

CEL | Daniel Goleman - Ecological Intelligence - 0 views

  • Psychologists conventionally view intelligence as residing within an individual. But the ecological abilities we need in order to survive today must be a collective intelligence, one that we learn and master as a species, and that resides in a distributed fashion among far-flung networks of people. The challenges we face are too varied, too subtle, and too complicated to be understood and overcome by a single person; their recognition and solution require intense efforts by a vastly diverse range of experts, businesspeople, activists — by all of us.
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    The shared nature of ecological intelligence makes it synergistic with social intelligence, which gives us the capacity to coordinate and harmonize our efforts. The art of working together effectively, as mastered by a star performing team, combines abilities like empathy and perspective taking, candor and cooperation, to create person-to-person links that let information gain added value as it travels. Collaboration and the exchange of information are vital to amassing the essential ecological insights and necessary database that allow us to act for the greater good.
Gary Brown

Public Higher Education Is 'Eroding From All Sides,' Warn Political Scientists - Facult... - 2 views

  • The ideal of American public higher education may have entered a death spiral, several scholars said here Thursday during a panel discussion at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. That crisis might ultimately harm not only universities, but also democracy itself, they warned.
  • And families who are frozen out of the system see public universities as something for the affluent. They'd rather see the state spend money on health care."
  • Cultural values don't support the liberal arts. Debt-burdened families aren't demanding it. The capitalist state isn't interested in it. Universities aren't funding it."
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  • Instead, all of public higher education will be essentially vocational in nature, oriented entirely around the market logic of job preparation. Instead of educating whole persons, Ms. Brown warned, universities will be expected to "build human capital," a narrower and more hollow mission.
  • His own campus, Mr. Nelson said, has recently seen several multimillion-dollar projects that were favorites of administrators but were not endorsed by the faculty.
  • Instead, he said that faculty activists should open up a more basic debate about the purposes of education. They should fight, he said, for a tuition-free public higher-education system wholly subsidized by the federal government.
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    The issues are taking root in disciplinary discussions, so perhaps awareness and response will sprout.
Gary Brown

The Madness of Rankings - WorldWise - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 1 views

  • In case it hasn’t already become obvious, I am among those who view rankings with some cynicism due to their past misuses and abuses. At the same time, I must concede that they can be a useful tool to help guide institutional improvement.
  • Indeed, rankings are part of the nature of education. Like it or not, comparisons are unavoidable.
  • To further complicate the utility of these rankings, it appears that not a single perspective was included from outside the Ivory Towers.
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  • I forgot that students can’t provide a legitimate opinion about their institutions. What do they know about them? I guess not much since their points of view are flatly ignored.
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    Collector's item.
Gary Brown

Would You Protect Your Computer's Feelings? Clifford Nass Says Yes. - ProfHacker - The ... - 2 views

  • why peer review processes often avoid, rather than facilitate, sound judgment
  • humans do not differentiate between computers and people in their social interactions.
  • no matter what "everyone knows," people act as if the computer secretly cares
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  • users given completely random praise by a computer program liked it more than the same program without praise, even though they knew in advance the praise was meaningless.
  • Nass demonstrates, however, that people internalize praise and criticism differently—while we welcome the former, we really dwell on and obsess over the latter. In the criticism sandwich, then, "the criticism blasts the first list of positive achievements out of listeners' memory. They then think hard about the criticism (which will make them remember it better) and are on the alert to think even harder about what happens next. What do they then get? Positive remarks that are too general to be remembered"
  • And because we focus so much on the negative, having a similar number of positive and negative comments "feels negative overall"
  • The best strategy, he suggests, is "to briefly present a few negative remarks and then provide a long list of positive remarks...You should also provide as much detail as possible within the positive comments, even more than feels natural, because positive feedback is less memorable" (33).
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    The implications for feedback issues are pretty clear.
Gary Brown

Does testing for statistical significance encourage or discourage thoughtful ... - 1 views

