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H DeWaard

5 Reasons Why Origami Improves Students' Skills | Edutopia - 59 views

www.edutopia.org/...tudents-skills-ainissa-ramirez

origami STEAM edutopia skills STEM math makerspace

shared by H DeWaard on 22 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • origami
  • This art form engages students and sneakily enhances their skills -- including improved spatial perception and logical and sequential thinking.
  • Here are some ways that origami can be used in your classroom to improve a range of skills:
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Geometry
  • According to the National Center for Education Statistics in 2003, geometry was one area of weakness among American students.
  • Origami has been found to strengthen an understanding of geometric concepts, formulas, and labels, making them come alive.
  • Thinking Skills
  • Origami excites other modalities of learning. It has been shown to improve spatial visualization skills using hands-on learning.
  • Fractions
  • Folding paper can demonstrate the fractions in a tactile way.
  • Problem Solving
  • Often in assignments, there is one set answer and one way to get there. Origami provides children an opportunity to solve something that isn't prescribed and gives them a chance to make friends with failure (i.e. trial and error).
  • Origami is a fun way to explain physics concepts. A thin piece of paper is not very strong, but if you fold it like an accordion it will be.
  • Researchers have found that students who use origami in math perform better.
  • STEAM
  • While schools are still catching up to the idea of origami as a STEAM engine (the merging of these disciplines), origami is already being used to solve tough problems in technology.
  • Additionally, the National Science Foundation, one of the government's largest funding agencies, has supported a few programs that link engineers with artists to use origami in designs. The ideas range from medical forceps to foldable plastic solar panels.
  • H DeWaard on 26 Aug 15
     
    Origami, the ancient art of paper folding, has applications in the modern-day classroom for teaching geometry, thinking skills, fractions, problem solving, and fun science.
Russ Goerend

ASCD Inservice: Practice, Practice, Practice (Or: Homework, Homework, Homework?) - 1 views

ascd.typepad.com/...omework-homework-homework.html

homework marzano research ascd kohn

shared by Russ Goerend on 18 May 09 - Cached
  • Homework needs to be completed in order to produce the highest achievement gains. Design it with ease of completion in mind. A large amount of homework does not result in better learning. Homework should be academically purposeful, not a punishment or a symbol of the seriousness of study. Homework should be explicitly tied to the current learning goals of the class. Homework should be able to be completed without adult assistance. Parents or guardians should not be expected to act as content experts. Parents should, however, be provided with clear homework guidelines. Assignments that involve using the parents' expertise or personal experiences (such as interviews) are often successful.
Sharin Tebo

OPINION: Personalization, Possibilities and Challenges with Learning Analytics | EdSurg... - 34 views

www.edsurge.com/...lenges-with-learning-analytics

personalizedlearning learner research personalized SDW analytics challenges possibilities personalization

shared by Sharin Tebo on 02 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Many of these challenges result from trying to personalize within the context of traditional school structures that standardize the curriculum, the assessments, the grouping, and the instructional time.
  • a genuine problem: how to achieve the tremendous academic gains that are possible through personalized instructional methods within the constraints of a traditional classroom.
  • Knowledge mapsFormalizing a learning map--sequences of connected concepts and skills that define how one masters a domain, such as beginning Algebra--and mapping student mastery on the map, enables intelligent learning systems to recommend the next concept or skill to be learned, propose aligned instructional content, and present appropriate questions and tasks to assess mastery.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Learning analytics combines data from student models with data on learning behaviors, knowledge maps, and learning outcomes, and mines these data sets to identify patterns that associate student attributes and behaviors with successful outcomes.
  • Learning analytics marks a significant departure from traditional data-driven instructional strategies. That’s because so much more data is available to mine, make sense of, and use.
  • It is not enough to design cutting edge analytics to shape educational decision making if we do not understand how teachers can apply them to optimize student learning outcomes.
  • Sharin Tebo on 02 Nov 14
     
    Learner analytics to help personalize learning
robert morris

Education Theory/Constructivism and Social Constructivism - UCD - CTAG - 56 views

www.ucdoer.ie/...vism_and_Social_Constructivism

shared by robert morris on 08 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Deep roots classical antiquity. Socrates, in dialogue with his followers, asked directed questions that led his students to realize for themselves the weaknesses in their thinking.
    • Manuel Condoleon
      Manuel Condoleon on 08 Dec 14
       
