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Terry Elliott

Leadership Day - The Pace of Change - Practical Theory - 0 views

practicaltheory.org/...index.php

shared by Terry Elliott on 13 Jul 09 - Cached
  • Terry Elliott on 13 Jul 09
     
    So some thoughts on how to affect change in a timely, and yet, deliberate fashion. * Know why you are changing... and know what you are giving up by making this change. Every change creates winners and losers, so be sure to think through what you gain and what you lose (thanks to Neil Postman for that framework.) which leads to... * Always ask "What is the worst consequence of your best idea?" Do it for two reasons - one, because if you can't live with that consequence, don't do what you planned, but two, because the process of thinking this through will help you (and your team) mitigate the problems and you won't be as surprised when the thing you didn't think of comes up. * Research like crazy. Who has tried what you are doing? Who has tried something close to what you're doing? Who is talking about it? Who is writing about it? Who says the idea is already crazy? There aren't many truly new ideas in education, so figure out the history of your idea and learn from who has come before you. * Get lots of opinions - Come up with a smart, sensible, honest way to explain your idea and then listen. Listen a lot. Listen to the folks who don't like the idea, and ask them why. * Be honest - Don't oversell, don't overpromise, and don't pretend that the idea is perfect. * Build consensus - If only a few people are on-board with the idea, it won't work. But consensus doesn't mean taking something from everyone and sticking it onto the original idea until what you have is the worst of committee-based decisions. It means listening for the truths in what other people are telling you and being willing to make substantive change when it makes sense. * Know when to move forward. Don't let ideas die in committee because the team gets hung up on the final 5% of an idea. * Set realistic expectations for initial success, and then set up a plan to get there. If it's a tech idea -- get the tech right. (Nothing worse than getting everyone excited about a n
  • Terry Elliott on 13 Jul 09
     
    So some thoughts on how to affect change in a timely, and yet, deliberate fashion. * Know why you are changing... and know what you are giving up by making this change. Every change creates winners and losers, so be sure to think through what you gain and what you lose (thanks to Neil Postman for that framework.) which leads to... * Always ask "What is the worst consequence of your best idea?" Do it for two reasons - one, because if you can't live with that consequence, don't do what you planned, but two, because the process of thinking this through will help you (and your team) mitigate the problems and you won't be as surprised when the thing you didn't think of comes up. * Research like crazy. Who has tried what you are doing? Who has tried something close to what you're doing? Who is talking about it? Who is writing about it? Who says the idea is already crazy? There aren't many truly new ideas in education, so figure out the history of your idea and learn from who has come before you. * Get lots of opinions - Come up with a smart, sensible, honest way to explain your idea and then listen. Listen a lot. Listen to the folks who don't like the idea, and ask them why. * Be honest - Don't oversell, don't overpromise, and don't pretend that the idea is perfect. * Build consensus - If only a few people are on-board with the idea, it won't work. But consensus doesn't mean taking something from everyone and sticking it onto the original idea until what you have is the worst of committee-based decisions. It means listening for the truths in what other people are telling you and being willing to make substantive change when it makes sense. * Know when to move forward. Don't let ideas die in committee because the team gets hung up on the final 5% of an idea. * Set realistic expectations for initial success, and then set up a plan to get there. If it's a tech idea -- get the tech right. (Nothing worse than getting everyone excited about a n
Don Doehla

Johnson: Language networks: When bigger isn't better | The Economist - 20 views

www.economist.com/...johnson-language-networks

economist language research resources

shared by Don Doehla on 23 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Don Doehla on 23 Jan 15
     
    HOW would you rank "important" languages? If asked to rattle them off, many people start with English, but after that are reluctant to go further. Important how, they ask. One approach would be to look at people and money: surely a language is important if it is spoken by lots of people, in countries with great wealth (and presumably, therefore, power).
Maria Nuzzo

Three Elements of Great Communication, According to Aristotle - Scott Edinger - Harvard Business Review - 99 views

blogs.hbr.org/...t_communication_according.html

shared by Maria Nuzzo on 19 Jan 13 - No Cached
Kelly Dau liked it
  • Three Elements of Great Communication, According to Aristotle by Scott Edinger  |   9:00 AM January 17, 2013 Comments (78)         In my nearly 20 years of work in organization development, I've never heard anyone say that a leader communicated too much or too well. On the contrary, the most common improvement suggestion I've seen offered up on the thousands of 360 evaluations I've reviewed over the years is that it would be better if the subject in question learned to communicate more effectively. What makes someone a good communicator? There's no mystery here, not since Aristotle identified the three critical elements — ethos, pathos, and logos. — thousands of years ago. Ethos is essentially your credibility — that is, the reason people should believe what you're saying. In writing this blog I made an effort to demonstrate my ethos in the introduction, and here I'll just add that I have a degree in communication studies (emphasis in rhetoric for those who want the details) for good measure. In some cases, ethos comes merely from your rank within an organization. More commonly, though, today's leaders build ethos most
  • Jennie Snyder on 19 Jan 13
     