  • Does testing for statistical significance encourage or discourage thoughtful data analysis? Posted by Patricia Rogers on October 20th, 2010
  • Epidemiology, 9(3):333–337). which argues not only for thoughtful interpretation of findings, but for not reporting statistical significance at all.
  • We also would like to see the interpretation of a study based not on statistical significance, or lack of it, for one or more study variables, but rather on careful quantitative consideration of the data in light of competing explanations for the findings.
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  • we prefer a researcher to consider whether the magnitude of an estimated effect could be readily explained by uncontrolled confounding or selection biases, rather than simply to offer the uninspired interpretation that the estimated effect is significant, as if neither chance nor bias could then account for the findings.
  • Many data analysts appear to remain oblivious to the qualitative nature of significance testing.
  • statistical significance is itself only a dichotomous indicator.
  • it cannot convey much useful information
  • Even worse, those two values often signal just the wrong interpretation. These misleading signals occur when a trivial effect is found to be ’significant’, as often happens in large studies, or when a strong relation is found ’nonsignificant’, as often happens in small studies.
  • Another useful paper on this issue is Kristin Sainani, (2010) “Misleading Comparisons: The Fallacy of Comparing Statistical Significance”Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Vol. 2 (June), 559-562 which discusses the need to look carefully at within-group differences as well as between-group differences, and at sub-group significance compared to interaction. She concludes: ‘Readers should have a particularly high index of suspicion for controlled studies that fail to report between-group comparisons, because these likely represent attempts to “spin” null results.”
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    and at sub-group significance compared to interaction. She concludes: 'Readers should have a particularly high index of suspicion for controlled studies that fail to report between-group comparisons, because these likely represent attempts to "spin" null results."
Gary Brown

Disciplines Follow Their Own Paths to Quality - Faculty - The Chronicle of Higher Educa... - 2 views

  • But when it comes to the fundamentals of measuring and improving student learning, engineering professors naturally have more to talk about with their counterparts at, say, Georgia Tech than with the humanities professors at Villanova
    • Gary Brown
       
      Perhaps this is too bad....
  • But there is no nationally normed way to measure the particular kind of critical thinking that students of classics acquire
  • er colleagues have created discipline-specific critical-reasoning tests for classics and political science
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  • Political science cultivates skills that are substantially different from those in classics, and in each case those skills can't be measured with a general-education test.
  • he wants to use tests of reasoning that are appropriate for each discipline
  • I believe Richard Paul has spent a lifetime articulating the characteristics of discipline based critical thinking. But anyway, I think it is interesting that an attempt is being made to develop (perhaps) a "national standard" for critical thinking in classics. In order to assess anything effectively we need a standard. Without a standard there are no criteria and therefore no basis from which to assess. But standards do not necessarily have to be established at the national level. This raises the issue of scale. What is the appropriate scale from which to measure the quality and effectiveness of an educational experience? Any valid approach to quality assurance has to be multi-scaled and requires multiple measures over time. But to be honest the issues of standards and scale are really just the tip of the outcomes iceberg.
    • Gary Brown
       
      Missing the notion that the variance is in the activity more than the criteria.  We hear little of embedding nationally normed and weighted assignments and then assessing the implementation and facilitation variables.... mirror, not lens.
  • the UW Study of Undergraduate Learning (UW SOUL). Results from the UW SOUL show that learning in college is disciplinary; therefore, real assessment of learning must occur (with central support and resources)in the academic departments. Generic approaches to assessing thinking, writing, research, quantitative reasoning, and other areas of learning may be measuring something, but they cannot measure learning in college.
  • It turns out there is a six week, or 210+ hour serious reading exposure to two or more domains outside ones own, that "turns on" cross domain mapping as a robust capability. Some people just happen to have accumulated, usually by unseen and unsensed happenstance involvements (rooming with an engineer, son of a dad changing domains/careers, etc.) this minimum level of basics that allows robust metaphor based mapping.
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