      Good link to Socrates
    • robert morris
      robert morris on 08 Dec 14
       
      I think this is the essence of teaching and learning - asking questions, for nothing is really true.
  • Emphasis is on the collaborative nature of learning and the importance of cultural and social context.
    • robert morris
      robert morris on 08 Dec 14
       
      I agree - context, and culture play a very important role. And this might change from corner to corner, it can change quickly, neighbours etc
  • Believed that constructivists such as Piaget had overlooked the essentially social nature of language and consequently failed to understand that learning is a collaborative process.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • Constructivist learning environments provide multiple representations of reality
  • Multiple representations avoid oversimplification and represent the complexity of the real world
  • Constructivist learning environments emphasize authentic tasks in a meaningful context rather than abstract instruction out of context.
  • Constructivist learning environments provide learning environments such as real-world settings or case-based learnin
  • Constructivist learning environments encourage thoughtful reflection on experience.
  • Constructivist learning environments support "collaborative construction of knowledge through social negotiation, not competition among learners for recognition.
  • Jonassen (1994)
  • There is no absolute knowledge, just our interpretation of it. The acquisition of knowledge therefore requires the individual to consider the information and - based on their past experiences, personal views, and cultural background - construct an interpretation of the information that is being presented to them.
  • Teaching styles based on this approach therefore mark a conscious effort to move from these ‘traditional, objectivist models didactic, memory-oriented transmission models’ (Cannella & Reiff, 1994) to a more student-centred approach.
  • Students ‘construct’ their own meaning by building on their previous knowledge and experience. New ideas and experiences are matched against existing knowledge, and the learner constructs new or adapted rules to make sense of the world
  • John Dewey (1933/1998) is often cited as the philosophical founder of this approach
  • while Vygotsky (1978) is the major theorist among the social constructivists.
  • Bruner (1990) and Piaget (1972) are considered the chief theorists among the cogn
  • Dewey
  • Piaget
  • John Dewey rejected the notion that schools should focus on repetitive, rote memorization & proposed a method of "directed living" – students would engage in real-world, practical workshops in which they would demonstrate their knowledge through creativity and collaboration
  • Piaget rejected the idea that learning was the passive assimilation of given knowledge. Instead, he proposed that learning is a dynamic process comprising successive stages of adaption to reality during which learners actively construct knowledge by creating and testing their own theories of the world.
  • A common misunderstanding regarding constructivism is that instructors should never tell students anything directly but, instead, should always allow them to construct knowledge for themselves. This is actually confusing a theory of pedagogy (teaching) with a theory of knowing. Constructivism assumes that all knowledge is constructed from the learner’s previous knowledge, regardless of how one is taught. Thus, even listening to a lecture involves active attempts to construct new knowledge.
  • social interaction lay at the root of good learning.
  • Bruner builds on the Socratic tradition of learning through dialogue, encouraging the learner to come to enlighten themselves through reflection
  • Careful curriculum design is essential so that one area builds upon the other. Learning must therefore be a process of discovery where learners build their own knowledge, with the active dialogue of teachers, building on their existing knowledge.
  • Social constructivism was developed by Vygotsky. He rejected the assumption made by Piaget that it was possible to separate learning from its social context.
    • robert morris
      robert morris on 08 Dec 14
       
      On Vgotsky`s side here - I don`t think you can forget the role of "social learning", peer to peer learning and the role of social interaction.
  • The basic tenet of constructivism is that students learn by doing rather than observing.
  • By the 1980s the research of Dewey and Vygotsky had blended with Piaget's work in developmental psychology into the broad approach of constructivism
  • 1. Discovery Learning (Bruner) In discovery learning, the student is placed in problem solving situations where they are required to draw on past experiences and existing knowledge to discover facts, relationships, and new information. Students are more likely to retain knowledge attained by engaging real-world and contextualised problem-solving than by traditional transmission methods. Models that are based upon discovery learning model include: guided discovery, problem-based learning, simulation-based learning, case-based learning, and incidental learning.
deb loftsgard

Gold Standard PBL: Essential Project Design Elements | Blog | Project Based Learning | BIE - 76 views

bie.org/...ential_project_design_elements

shared by deb loftsgard on 17 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Sustained
    • deb loftsgard
      deb loftsgard on 17 Jun 15
       