    Three aspects of communication as outlined by Aristotle.
Roland Gesthuizen

your monkey called · You Are Boring - 89 views

yourmonkeycalled.com/...you-are-boring

motivation interview questioning listening blog socialnetwork socialmedia filtering productivity

shared by Roland Gesthuizen on 02 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Ask questions; the person you’re speaking with will respect your inquisitiveness and become more interested in the exchange. “Asking questions makes people feel valued,”
  • The people who were interesting told good stories. They were also inquisitive: willing to work to expand their social and intellectual range. Most important, interesting people were also the best listeners. They knew when to ask questions.
  • Roland Gesthuizen on 02 Mar 13
     
    "You are boring. So, so boring. Don't take it too hard. We're all boring. At best, we're recovering bores. Each day offers a hundred ways for us to bore the crap out of the folks with whom we live, work, and drink. And on the internet, you're able to bore thousands of people at once"
Celia Emmelhainz

» Napster, Udacity, and the Academy Clay Shirky - 1 views

www.shirky.com/...apster-udacity-and-the-academy

shared by Celia Emmelhainz on 08 Feb 13 - No Cached
    • Celia Emmelhainz
      Celia Emmelhainz on 08 Feb 13
       
      And we've done all of that with education!
  • An organization with cost disease can use lower paid workers, increase the number of consumers per worker, subsidize production, or increase price
  • Cheap graduate students let a college lower the cost of teaching the sections while continuing to produce lectures as an artisanal product, from scratch, on site, real time
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • We ask students to read the best works we can find, whoever produced them and where, but we only ask them to listen to the best lecture a local employee can produce that morning.
    • Celia Emmelhainz
      Celia Emmelhainz on 08 Feb 13
       
      Which is why I think amazing lectures and lecture-notes followed by in person discussion could be powerful. Like a reading group (aka english class) but for video.
  • he very things the US News list of top colleges prizes—low average class size, ratio of staff to students—mean that any institution that tries to create a cost-effective education will move down the list.
  • hese are where most students are, and their experience is what college education is mostly like.
  • a good chunk of the four thousand institutions you haven’t heard of provide an expensive but mediocre education
  • That’s because the fight over MOOCs is really about the story we tell ourselves about higher education: what it is, who it’s for, how it’s delivered, who delivers it.
  • OOCs expand the audience for education to people ill-served or completely shut out from the current system, in the same way phonographs expanded the audience for symphonies to people who couldn’t get to a concert hall, and PCs expanded the users of computing power to people who didn’t work in big companies. Those earlier inventions systems started out markedly inferior to the high-cost alternative: records were scratchy, PCs were crashy. But first they got better, then they got better than that, and finally, they got so good, for so cheap, that they changed people’s sense of what was possible
  • n the US, an undergraduate education used to be an option, one way to get into the middle class. Now it’s a hostage situation, required to avoid falling out of it.
  • Open systems are open. For people used to dealing with institutions that go out of their way to hide their flaws, this makes these systems look terrible at first. But anyone who has watched a piece of open source software improve, or remembers the Britannica people throwing tantrums about Wikipedia, has seen how blistering public criticism makes open systems better.
anonymous

The Coach in the Operating Room - The New Yorker - 37 views

www.newyorker.com/...personal-best

coaching teaching professional development

shared by anonymous on 14 Dec 16 - No Cached
Xiaojing Kou liked it
  • I compared my results against national data, and I began beating the averages.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 14 Dec 16
       
      this is one of the most important reasons for data and using the data to help guide instruction
  • the obvious struck me as interesting: even Rafael Nadal has a coach. Nearly every élite tennis player in the world does. Professional athletes use coaches to make sure they are as good as they can be.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 14 Dec 16
       
      Why wouldn't we want a coach? Our supervisor or administrator often serves as an evaluator but might not have the time due to time constraints to serve as an effective and dedicated coach. Yet, a coach doesn't have to be an expert. Couldn't the coach just be a colleague with a different skill set?
  • They don’t even have to be good at the sport. The famous Olympic gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi couldn’t do a split if his life depended on it. Mainly, they observe, they judge, and they guide.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 14 Dec 16
       
      PROFOUND!!!
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • always evolving
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 14 Dec 16
       
      Please tell me what profession isn't always evolving? It something isn't evolving, it is dying! So, why doesn't everyone on the face of the earth - regardless of his/her profession or station in life - need coaching periodically to help them continue to grow and evolve?
  • We have to keep developing our capabilities and avoid falling behind.
  • no matter how well prepared people are in their formative years, few can achieve and maintain their best performance on their own.
  • outside ears, and eyes, are important
  • For decades, research has confirmed that the big factor in determining how much students learn is not class size or the extent of standardized testing but the quality of their teachers.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 14 Dec 16
       
