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Keith Rowley

Harvard Working Knowledge: Why Leaders Lose Their Way - Bill George - 1 views

  • Leaders who lose their way are not bad people; rather, they lose their moral bearings
  • we all have the capacity for actions we deeply regret unless we stay grounded.
  • Self-reflection: a path to leadership development
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  • narcissistic wounds from childhood.
    • Keith Rowley
       
      Their "crucibles." Or, as Eckhard Tolle calls it, "pain bodies".
  • What's the purpose of my leadership?
  • Why do I want to lead?
  • Often they reject the honest critic who speaks truth to power.
  • these problems are neither their fault nor their responsibility. Or they look for scapegoats to blame for their problems. Using their power, charisma, and communications skills, they force people to accept these distortions, causing entire organizations to lose touch with reality. At this stage leaders are vulnerable to making big mistakes, such as violating the law or putting their organizations' existence at risk. Their distortions convince them they are doing nothing wrong, or they rationalize that their deviations are acceptable to achieve a greater good.
    • Keith Rowley
       
      George W Bush!
  • Values-centered leadership
  • Leaders can avoid these pitfalls by devoting themselves to personal development that cultivates their inner compass, or True North.
  • reframing their leadership from being heroes to beingservants of the people they lead.
    • Keith Rowley
       
      Values-centerd leaders are "Go-Givers"
  • Leaders can avoid these pitfalls by devoting themselves to personal development that cultivates their inner compass, or True North. This requires reframing their leadership from being heroes to beingservants of the people they lead.
  • discipline
    • Keith Rowley
       
      Meditation is a good discipline to practice.
  • meditation
  • A system to support values-centered leadership The reality is that people cannot stay grounded by themselves. Leaders depend on people closest to them to stay centered. They should seek out people who influence them in profound ways and stay connected to them. Often their spouse or partner knows them best.
  • rue North Groups
    • Keith Rowley
       
      What is this???
  • Spouses and partners can't carry this entire burden though. We need mentors
  • heir choices don't matter, as long as they relieve stress and enable them to think clearly about work and personal issues.
  • Surround yourselves with people who will be honest with you about how you really are and what you are becoming, and then make them promise to not hold back… from telling you the truth."
  •  
    Values-centered leadership. Bill George is great!
Steve Ransom

Extraordinary teachers can't overcome poor classroom situations - latimes.com - 7 views

  • Still, it's become a popular fantasy that all you need is a superstar teacher, and that he or she will be just as effective even as budget cuts force us to pack more kids into each classroom.
  • we can't demand that teachers be excellent in conditions that preclude excellence.
Jackie Rippy

Soviet Psychology: Psychology and Marxism Internet Archive - 14 views

    • Jackie Rippy
       
      This points to stark differences - what about subtle differences between cultures. Do our symbols affect brain development - do our tools affect brain development?
  • Other Gestalt psychologists emphasized the common properties of mind in all cultures
  • shifts
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  • in the basic forms, as well as in the content of people's thinking.
  • The early 1930
  • had experienced the conditions necessary to alter radically the content and form of their thought.
  • we expected that they would display a predominance of those forms of thought that come from activity that is guided by the physical features of familiar objects.
  • Therefore we began, as most field work with people does, by emphasizing contact with the people who would serve as our subjects. We tried to establish friendly relations so that experimental sessions seemed natural and non-threatening. We were particularly careful not to conduct hasty or unprepared presentations of the test materials.
  • As a rule, our experimental sessions began with long conversations which were sometimes repeated with the subjects in the relaxed atmosphere of a tea house, where the villagers spent most of their free time, or in camps in the field and in mountain pastures around the evening campfire. These talks were frequently held in groups. Even when the interviews were held with one person, the experimenter and other subjects made up a group of two or three who listened attentively to the person being interviewed and who sometimes offered remarks or comments on what he said. The talk often took the form of a free-flowing exchange of opinion between participants, and a particular problem might be solved simultaneously by two or three subjects, each proposing an answer. Only gradually did the experimenters introduce the prepared tasks, which resembled the “riddles” familiar to the population and therefore seemed like a natural extension of the conversation.
  • He characterized primitive thinking as “prelogical” and “loosely organized.” Primitive people were said to be indifferent to logical contradiction and dominated by the idea that mystical forces control natural phenomena
  • We conceived the idea of carrying out the first far-reaching study of intellectual functions among adults from a non-technological non-literate, traditional society
  • hamlets
  • nomad
  • 1. Women living in remote villages who were illiterate and who were not involved in any modern social activities. There were still a considerable number of such women at the time our study was made. Their interviews were conducted by women, since they alone had the right to enter the women's quarters. 2. Peasants living in remote villages who were in no way involved with socialized labor and who continued to maintain an individualistic economy. These peasants were not literate. 3. Women who attended short-term courses in the teaching of kindergarteners. As a rule, they had no formal schooling and almost no training in literacy. 4. Active kolhoz (collective farm) workers and young people who had taken short courses. They were involved as chairmen running collective farms, as holders of other offices on the, collective farm, or as brigade leaders. They had considerable experience in planning production, distributing labor, and taking stock of output. By dealing with other collective farm members, they had acquired a much broader outlook than isolated peasants. But they had attended school only briefly, and many were still barely literate. 5. Women students admitted to teachers school after two or three years of study. Their educational qualifications, however, were still fairly low.
  • Short-term psychological experiments would have been highly problematic under the field conditions we expected to encounter
M Holthouse