      Level 3  research using I can statements as the funnel toward the driving question
  • students ask questions,
    • deb loftsgard
      deb loftsgard on 17 Jun 15
       
      Creation of Need to Know questions - level 2 knowledge
  • Authenticity
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • solve problems like those faced by people in the world outside of school (
  • eal-world processes, tasks and tools, and performance standards,
  • address a need in their school or community
  • own concerns, interests, cultures,
  • Student Voice & Choice
  • Students can have input and (some) control over many aspects of a project, from the questions they generate, to the resources they will use to find answers to their questions, to the tasks and roles they will take on as team members, to the products they will create
  • Reflection
  • We do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience.
  • Critique & Revision
  • ddition to peers and teachers, outside adults and experts can also contribute to the critique process, bringing an authentic, real-world point of view.
  • product” can be a tangible thing, or it can be a presentation of a solution to a problem or answer to a driving question.
  • resent or display their work to an audience beyond the classroom, the performance bar raises, since no one wants to look bad in public
  • aking student work public is an effective way to communicate with parents, community members, and the wider world about what PBL is and what it does for students.
  • people need to be able to think critically and solve problems,
Dallas McPheeters

at Learning Theories - 56 views

www.learning-theories.com

shared by Dallas McPheeters on 25 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Theories and Models of Learning for Educational Research and Practice. This knowledge base features learning theories that address how people learn. A resource useful for scholars of various fields such as educational psychology, instructional design, and human-computer interaction. Below is the index of learning theories, grouped in somewhat arbitrary categories.
    • Dallas McPheeters
      Dallas McPheeters on 25 Jul 10
       
      Excellent resource for understanding various learning theories and how they differ. Recommend for educators and professional development needs.
Tracy Tuten

Tech Learning TL Advisor Blog and Ed Tech Ticker Blogs from TL Blog Staff - TechLearnin... - 60 views

www.techlearning.com/31582

learning storytelling publishing sme

shared by Tracy Tuten on 20 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Mixbook (or Mixbook for Educators) is a photo-based creation platform that offers hundreds of layouts and backgrounds to choose from along with customizable frames and text to make your book beautiful. Just pick a layout, drag-and-drop your photos into the photo slots, and edit to your heart's content.
  • Though the site's examples suggest using the books to gather wedding, travel, and baby albums, this program can absolutely used to create stories around historic photographs and artifacts, original art, to produce a class yearbook, to share an oral or personal history or journey, to tell the story of a field trip.  Mixbook for Educators now offers a secure collaborative environment for sharing their ebooks, as well as discounts on printed products, should you choose to print.  (A similar option is Scrapblog.)
  • Storybird, a collaborative storybook building space designed for ages 3-13, inspires young writers to create text around the work of professional artists and the collection of art is growing. Two (or more) people create a Storybird in a round robin fashion by writing their own text and inserting pictures. They then have the option of sharing their Storybird privately or publicly on the network. The final product can be printed (soon), watched on screen, played with like a toy, or shared through a worldwide library. Storybird is also a simple publishing platform for writers and artists that allows them to experiment, publish their stories, and connect with their fans.
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  • Myth and Legend Creator 2 shares a collection of traditional stories from England and around the world to hear and read. The site offers historical context for each story, story time lines and maps, ideas for use of the story in the classroom, and student work inspired by the story.  The Story Creator--with its libraries of backgrounds, characters, props, text bubbles, sound and video recording tools, and options to upload--provides students easy opportunities to create their own versions of traditional stories.
  • The Historic Tale Construction Kit is similar in that it helps students construct stories around a theme, in this case stories set in the middle ages with movable, scalable beasts, folks, braves, buildings. and old-style text.
  • Tikatok is a platform devoted to kid book publishing at a variety of levels.  Children have the option of exploring a collection of interactive story templates called StorySparks prompts, personalizing an existing book with their own names in Books2Go, with their own names, or starting from scratch in Create Your Own Book. Tikatok’s Classroom Program allows teachers to share lesson plans, view and edit students' work online, encourage collaboration, and track writing progress.
  • Big Universe is both an online library and a publishing and sharing community for grades K through 8.  Using Big Universe Author, students may create, research, and collaborate on books using a library of more than 7000 images and interactive tools.
  • Tracy Tuten on 20 Aug 10
     