      So, instead of having students take test after test after test, why don't we just have coaches who observe and sit and discuss and offer suggestions and divide the number of tests we give students in half and do away with half? Are we concerned about student knowledge? student performance? student ability? student growth or capacity for growth? What we really need to identify is what we value!
  • California researchers in the early nineteen-eighties conducted a five-year study of teacher-skill development in eighty schools, and noticed something interesting. Workshops led teachers to use new skills in the classroom only ten per cent of the time. Even when a practice session with demonstrations and personal feedback was added, fewer than twenty per cent made the change. But when coaching was introduced—when a colleague watched them try the new skills in their own classroom and provided suggestions—adoption rates passed ninety per cent. A spate of small randomized trials confirmed the effect. Coached teachers were more effective, and their students did better on tests.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 14 Dec 16
       
      Of course they are more effective! They have a trusted individual to guide them, mentor them, help sustain them. The coach can cheer and affirm what the teacher is already doing well and offer suggestions that are desired and sought in order to improve their 'game' and become more effective.
  • they did not necessarily have any special expertise in a content area, like math or science.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 14 Dec 16
       
      Knowledge of the content is one thing and expertise is yet another. Sometimes what makes us better teachers is simply strategies and techniques - not expertise in the content. Sometimes what makes us better teachers could simply be using a different tool or offering options for students to choose.
  • The coaches let the teachers choose the direction for coaching. They usually know better than anyone what their difficulties are.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 14 Dec 16
       
      The conversation with the coach and the coach listening and learning what the teacher would like to expand, improve, and grow is probably the most vital part! If the teacher doesn't have a clue, the coach could start anywhere and that might not be what the teacher adopts and owns. So, the teacher must have ownership and direction.
  • teaches coaches to observe a few specifics: whether the teacher has an effective plan for instruction; how many students are engaged in the material; whether they interact respectfully; whether they engage in high-level conversations; whether they understand how they are progressing, or failing to progress.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 14 Dec 16
       
      This could provide specific categories to offer teachers a choice in what direction they want to go toward improving - especially important for those who want broad improvement or are clueless at where to start.
  • must engage in “deliberate practice”—sustained, mindful efforts to develop the full range of abilities that success requires. You have to work at what you’re not good at.
  • most people do not know where to start or how to proceed. Expertise, as the formula goes, requires going from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence and finally to unconscious competence.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 14 Dec 16
       
      Progression
  • The coach provides the outside eyes and ears, and makes you aware of where you’re falling short.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 14 Dec 16
       
      The coach also makes you aware of where you are excelling!
  • So coaches use a variety of approaches—showing what other, respected colleagues do, for instance, or reviewing videos of the subject’s performance. The most common, however, is just conversation.
  • “What worked?”
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 14 Dec 16
       
      Great way to open any coaching conversation!
  • “How could you help her?”
  • “What else did you notice?”
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 14 Dec 16
       
      These questions are quite similar to what we ask little children when they are learning something new. How did that go? What else could you do? What could you do differently? What more is needed? What would help?
  • something to try.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 14 Dec 16
       
      Suggestions of something to try! Any colleague can offer this - so why don't we ask colleagues for ideas of something to try more often?
  • three colleagues on a lunch break
  • Good coaches, he said, speak with credibility, make a personal connection, and focus little on themselves.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 14 Dec 16
       
      I probably need this printed out and stuck to the monitor of my computer or tattooed on my hand!
  • “listened more than they talked,” Knight said. “They were one hundred per cent present in the conversation.”
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 14 Dec 16
       
      patient, engaged listening
  • coaching has definitely changed how satisfying teaching is
  • trying to get residents to think—to think like surgeons—and his questions exposed how much we had to learn.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 14 Dec 16
       
      Encouraging people to think - it is important to teach and encourage thinking rather than teaching them WHAT to think!
  • a whole list of observations like this.
  • one twenty-minute discussion gave me more to consider and work on than I’d had in the past five years.
  • watch other colleagues operate in order to gather ideas about what I could do.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 14 Dec 16
       
      This is one of the greatest strategies to promote growth - ever!
  • routine, high-quality video recordings of operations could enable us to figure out why some patients fare better than others.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 14 Dec 16
       
      I always hate seeing a video of me teaching but I did learn so much about myself, my teaching, and my students that I could not learn in any other way!
  • I know that I’m learning again.
  • It’s teaching with a trendier name. Coaching aimed at improving the performance of people who are already professionals is less usual.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 14 Dec 16
       
      But it still works and is effective at nudging even those who are fabulous to be even better!
  • modern society increasingly depends on ordinary people taking responsibility for doing extraordinary things
  • coaching may prove essential to the success of modern society.
  • We care about results in sports, and if we care half as much about results in schools and in hospitals we may reach the same conclusion.
  • anonymous on 14 Dec 16
     