eGFI - For Teachers » Lesson: Concrete for Kids - 36 views

  •  
    hands-on project for experimenting with concrete
Tamara Connors

Digitally Speaking / Social Bookmarking and Annotating - 58 views

  • Diigo's "group forums" are threaded, allowing users to start new strands or to reply to strands started by others.
  • powerful learning depends on the quality of the conversation that develops around the content being studied together. 
  • This handout--including a description of each role and a group sign-up sheet---can be used with student social bookmarking efforts: Handout_SocialBookmarkingRoles.pdf
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  • Captain Cannonball should find four or five key points in a shared reading to highlight and craft initial questions for other readers to consider
  • hallenging the thinking of peers in the conversation.  Directly responding to comments made by others, the Provocateur works to remind everyone that there are two sides to every story.    
  • for connections.  Middle Men
  • question statements made and conclusions drawn throughout a shared reading.
  • dentify important "takeaways" that a group can learn from
  •  
    Fred, What an incredible resource. It has changed my thinking about collaborative annotation technologies. Thank you! -tbf Todd Finley http://bit.ly/Hfs8N
  •  
    The driving force behind the Web 2.0 revolution is a spirit of intellectual philanthropy and collective intelligence that is made possible by new technologies for communication, collaboration and information management.  One of the best examples of collective intelligence in action are the wide range of social bookmarking applications that have been embraced in recent years.
D. S. Koelling

Font Size May Not Aid Learning, but Its Style Can, Researchers Find - NYTimes.com - 110 views

  • Is it easier to remember a new fact if it appears in normal type, like this, or in big, bold letters, like this?
  • Font size has no effect on memory, even though most people assume that bigger is better. But font style does.
  • New research finds that people retain significantly more material — whether science, history or language — when they study it in a font that is not only unfamiliar but also hard to read.
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  • “So much of the learning that we do now is unsupervised, on our own,” said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, “that it’s crucial to be able to monitor that learning accurately; that is, to know how well we know what we know, so that we avoid fooling ourselves.”
  • “Studying something in the presence of an answer, whether it’s conscious or not, influences how you interpret the question,” Dr. Bjork said. “You don’t appreciate all of the other things that would have come to mind if the answer weren’t there. “Let’s say you’re studying capitals and you see that Australia’s is Canberra. O.K., that seems easy enough. But when the exam question appears, you think: ‘Uh oh, was it Sydney? Melbourne? Adelaide?’ ” That’s why some experts are leery of students’ increasing use of online sites like Cramster, Course Hero, Koofers and others that offer summaries, step-by-step problem solving and copies of previous exams. The extra help may provide a valuable supplement to a difficult or crowded course, but it could also leave students with a false sense of mastery. Even course outlines provided by a teacher, a textbook or other outside source can create a false sense of security, some research suggests. In one experiment, researchers found that participants studying a difficult chapter on the industrial uses of microbes remembered more when they were given a poor outline — which they had to rework to match the material — than a more accurate one.
  • a cognitive quality known as fluency, a measure of how easy a piece of information is to process.
  • On real tests, font size made no difference and practice paid off, the study found.
  • And so it goes, researchers say, with most study sessions: difficulty builds mental muscle, while ease often builds only confidence.
  • To test the approach in the classroom, the researchers conducted a large experiment involving 222 students at a public school in Chesterland, Ohio. One group had all its supplementary study materials, in English, history and science courses, reset in an unusual font, like Monotype Corsiva. The others studied as before. After the lessons were completed, the researchers evaluated the classes’ relevant tests and found that those students who’d been squinting at the stranger typefaces did significantly better than the others in all the classes — particularly in physics. “The reason that the unusual fonts are effective is that it causes us to think more deeply about the material,” a co-author of the study, Daniel M. Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Princeton, wrote in an e-mail. “But we are capable of thinking deeply without being subjected to unusual fonts. Think of it this way, you can’t skim material in a hard to read font, so putting text in a hard-to-read font will force you to read more carefully.” Then again, so will raw effort, he and other researchers said. Concentrating harder. Making outlines from scratch. Working through problem sets without glancing at the answers. And studying with classmates who test one another.
  •  
    Students' raw effort improves learning [No surprise there, huh?]
D. S. Koelling