    Digital publishing tools for creating story books
Barbara Moose

http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational_leadership/mar09/vol66/num06/Plagiarism_in... - 0 views

www.ascd.org/...arism_in_the_Internet_Age.aspx

plagiarism Internet research intellectual_property

shared by Barbara Moose on 25 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Teachers who wish to prevent plagiarism should devote extensive instruction to the component tasks of writing from sources
  • instruction should focus on
  • summarizing sources
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Instructional materials like these imply that teachers can stop inappropriate use of sources through three strategies: (1) teaching students from early grades the nuts and bolts of crediting all sources they use; (2) designing plagiarism-proof assignments that spell out how works should be cited and that include personal reflection and alternative final projects like creating a brochure; and (3) communicating to students that you're laying down the law on plagiarism ("I'll be on the lookout for this in your papers, you know").
  • Any worthwhile guide to preventing plagiarism should Discuss intellectual property and what it means to "own" a text. Discuss how to evaluate both online and print-based sources (for example, comparing the quality and reliability of a Web site created by an amateur with the reliability of a peer-reviewed scholarly article). Guide students through the hard work of engaging with and understanding their sources, so students don't conclude that creating a technically perfect bibliography is enough. Acknowledge that teaching students how to write from sources involves more than telling students that copying is a crime and handing them a pile of source citation cards.
  • That pedagogy should both teach source-reading skills and take into consideration our increasingly wired world. And it should communicate that plagiarism is wrong in terms of what society values about schools and learning, not just in terms of arbitrary rules.
  • through formal education, people learn skills they can apply elsewhere—but taking shortcuts lessens such learning.
  • communicate why writing is important. Through writing, people learn, communicate with one another, and discover and establish their own authority and identity. Even students who feel comfortable with collaboration and uneasy with individual authorship need to realize that acknowledged collaboration—such as a coauthored article like this one—is very different from unacknowledged use of another person's work.
Maggie Tsai

Diigo Blog » Wear your "Diigo Education Pioneer" Badge with pride :-) - 1 views

blog.diigo.com/...ation-pioneer-badge-with-pride

diigo education pioneer badge news

shared by Maggie Tsai on 21 Nov 08 - Cached
  • With all the interaction and kind help that we’ve received from the education community, we’d like to recognize those educators who are taking pioneering steps in getting their students and/or their peers started on collaborative research using Diigo’s powerful features. To express our appreciation, we’ve designed a “Diigo Education Pioneer” badge especially for you! Along with that, a big “Thank you”!
  • So, who gets to have this “Diigo Education Pioneer” badge?  Well, once your account has been approved for the education upgrade and you have started using and sharing Diigo with your students and/or colleagues in an educational setting,  you can get your own in your “Teacher Console” area >> Get Your Own Badge! We have a whole array of nice looking badges to suit your own personal style
  • jlcebollada gracia on 21 Nov 08
     
    Hi Maggie and everybody, I asked for a students account for my students but we are using a normal account. Why? Because my students are 16 or older and most of them use several services like Messenger, tuenti (a very popular social net of sharing pictures and comments), photolog... and I'd like to teach them to use REAL internet, the net they use at home and in real life. Now I have some frontbattles at the same time in different ways. My groups are: http://groups.diigo.com/groups/fotos_unicas http://groups.diigo.com/groups/blogs-para-leer-ccmc http://groups.diigo.com/groups/reacciones-qumica Unfortunately all of them are written in Spanish, but feel free to take a look and give me your opinion. thanks to the Diigo Community and specially to Maggie for her quick replies to my mails. see 'virtualy' you, Jose
Ed Webb