    Valuable points about coaching - makes me want my own coach!
Tracy Tuten

The Irascible Professor on "The SAT that isn't (the death of aptitude.)" - 2 views

irascibleprofessor.com/comments-08-11-12.htm

education essay SAT 2012 esteem objectivism

shared by Tracy Tuten on 13 Aug 12 - Cached
  • It used to be that the SAT was distinguished from its competitor the ACT by the fact that the former was seen as measuring aptitude and being effectively un-coachable, while the latter was a gauge of achievement in learning.
  • At the risk of sounding pejorative, I'd say that I was expecting the test to be a measure of who I was, while some of my fellow students and their parents treated it more as a test of how they could present themselves to admissions officers.  And while I wouldn't suggest that people tend to think of it in these terms, I believe that the latter perception relies on the academically damaging belief that an individual student's capabilities need not matter to what goals he sets for himself.  That perception leads people to believe that there is something inherently unfair about a test that you can't study for.
  • And if after four years of high school they haven't developed much skill for reasoning, that's okay – they can take preparatory courses to learn how to fake it for an exam, and let that be their stepping stone toward academic accomplishment.  As a society that values the promise of formal education more than the satisfaction of actual learning, we have precipitated the death of aptitude.  We are afraid to acknowledge that it exists, because aptitude, whether the product of inborn talent or effective rearing, makes some people better suited than others for certain goals.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Lori Gottlieb, writing in The Atlantic last year, claimed that child-rearing in the current generation has been excessively focused on preserving self-esteem.  As an illustration of one symptom of this, Gottlieb quoted clinical psychologist Wendy Mogel as saying that parents are actually relieved to be told that their struggling children are learning disabled, so that today "every child is either learning disabled, gifted, or both – there's no curve left, no average."  To claim a learning disability is the only way to set legitimate lower benchmarks for performance.  Kids are never just bad at anything anymore, because that's seen as being more harmful to self-esteem.
  • But my worries about the individual effects of the death of aptitude are dwarfed by my concern for its effect on the institutions of higher learning that those individuals are entering.  College is not a one-directional relationship of dispensing knowledge to young people.  The entire institution gains or loses value on the basis of what its students put into it.  By telling students with low aptitude and low interest that they can, should, and must strive to accomplish the same things as their higher-achieving peers, I fear that we're saturating higher education with people who subtract value from their institutions by committing minimum effort and lowering whatever curve still exists for the measurement of performance.
  • We all seem to agree that standards for college readiness need to improve, but you'll hear virtually no one asserting that when those standards are not met, the student ought to leave off college altogether, or to defer it until they have acquired, by sheer will or by natural intellectual growth, the aptitude to be successful at the proper level.  Indeed, just as common in criticism of education is the sentiment that we must see to it that more children enter and complete college.  But if those children don't have the aptitude to do so, the goal of improving college curriculum contradicts the goal of college-for-all.
  • We can't keep pretending that there is no such thing as aptitude and that every child has equal cause to vie for the topmost positions of intellectual esteem.  It does a disservice to the student and the school in kind.
  • Tracy Tuten on 13 Aug 12
     
    An essay on what the SAT says about society's view of education, accomplishments, aptitude, and self-esteem. 
fergtoo

the Truth About Being a Hero - WSJ - 14 views

www.wsj.com/...111903596904576516302821089790

hero

shared by fergtoo on 23 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • We all want to be special, to stand out; there's nothing wrong with this. The irony is that every human being is special to start with, because we're unique to start with.
  • n the military I could exercise the power of being automatically respected because of the medals on my chest, not because I had done anything right at the moment to earn that respect.
  • I knew many Marines had done brave deeds that no one saw and for which they got no medals at all.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • "A lot of people have done a lot more and gotten a lot less, and a lot of people have done a lot less and gotten a lot more."
  • I got my medals, in part, because I did brave acts, but also, in part, because the kids liked me and they spent time writing better eyewitness accounts than they would have written if they hadn't liked me
  • The only people who will ever know the value of the ribbons on their chests are the people wearing them—and even they can fool themselves, in both directions.
  • he whole assault ground to a halt, except for one kid named Niemi, who had sprinted forward when we came under the intense fire and disappeared up in front of us somewhere.
  • alking to a group of us about when it was a platoon leader earned his pay. I knew, floating above that mess, that now that time had come. If I didn't get up and lead, we'd get wiped.
  • I'm most proud of is that I simply stood up, in the middle of all that flying metal, and started up the hill all by myself.
  • I did it for the right reasons.
  • At this point I saw the missing kid, Niemi, pop his head up. He sprinted across the open top of the hill, all alone.
  • He was a black kid, all tangled up in black-power politics, almost always angry and sullen. A troublemaker. Yet here he was, most of his body naked with only flapping rags left of his jungle utilities, begging for a rifle when he had a perfect excuse to just bury his head in the clay and quit. I gave him mine. I still had a pistol. He grabbed the rifle, stood up to his full height, fully exposing himself to all the fire, and simply blasted an entire magazine at the two soldiers in front of us, killing both of them. He then went charging into the fight, leaving me stunned for a moment. Why? Who was he doing this for? What is this thing in young men? We were beyond ourselves, beyond politics, beyond good and evil. This was transcendence.
  • Crashing out of the clouds into this confusion came a flaming, smoking twin-rotor CH-46 helicopter.
  • I saw Niemi pop into sight again. He sprinted to the downed chopper.
  • the only thing he could think to do was sprint across the open hilltop to see if he could find a place from which he could lay down fire to protect them.
  • Niemi got a Navy Cross.
  • I got a Navy Cross.
  • elicopter pilot
  • ont-page story
  • The kid who borrowed my rifle didn't get anyt
  • hing.
  • It was just about that time I got knocked out and blinded by a hand grenade. I came to, groggy.
  • hen a kid I knew from Second Platoon, mainly because of his bad reputation, threw himself down beside me, half his clothes blown away. He was begging people for a rifle. His had been blown out of his hands.
Wayne Holly