Helping First-Year Students Help Themselves - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 1 views

  • According to a yearly national survey of more than 200,000 first-year students conducted by researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles, college freshmen are increasingly "overwhelmed," rating their emotional health at the lowest levels in the 25 years the question has been asked. Such is the latest problem dropped at the offices of higher-education administrators and professors nationwide: Young adults raised with a single-minded focus on gaining admission to college now need help translating that focus into ways to thrive on campus and beyond.
  • Many young adults weren't taught the basic life skills and coping mechanisms for challenging times.
  • The consequences for students who lack those skills have become increasingly clear both on campus and after graduation. At Pitt, where I teach, and at other institutions, student-life administrators have noticed a marked decrease in resiliency, particularly among first-year students. That leads to an increase in everything from roommate disagreements to emotional imbalance and crisis. After graduation, employers complain that a lack of coping mechanisms makes for less proficient workers: According to a 2006 report by the Conference Board, a business-research group, three-quarters of surveyed employers said incoming new graduates were deficient in "soft" skills like communication and decision making.
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  • Parents and high-school educators certainly have a role to play, but college administrators and professors cannot abdicate their role as an influential socialization force to guide young adults toward better self-management.
  • The way to combat the decline in emotional health among first-year students is to offer them opportunities to build such self-efficacy from the start.
  • Teaching interpersonal skills of self-presentation is also essential, as it makes students' interactions with roommates, professors, and professional colleagues flow more smoothly. By following suggestions popularized by Dale Carnegie during the Great Depression—to think in terms of the interests of others, smile, and express honest and sincere appreciation—my Generation WTF students report being happily stunned by more-successful interviews, better relationships with family members, and more-meaningful interactions with friends.
  • While much of my advice seems revolutionary to them, adults from previous generations know that I'm simply teaching a return to core values of self-control, honesty, thrift, and perseverance­—the basic skills that will allow those in "emerging adulthood" to get on with life.
Ryan Trauman

English 102 - Bear | Blog | The review of Ideas - 14 views

shared by Ryan Trauman on 30 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • “If we want to actually reduce the number of divorces, we need to make divorce less appealing to women.”(Davidson). What Davidson is expressing is that women are attracted to divorce. Marriage was once a partnership. “A person doesn’t cling to what they do not need. Therefore a woman will not cling to a man who is not needed.”(Feldman) Feldmon forwards Davidson’s thought, but it adds to it. Marriage is hard enough. If a the partner is not needed why would either party wish to go through the difficulties. “The origins of marriage was a simple set up, the man worked, the woman did not.”(Hendrix) Hendrix continues to expand on a common thought of partnership. Hendrix shows that originally that marriage partners were dependent on each other. The woman was dependent on the man for money and the man dependent on the woman for the upkeep of the house. Was it the best system? Possibly. Couples stuck together back then. They fought tooth and nail to keep their marriage strong and did what was best for the family. However, no one disagrees with women becoming part of the work force. “We need to find a middle ground”(Cochrane). Cochrane is speaking on  the terms of interdependence. She is saying that there has to be a middle ground between the powers.
    • Ryan Trauman
       
      Excellent "conversational style" here, Daniel.
  • very article agrees on one thing.
    • Ryan Trauman
       