Times Higher Education - Dummies' guides to teaching insult our intelligence - 0 views

www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp

opinion teaching education university college training pedagogy

shared by Ed Webb on 25 Aug 09 - Cached
  • if you encourage discussion in class, you have to be prepared for your students to arrive at conclusions that are unpalatable to you.
  • When I started, largely out of exasperation, to investigate the educational research literature for myself, I was pleasantly surprised to find there was some genuinely useful and scholarly work out there, which recognised the demands of different subjects and even admitted that university lecturers aren't all workshy and stupid... It's a shame that this better stuff doesn't seem to have fed through into the generic courses that most institutions offer. My personal advice to anyone starting out as a university teacher: find a few colleagues who take their teaching seriously (there are almost certain to be some in the department) and ask them for advice; sit in on their classes if possible; remember you'll never teach perfectly but you can always teach better; and close your ears to well-meaning interference from anybody who's never actually spent time at the chalkface!
  • Magueijo's could acknowledge that some people teaching these courses are genuinely concerned about improving teaching, and they need academics' help in designing better courses that do so. Sotto's side should acknowldge that however much they talk about how important teaching is (as if they discovered this, and academics did not know), they are not listening to the people attending their courses if those people feel utterly patronised and frustrated at the waste of their time. If academics treated their students like educationalists treat their student academics they'd be appalling teachers. A simple course allowing us to learn from a video of our own lectures would be immensely useful. Instead whole empires of education have developed that need to justify themselves and grow, so they subject us to educational jargon and make us write essays on the educationalist's pet theory.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • I would have preferred that David Pritchard had written it; his comments above are perfect.
  • Most colleagues with excellent teaching reputations seem not to oppose training per se, but bad training.
Ed Webb

The Wired Campus - Do Students Cheat More in Online Classes? Maybe not. - The Chronicle... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...8073

distance education plagiarism survey chronicle edu_trends

shared by Ed Webb on 16 Sep 09 - Cached
  • You can’t make any sweeping generalizations based on the results
  • older students tend to cheat less frequently than younger students
  • If you are interested in this topic, look for the interesting edited book called Student Plagiarism in an Online World: http://www.igi-global.com/reference/details.asp?ID=7031&v=tableOfContentsI wrote a chapter called, "Expect Originality! Using Taxonomies to Structure Assignments that Support Original Work." In it I discuss the complexities of plagiarism in the context of a digital culture of sharing and suggest that it is rarely black and white. I propose a continuum with intentional academic dishonesty on one end and original work on the other, with gradations in between. Based on my own research and teaching experience, I believe the instructional design and style of teaching can either make it easy-- or very difficult-- to cheat.
Stan Golanka

Reading and the Web - Texts Without Context - NYTimes.com - 49 views

www.nytimes.com/...21mash.html

shared by Stan Golanka on 08 Feb 11 - Cached
  • It’s also a question, as Mr. Lanier, 49, astutely points out in his new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” of how online collectivism, social networking and popular software designs are changing the way people think and process information, a question of what becomes of originality and imagination in a world that prizes “metaness” and regards the mash-up as “more important than the sources who were mashed.”
    • Stan Golanka
      Stan Golanka on 08 Feb 11
       
      Core discussion topic? From this, I see a few discussion issues: 1. Do we prize "mash-ups" more than original work? Who is "we" in this? 2. If the answer to #1 is "yes," then the next question is: is this good or bad? 3. Finally, if the answer is "bad" to #2, what place do "mash-ups" have, and how do we help our students see the value in original work?
  • Web 2.0 is creating a “digital forest of mediocrity” and substituting ill-informed speculation for genuine expertise;
    • Stan Golanka
      Stan Golanka on 08 Feb 11
       
      How do teachers help students rise above this "digital forest of mediocrity"?
  • Mr. Johnson added that the book’s migration to the digital realm will turn the solitary act of reading — “a direct exchange between author and reader” — into something far more social and suggested that as online chatter about books grows, “the unity of the book will disperse into a multitude of pages and paragraphs vying for Google’s attention.”
    • Stan Golanka
      Stan Golanka on 08 Feb 11
       
      If Johnson's predictions are true, is this necessarily bad? How much of this concern is "nostalgia"? What would be lost from an academic p.o.v, and what migh be gained?
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Instead of reading an entire news article, watching an entire television show or listening to an entire speech, growing numbers of people are happy to jump to the summary, the video clip, the sound bite — never mind if context and nuance are lost in the process; never mind if it’s our emotions, more than our sense of reason, that are engaged; never mind if statements haven’t been properly vetted and sourced.
    • Stan Golanka
      Stan Golanka on 08 Feb 11
       