How To Get People To Do What You Want, Without Telling Them What to do. | Management Innovation eXchange - 73 views

www.managementexchange.com/...t-without-telling-them-what-do

shared by Wayne Holly on 23 Nov 10 - Cached
  • Wayne Holly on 23 Nov 10
     
    Most managers manage by telling their workforce what to do, without realising that telling them what to do actually destroys their ability to do it. Telling people what to do creates the resistance that prevents them from doing it.
  • Wayne Holly on 23 Nov 10
     
    Most managers manage by telling their workforce what to do, without realising that telling them what to do actually destroys their ability to do it. Telling people what to do creates the resistance that prevents them from doing it.
Sarah Horrigan

How People are using Twitter during Conferences - 0 views

lamp.tu-graz.ac.at/...09_edumedia.pdf

twitter tagging microblogging conference pdf education elearning online backchannel NTUEDU

shared by Sarah Horrigan on 01 Jul 09 - No Cached
  • Sarah Horrigan on 01 Jul 09
     
    The popularity of microblogging, with special emphasis on twitter, the most famous application of the kind, is growing rapidly. This kind of tools for micro-exchange of information and communication is changing the daily life of knowledgeable worker as well as Internet savvy people. From this perspective this paper aims to show how Twitter can be used during conferences, and furthermore how different people are using it. With the help of a survey and analysis of the collected data, benefits regarding the use of a microblogging tool such as Twitter can be presented. The publication shows evidence on how Twitter can enhance the knowledge of a given group or community by micro-connecting a diverse online audience. Statistical data was also used to support this research.
Tracy Tuten

Reading and the Web - Texts Without Context - NYTimes.com - 28 views

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

sme NYTimes technology Web 2.0 critic mashup

shared by Tracy Tuten on 08 Apr 10 - Cached
  • In his deliberately provocative — and deeply nihilistic — new book, “Reality Hunger,” the onetime novelist David Shields asserts that fiction “has never seemed less central to the culture’s sense of itself.”
  • Mr. Shields’s book consists of 618 fragments, including hundreds of quotations taken from other writers like Philip Roth, Joan Didion and Saul Bellow — quotations that Mr. Shields, 53, has taken out of context and in some cases, he says, “also revised, at least a little — for the sake of compression, consistency or whim.”
  • 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.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Mr. Lanier’s book, which makes an impassioned case for “a digital humanism,” is only one of many recent volumes to take a hard but judicious look at some of the consequences of new technology and Web 2.0. Among them are several prescient books by Cass Sunstein, 55, which explore the effects of the Internet on public discourse; Farhad Manjoo’s “True Enough,” which examines how new technologies are promoting the cultural ascendancy of belief over fact; “The Cult of the Amateur,” by Andrew Keen, which argues that Web 2.0 is creating a “digital forest of mediocrity” and substituting ill-informed speculation for genuine expertise; and Nicholas Carr’s book “The Shallows” (coming in June), which suggests that increased Internet use is rewiring our brains, impairing our ability to think deeply and creatively even as it improves our ability to multitask.
  • Steven Johnson, a founder of the online magazine Feed, for instance, wrote in an article in The Wall Street Journal last year that with the development of software for Amazon.com’s Kindle and other e-book readers that enable users to jump back and forth from other applications, he fears “one of the great joys of book reading — the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author’s ideas — will be compromised.” He continued, “We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.”
  • Tracy Tuten on 08 Apr 10
     
    Highly insightful and developed argument for how Web 2.0 is changing how we process information, learn, and develop opinions. 
James Spagnoletti