      Good, but where are you other sources? If everyone agrees, can you show us little pieces of text that deomonstrate how they agree?
  • Hendrix
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Hendrix
  • Anderson
  • Cochrane
  • Feldman
Randolph Hollingsworth

Group Rumbler, assigning groups in large audience via Excel file - 35 views

  •  
    Group assignment via Excel file (.xls file with programming scripts - need to turn security settings to low); provides diversity within each group based on characterizations of each student; can also generate sequences of up to 10 successive group assignments (e.g., keep students apart who have been together in any group before).
Cath Horan

RBA: Speech-The Economic Outlook - 8 views

  • world economy has continued its expansion
  • 2014 economic global growth is thought likely by major forecasters to be a bit higher than in 2013
  • growth is coming from the advanced countries
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • United States continues its recovery led by private demand and over the second half of last year the economy expanded at an annualised rate of just over 3 per cent.
  • The euro area has resumed growth, albeit in a somewhat hesitant fashion and with noticeable differences in performance by country.
  • A few emerging economies have lately come under pressure,
  • In fact were the Bank of Japan (BoJ) to step up its current program of quantitative and qualitative easing, it would soon be adding more cash to the global financial system, in absolute terms, than the Federal Reserve.
  • China's economy grew close to, and in fact a little faster than, the government's target last year. Strong and about equal contributions to growth were made by household consumption and investment. Consumer price inflation continues to be stable.
  • Recent indicators have shown possible signs of slower growth in the early part of 2014: growth of industrial production slowed; retail sales and passenger vehicle sales moderated; and fixed asse
  • Australia certainly weathered the financial crisis well, and with a real GDP some 13 per cent larger than it was at the beginning of 2009, compares well with many other advanced countries. It is the case, though, that growth while positive, has been running at a pace a bit below its trend pace for about 18 months now. The rate of unemployment has increased by something like a percentage point over the same period.
  • strong conditions in the natural resources sector.
  • n the rest of the economy, households have spent most of the past five years behaving more conservatively, or rather more normally, than they did over a long period up to the mid 2000s when they had been in a very expansive mood. Both consumption and residential construction have been soft for a while.
  • esources sector's capital spending continues to fall, it
  • It is unlikely, though, that a pick-up in resources exports, as important as that will be, will be enough to keep overall growth on the right trac
  • Recent data shows stronger household consumption over the summer. The latest surve
  • bundant signs of confidence in the housing market
  • Measures of business confidence have improved over the past six months. Businesses seem, so far, to be taking a cautious approach to investment,
  • is important to stress that this outlook is, obviously, a balance between the large negative force of declining mining investment and, working the other way, the likely pick up in some other areas of demand helped by very low interest rates, improved confidence and so on, as well as higher resource shipments. The lower exchange rate since last April and the improved economic conditions overseas also help.
  • On inflation, our view is that it will be a little higher than we thought three months ago
Marti Pike

BBC News - Stephen Hawking warns artificial intelligence could end mankind - 22 views

  • suggests the words he might want to use next.
    • Marti Pike
       
      Some Smart Phones already do a little of this. 
  • useful
  • re-design itself at an ever increasing rate,
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution,
  • fooling a high proportion of people into believing they are talking to a human.
  • algorithms
  • believes it will come in the next few decades.
  • But he is betting that AI is going to be a positive force.
  • destroy millions of jobs.
  • Elon Musk has warned that AI is "our biggest existential threat".
  • "The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race."
  • "More must be done by the internet companies to counter the threat, but the difficulty is to do this without sacrificing freedom and privacy."
  • write much faster with his new system.
  • he didn't want a more natural voice.
  • children who need a computer voice
Monica Williams-Mitchell

Education in the Age of Globalization » Blog Archive » Five Questions to Ask about the Common Core* - 29 views

  • Daniel Pink observed, traditionally neglected talents, which he refers to as Right-brained directed skills, including design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning, will become more valuable (Pink, 2006).
    • Monica Williams-Mitchell
       
      YES! We need to address these things. I don't see them as incompatible w CC, however.
  • international assessments such as PISA and TIMSS, which are mostly left-brained cognitive skills.
  • Common Core does not include an element to prepare the future generations to live in this globalized world and interact with people from different cultures.
    • Monica Williams-Mitchell
       
      But does that simple fact prevent us from addressing this? I think not.
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  • Common Core, by forcing children to master the same curriculum, essentially discriminates against talents that are not consistent with their prescribed knowledge and skills.
    • Monica Williams-Mitchell
       