      Should teachers "fight" this, or embrace it? Can summaries/sound bites ever be appropriate for academic discussions?
  • And online research enables scholars to power-search for nuggets of information that might support their theses, saving them the time of wading through stacks of material that might prove marginal but that might have also prompted them to reconsider or refine their original thinking.
  • Digital insiders like Mr. Lanier and Paulina Borsook, the author of the book “Cyberselfish,” have noted the easily distracted, adolescent quality of much of cyberculture. Ms. Borsook describes tech-heads as having “an angry adolescent view of all authority as the Pig Parent,” writing that even older digerati want to think of themselves as “having an Inner Bike Messenger.”
    • Stan Golanka
      Stan Golanka on 08 Feb 11
       
      Can teachers moderate this attitude? Does our (adults) use/non-use of technology help breed this attitude?
  • authors “will increasingly tailor their work to a milieu that the writer Caleb Crain describes as ‘groupiness,’ where people read mainly ‘for the sake of a feeling of belonging’ rather than for personal enlightenment or amusement. As social concerns override literary ones, writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style.
    • Stan Golanka
      Stan Golanka on 08 Feb 11
       
      Does this ring true to educators? Are social concerns and literary conerns opposites? How does web publishing affect "literary" publishing, as opposed to "non-literary" publishing?
  • However impossible it is to think of “Jon & Kate Plus Eight” or “Jersey Shore” as art, reality shows have taken over wide swaths of television,
Kim Drain

Stanford Copyright & Fair Use - Welcome to the Public Domain - 106 views

fairuse.stanford.edu/...8-a.html

public domain copyright research

shared by Kim Drain on 10 Jun 11 - Cached
  • The public owns these works, not an individual author or artist. Anyone can use a public domain work without obtaining permission, but no one can ever own it.
  • Copyright has expired for all works published in the United States before 1923.
  • For works published after 1977, if the work was written by a single author, the copyright will not expire until 70 years after the author’s death. If a work was written by several authors and published after 1977, it will not expire until 70 years after the last surviving author dies.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Thousands of works published in the United States before 1964 fell into the public domain because the copyright was not renewed in time under the law in effect then.
  • Copyright law does not protect ideas; it only protects the particular way an idea is expressed.
  • Sometimes an author deliberately chooses not to protect a work and dedicates the work to the public. This type of dedication is rare, and unless there is express authorization placing the work in the public domain, do not assume that the work is free to use.
  • Copyright law does not protect the titles of books or movies, nor does it protect short phrases such as, “Make my day.” Copyright protection also doesn’t cover facts, ideas, or theories.
  • Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization designed to foster the public domain, helps copyright owners dedicate their works to the public domain.
  • Works published in the U.S. before 1923 In the
  • In the U.S., any work created by a federal government employee or officer is in the public domain, provided that the work was created in that person’s official capacity.
  • Kim Drain on 10 Jun 11
     
    This chapter of Stanford's Copyright and Fair Use Overview defines public domain and explains the main ways in which works become public domain. "Dear Rich" letters provide scenarios to illustrate many of these.
James Spagnoletti

Göbekli Tepe -National Geographic Magazine--"Origin of Religion" - 36 views

ngm.nationalgeographic.com/...mann-text

WHAP World_History_One agriculture religion prehistoric archaeology

shared by James Spagnoletti on 17 Sep 11 - No Cached
    • James Spagnoletti
      James Spagnoletti on 17 Sep 11
       