Göbekli Tepe - Pictures, More From National Geographic Magazine - 67 views

ngm.nationalgeographic.com/...1

religion history anthropology WHAP

shared by James Spagnoletti on 17 Sep 11 - No Cached
Ruth Howard liked it
  • The Birth of ReligionWe used to think agriculture gave rise to cities and later to writing, art, and religion. Now the world’s oldest temple suggests the urge to worship sparked civilization.
  • Before them are dozens of massive stone pillars arranged into a set of rings, one mashed up against the next. Known as Göbekli Tepe (pronounced Guh-behk-LEE TEH-peh), the site is vaguely reminiscent of Stonehenge, except that Göbekli Tepe was built much earlier and is made not from roughly hewn blocks but from cleanly carved limestone pillars splashed with bas-reliefs of animals—a cavalcade of gazelles, snakes, foxes, scorpions, and ferocious wild boars. The assemblage was built some 11,600 years ago, seven millennia before the Great Pyramid of Giza. It contains the oldest known temple. Indeed, Göbekli Tepe is the oldest known example of monumental architecture—the first structure human beings put together that was bigger and more complicated than a hut. When these pillars were erected, so far as we know, nothing of comparable scale existed in the world.
  • At the time of Göbekli Tepe's construction much of the human race lived in small nomadic bands that survived by foraging for plants and hunting wild animals. Construction of the site would have required more people coming together in one place than had likely occurred before. Amazingly, the temple's builders were able to cut, shape, and transport 16-ton stones hundreds of feet despite having no wheels or beasts of burden. The pilgrims who came to Göbekli Tepe lived in a world without writing, metal, or pottery; to those approaching the temple from below, its pillars must have loomed overhead like rigid giants, the animals on the stones shivering in the firelight—emissaries from a spiritual world that the human mind may have only begun to envision.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Archaeologists are still excavating Göbekli Tepe and debating its meaning. What they do know is that the site is the most significant in a volley of unexpected findings that have overturned earlier ideas about our species' deep past. Just 20 years ago most researchers believed they knew the time, place, and rough sequence of the Neolithic Revolution—the critical transition that resulted in the birth of agriculture, taking Homo sapiens from scattered groups of hunter-gatherers to farming villages and from there to technologically sophisticated societies with great temples and towers and kings and priests who directed the labor of their subjects and recorded their feats in written form. But in recent years multiple new discoveries, Göbekli Tepe preeminent among them, have begun forcing archaeologists to reconsider. At first the Neolithic Revolution was viewed as a single event—a sudden flash of genius—that occurred in a single location, Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now southern Iraq, then spread to India, Europe, and beyond. Most archaeologists believed this sudden blossoming of civilization was driven largely by environmental changes: a gradual warming as the Ice Age ended that allowed some people to begin cultivating plants and herding animals in abundance. The new research suggests that the "revolution" was actually carried out by many hands across a huge area and over thousands of years. And it may have been driven not by the environment but by something else entirely.
  • 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.
  • n 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 outpo
  • 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.
  • nches below the surface the team struck an elaborately fashioned stone. Then another, and another—a ring of standing pillars.
  • Geomagnetic surveys in 2003 revealed at least 20 rings piled together, higgledy-piggledy, under the earth.
  • he 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.
  • They hadn't yet mastered engineering." Knoll speculated that the pillars may have been propped up, perhaps by wooden posts.
  • 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.
  • Puzzle piled upon puzzle as the excavation continued. For reasons yet unknown, the rings at Göbekli Tepe seem to have regularly lost their power, or at least their charm. Every few decades people buried the pillars and put up new stones—a second, smaller ring, inside the first.
  • he site may have been built, filled in, and built again for centuries.
  • Bewilderingly, the people at Göbekli Tepe got steadily worse at temple building.
  • Finally the effort seems to have petered out altogether by 8200 B.C. Göbekli Tepe was all fall and no rise.
Marianne Hart

The Creativity Crisis - Newsweek - 48 views

www.newsweek.com/...the-creativity-crisis.html

shared by Marianne Hart on 13 Jul 10 - Cached
  • there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.
  • “Creativity can be taught,”
  • it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children
    • Brian C. Smith
      Brian C. Smith on 26 Jul 10
       
      Students are labeled as "creative" if they display a knack for art or music, and sometimes in writing, however, they are rarely recognized as creative in math or science where a lot of creativity is not only needed, but excellent for learning within those very two disciplines.
    • Bill Genereux
      Bill Genereux on 23 Aug 10
       
      This is precisely why creativity education is important. It is needed everywhere, not just in the arts. Those teaching outside of arts education need to start recognizing the importance of creative thinking as well.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”
  • The argument that we can’t teach creativity because kids already have too much to learn is a false trade-off. Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process.
  • When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available to the left hemisphere, which searches for unseen patterns, alternative meanings, and high-level abstractions. Having glimpsed such a connection, the left brain must quickly lock in on it before it escapes. The attention system must radically reverse gears, going from defocused attention to extremely focused attention. In a flash, the brain pulls together these disparate shreds of thought and binds them into a new single idea that enters consciousness. This is the “aha!” moment of insight, often followed by a spark of pleasure as the brain recognizes the novelty of what it’s come up with. Now the brain must evaluate the idea it just generated. Is it worth pursuing? Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas. Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate.
  • those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 23 Jul 10
       
      Surely, "more quickly"?
  • Creativity has always been prized in American society, but it’s never really been understood. While our creativity scores decline unchecked, the current national strategy for creativity consists of little more than praying for a Greek muse to drop by our houses. The problems we face now, and in the future, simply demand that we do more than just hope for inspiration to strike. Fortunately, the science can help: we know the steps to lead that elusive muse right to our doors.
    • Brian C. Smith
      Brian C. Smith on 26 Jul 10
       
      Likely because it was out of necessity and the hardships of life. Not that we don't have hardships and necessities, but innovation has solved a lot of problems and automation has made skills and tasks easy.
  • What’s common about successful programs is they alternate maximum divergent thinking with bouts of intense convergent thinking, through several stages. Real improvement doesn’t happen in a weekend workshop. But when applied to the everyday process of work or school, brain function improves.
    • Brian C. Smith
      Brian C. Smith on 26 Jul 10
       
      Everyday process of work or school... over time, consistent and non-prescriptive.
  • kids demonstrated the very definition of creativity: alternating between divergent and convergent thinking, they arrived at original and useful ideas. And they’d unwittingly mastered Ohio’s required fifth-grade curriculum—from understanding sound waves to per-unit cost calculations to the art of persuasive writing. “You never see our kids saying, ‘I’ll never use this so I don’t need to learn it,’ ” says school administrator Maryann Wolowiec. “Instead, kids ask, ‘Do we have to leave school now?’ ” Two weeks ago, when the school received its results on the state’s achievement test, principal Traci Buckner was moved to tears. The raw scores indicate that, in its first year, the school has already become one of the top three schools in Akron, despite having open enrollment by lottery and 42 percent of its students living in poverty.
  • project-based learning
  • highly creative adults frequently grew up with hardship. Hardship by itself doesn’t lead to creativity, but it does force kids to become more flexible—and flexibility helps with creativity.
  • When creative children have a supportive teacher—someone tolerant of unconventional answers, occasional disruptions, or detours of curiosity—they tend to excel. When they don’t, they tend to underperform and drop out of high school or don’t finish college at high rates. They’re quitting because they’re discouraged and bored, not because they’re dark, depressed, anxious, or neurotic. It’s a myth that creative people have these traits. (Those traits actually shut down creativity; they make people less open to experience and less interested in novelty.) Rather, creative people, for the most part, exhibit active moods and positive affect. They’re not particularly happy—contentment is a kind of complacency creative people rarely have. But they’re engaged, motivated, and open to the world.
  • solutions emerge from a healthy marketplace of ideas, sustained by a populace constantly contributing original ideas and receptive to the ideas of others
  • The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded.
  • When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.
  • The lore of pop psychology is that creativity occurs on the right side of the brain. But we now know that if you tried to be creative using only the right side of your brain, it’d be like living with ideas perpetually at the tip of your tongue, just beyond reach
  • those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better. A lifetime of consistent habits gradually changes the neurological pattern.
  • The home-game version of this means no longer encouraging kids to spring straight ahead to the right answer
  • The new view is that creativity is part of normal brain function.
  • “As a child, I never had an identity as a ‘creative person,’ ” Schwarzrock recalls. “But now that I know, it helps explain a lot of what I felt and went through.”
  • In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach.
  • fact-finding
  • problem-finding
  • Next, idea-finding
  • there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.
  • Christian Howd on 13 Jul 10
     
    For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. What went wrong-and how we can fix it.
Tonya Thomas

New Learning Institute - 0 views

www.newlearninginstitute.org

new learning resources tools

shared by Tonya Thomas on 25 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Tonya Thomas on 25 Sep 12
     
    "The New Learning Institute delivers engaging, personalized, project-based digital media programs to young people and educators. We work in classrooms, after-school centers, museums, and cultural institutions, or wherever learning takes place. Using the latest mobile technologies and digital media practices and tools, we help young people explore their interests, direct their own learning, and better prepare themselves for living and working in the 21st century."
Thieme Hennis

http://www.teachlr.com/ - 4 views

www.teachlr.com

platform learning education marketplace online

shared by Thieme Hennis on 12 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Thieme Hennis on 12 Nov 12
     
    Teachlr is building a completely state-of-the-art platform that enables anyone anywhere in the world to teach and share knowledge online. It's the virtual place to solve your needs and get real answers from real people. It's fun and educational because you get to ask questions on any topic and take classes on any matter. You can also help people out by answering others' questions or becoming a teacher. It's all about sharing what you know and what you want to know.
Andrew McCluskey