      Very cool photographs--take a look.  You will be doing your first art/artifact case studies this week. 
  • Most of the world's great religious centers, past and present, have been destinations for pilgrimages
  • Göbekli Tepe may be the first of all of them, the beginning of a pattern. What it suggests, at least to the archaeologists working there, is that the human sense of the sacred—and the human love of a good spectacle—may have given rise to civilization itself.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • In the 1960s archaeologists from the University of Chicago had surveyed the region and concluded that Göbekli Tepe was of little interest. Disturbance was evident at the top of the hill, but they attributed it to the activities of a Byzantine-era military outpost.
  • Schmidt had come across the Chicago researchers' brief description of the hilltop and decided to check it out. On the ground he saw flint chips—huge numbers of them. "Within minutes of getting there," Schmidt says, he realized that he was looking at a place where scores or even hundreds of people had worked in millennia past.
  • s the months and years went by, Schmidt's team
  • found a second circle of stones, then a third, and then more. Geomagnetic surveys in 2003 revealed at least 20 rings piled together, higgledy-piggledy, under the earth
  • The pillars were big—the tallest are 18 feet in height and weigh 16 tons. Swarming over their surfaces was a menagerie of animal bas-reliefs, each in a different style, some roughly rendered, a few as refined and symbolic as Byzantine art.
  • The circles follow a common design. All are made from limestone pillars shaped like giant spikes or capital T's. Bladelike, the pillars are easily five times as wide as they are deep. They stand an arm span or more apart, interconnected by low stone walls. In the middle of each ring are two taller pillars, their thin ends mounted in shallow grooves cut into the floor.
  • "They hadn't yet mastered engineering." Knoll speculated that the pillars may have been propped up, perhaps by wooden posts.
  • To Schmidt, the T-shaped pillars are stylized human beings, an idea bolstered by the carved arms that angle from the "shoulders" of some pillars, hands reaching toward their loincloth-draped bellies.
  • The stones face the center of the circle—as at "a meeting or dance," Schmidt says—a representation, perhaps, of a religious ritual.
  • As for the prancing, leaping animals on the figures, he noted that they are mostly deadly creatures: stinging scorpions, charging boars, ferocious lions. The figures represented by the pillars may be guarded by them, or appeasing them, or incorporating them as totems.
  • The site may have been built, filled in, and built again for centuries.
  • Bewilderingly, the people at Göbekli Tepe got steadily worse at temple building.
  • The earliest rings are the biggest and most sophisticated, technically and artistically. As time went by, the pillars became smaller, simpler, and were mounted with less and less care. Finally the effort seems to have petered out altogether by 8200 B.C. Göbekli Tepe was all fall and no rise.
Roland Gesthuizen

Everything You've Ever Been Told About How You Learn Is A Lie | Australian Popular Science - 151 views

www.popsci.com.au/...d-about-how-you-learn-is-a-lie

learning memory psychology research popsci

shared by Roland Gesthuizen on 23 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Roland Gesthuizen on 23 Sep 13
     
    "You know everyone learns differently. Do you think you learn better through words or pictures? Did you know you learn different subjects with different sides of the brain? Welp, they were wrong. Many of the theories of "brain-based" education, a method of instruction supposedly based on neuroscience, have been largely debunked by rigorous science."
  • David Simpson on 24 Sep 13
     
    Thanks for sharing .This is well done! I teach a Psychology course designed to develop students' critical thinking about such "myths." Here is a list of others: Lilienfeld, S. O., Lynn, S. J., Ruscio, J., and Beyerstein, B. L (2010). 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconceptions about Human Behavior. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Donny Corkern

the Causality Lab - 31 views

www.phil.cmu.edu/...causality-lab

shared by Donny Corkern on 09 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Craig Campbell on 09 Dec 14
     
    Causality design research
Smith Shots

Teaching 4-Year-Olds To Feel Better : NPR Ed : NPR - 11 views

www.npr.org/...-four-year-olds-to-feel-better

dissertation teaching feel npr

shared by Smith Shots on 14 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Researchers have identified qualities like delayed gratification, "grit" and "mindset," and they've developed curricula designed to instill those qualities. The idea is that the ability to apply yourself to a task, screen out distractions and believe in the possibility of your own improvement is a bigger determinant of success than reading and math skills.
Eric Robertson

Podcast: Mobile and Learning with Dr. Michael Truong - 18 views

bettereducators.com

Mobile learning comprehension

shared by Eric Robertson on 19 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Eric Robertson on 19 Feb 13
     
    Host Eric Robertson's conversation with Michael Truong, Associate Director of UC Merced's Center for Research on Teaching Excellence looks at technology innovations at the UC system's newest campus as an indicator for what is happening nationally. After covering topics ranging from the role of Learning Management Systems to trends in student technology purchases, their conversation focuses on UC Merced's Mobile App Learning Lounge, a resource designed to help students and faculty explore the possibilities of teaching and learning using mobile applications. Truong argues that mobile tools are dramatically enhancing assessment, communication between students and faculty, collaboration activities, and even access to and time spent with learning materials. The conversation concludes with a fascinating discussion about the challenges of teaching in an age of technology driven distraction. Referencing thinkers like Michael Wesch, Sherry Terkle and Nicholas Carr, Robertson and Truong explore how faculty can help students develop critical thinking skills in a "search culture" by moving beyond consuming knowledge to curating and producing it.
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