Six Words: Ask Who I Am, Not What : NPR - 67 views

www.npr.org/...ix-words-ask-who-i-am-not-what

race race card michele norris Writing six-word story story stories NPR

shared by Andrew McCluskey on 20 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Andrew McCluskey on 20 Mar 13
     
    "This month NPR begins a series of occasional conversations about The Race Card Project, where people can submit their thoughts on race and cultural identity in six words. Thousands of people have shared their six-word stories and every so often NPR Host/Special Correspondent Michele Norris will dip into the trove of six-word stories to explore issues surrounding race and cultural identity for Morning Edition. You can find hundreds of six-word submissions and submit your own at www.theracecardproject.com."
GP withMdmLin

Abortion laws cannot hinge on when life 'begins' - 15 views

www.todayonline.com/105511

abortion

shared by GP withMdmLin on 06 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • GP withMdmLin on 06 Apr 13
     
    In his letter, "Arguments that should be aborted" (April 3), Mr Devathas Satianathan states that it is unclear how Associate Professor Tan Seow Hon's religious view is relevant. From Edwin Dai Weiyun - 03 April In his letter, "Arguments that should be aborted" (April 3), Mr Devathas Satianathan states that it is unclear how Associate Professor Tan Seow Hon's religious view is relevant. However, I would ask if her premise is that life begins at six weeks from conception, or possibly earlier, an interpretation that would be informed by her religious views. To say that her view on this has no bearing on her commentary is intellectual dishonesty. She also cited recent legislative developments in North Dakota, a Bible Belt state. Mr Jason Cheng responded, in "Let pregnant women make their own moral choices" (April 2), that six weeks is insufficient time for women to detect their pregnancy, which basically results in a de facto ban on abortion. Mr Devathas argues that, in the balance between preserving a baby's life and a mother's choice, Mr Cheng fails to acknowledge the former. Ironically, Mr Devathas fails to acknowledge the latter. Where he discusses a valid point is in the question: When does life begin? Answers to such a question, though, are varied across society and influenced by the religious views, or a lack thereof, of the individual. It is unwise and unconstitutional for the State to legislate or endorse the moral views of any religious group over other members of society. People who hold strong pro-life views are free to bring their babies to full term. The same liberty should be accorded to People who hold pro-choice views."
  • Jason Castaldo on 08 Apr 13
     
    This does not seems to be educational but maybe I misunderstood what would be fed to me through diigo. In any event since it come through, I pose this philosophical non-religious question: If you were 2 weeks pregnant and I punched you in the stomach which in turn killed the fetus, it would definitely be assault on you, but should I be criminally responsible for the fetus? If so, why?
Glenn Hervieux

What is Jobs Made Real? | Jobs Made Real - 1 views

www.jobsmadereal.com/...what-is-jobs-made-real.html

careers videos

shared by Glenn Hervieux on 04 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Glenn Hervieux on 04 Apr 13
     
    "The website features thousands of videos of people describing and engaged in doing their jobs. The idea for the website was created in response to teens saying they do not know what people really do in their jobs, and therefore find it difficult to decide on a career direction.
John Evans

A Letter To Parents Of Digital Age Children - 2 views

www.teachthought.com/...arents-of-digital-age-children

letter parents digital children

shared by John Evans on 13 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • John Evans on 13 Feb 13
     
    "First, let me thank you for entrusting me with teaching your children, honoring the amazing individuals they are, and helping them discover the confident and empowered young people they can be. Providing a rich and engaging environment for your children to learn in is my utmost concern, but Iately I have had to acknowledge that the young people I see every day do much of the learning that is important to them when they leave the parking lot and head home from school. Thus, I am writing to solicit your help."
psmiley

Learnist | Share what you know - 2 views

learni.st/featured

learnist education tools sharing web2.0 bookmarking share knowledge

shared by psmiley on 13 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Steve Trumble on 13 Feb 13
     
    Everybody knows enough about some topic - be it English, science, yoga or bourbon - to teach other people about it. And every topic is covered by content scattered around the Web. The idea behind a new site called Learnist is to give everybody a spot to teach through curation. The site, which is also available as an app for iPhone and iPad, features user-created lessons that bring together Web pages, videos, Google Books e-books and other items on a specific topic. At the moment, only a relatively small group of people approved by the site - including some teachers - can create these "learnings," but anyone can check them out. Read more: http://techland.time.com/2012/09/18/50-best-websites-2012/#ixzz2KnPnZqks
  • Steve Trumble on 13 Feb 13
     
    Everybody knows enough about some topic to teach other people about it. And every topic is covered by content scattered around the Web. The idea behind a new site called Learnist is to give everybody a spot to teach through curation. The site, which is also available as an app for iPhone and iPad, features user-created lessons that bring together Web pages, videos, Google Books e-books and other items on a specific topic. At the moment, only a relatively small group of people approved by the site - including some teachers - can create these "learnings," but anyone can check them out.
  • psmiley on 22 May 13
     
    Curation
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