      Is this any different from the current situation? Is this author arguing that we should not have common standards, or that we should maintain our current status quo of a patchwork of test-driven standards?
  • A well organized, tightly controlled, and well-executed education system can transmit the prescribed content much more effectively than one that is less organized, loosely monitored, and less unified. In the meantime, the latter allows for exceptions with more room for individual exploration and experimentation
    • Monica Williams-Mitchell
       
      I think the problem lies in seeing this as an either-or question. Any system that relies solely on testing as the measure of success is short-sighted and archaic. Having no identified common ground puts at risk the learners who most need a firm starting point. To say that the current system allows "more room for individual exploration and experimentation" is naive at best and disingenuous at worst. Where in test-crazed American schools do you see this happening??
  •  
    A provocative article by Yong Zhao on CCSS and reflective questions we ought to as ourselves.
anonymous

The Power of Digital Story | Edutopia - 45 views

  • places of learning must be places of listening that allow time and space for the speed of life to be digested in a meaningful way.
  • the flood of technology tools that allow for instant communication has spun us back into a golden age where story again dominates the media landscape
  • Great digital stories are rooted in their narrative.
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  • A thousand words isn't the true power of images. Great images link story elements, humanize the abstract, and force the audience to see invisible people and places. Images are a gateway into the soul of stories.
  • the best of digital storytelling comes from the art of iteration
  • Today's best tools for digital story will quickly become relics
  • story inspires story
Julia Gardiner

Lateline - 29/10/2012: PMs plan for every child to learn an Asian language - 14 views

    • Julia Gardiner
       
      The rationale or thinking behind introducing languages early in primary school
  • Gillard Government's Asian Century white paper sets an aspiration for Australia to rank as the world's 10th biggest economy by 2025, capitalising on the rapid economic growth in the region.
  • education will be the key and wants all school students to study an Asian language.
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  • funded
  • where all the new teachers might come from
  • where all the new teachers might come from.
  • the gold standard
    • Julia Gardiner
       
       The gold standard =any excellent example of something, like how Olympians are the gold standard for athletes
  • If you understand through the learning of language how people think, how they construct meaning, what is important to them culturally, then I think that gives us better insights into the people that we're going to be working with in the future and negotiating with.
  • The Prime Minister says she'll force the curriculum changes by tying them to Commonwealth funding to state and private schools.
    • Julia Gardiner
       
      Is this  good policy making? Some would  consider  it 'blackmail'!
  • Broadly, teachers and education experts have welcomed the plan, but question where the money is going to come from.
  • catchcry of the Hawke and Keating governments
    • Julia Gardiner
       
      The Hawke-Keating Government refers to the Federal Government of Australia from 11 March 1983 to 11 March 1996. It was a Labour government
  • Currently across all levels of schooling there's around 18 per cent of our young people who are studying one of the four priority Asian languages: Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian and Korean. And that diminishes to fewer than 6 per cent by the time they get to Year 12.
    • Julia Gardiner
       
      How do we encourage students to  continue  learning an Asian language into the final years  of high school and  eyond?
  • say we simply don't have enough Asian language teachers to deliver the Prime Minister's vision and for the last decade the numbers of graduates have been declining.
  • hat's happened because universities have been under these budget constraints and when they've made decisions about what to cut, they cut courses with low enrolments and there goes the languages.
  • JEANNIE REA, PRESIDENT, NATIONAL TERTIARY EDUCATION UNION
    • Julia Gardiner
       
      Suggested reasons for the decline in language graduates and therefore  in language teachers. 
  • will help.JULIA GILLARD: We live in an age of different learning possibilities and choices. What we can do through the National Broadband Network, what we can do through having the world's first online national curriculum, which is what the Australian curriculum is, means we can get a deeper penetration of language, literacy and learning.
  • e Prime Minister acknowledges the shortages, but says technology
  • will help.
    • Julia Gardiner
       
      This argument t can be debated.  It would suggest that technology in itself will be a solution!
  • we need to be looking very carefully at what sort of encouragement and incentives we can provide to students so they continue doing a language, go on and major in a language in university and then go on to teach in the area.
  • JEANNIE REA:
    • Julia Gardiner
       
      What type of incentive scan be offered/
  •  
    The Prime Minister wants all school students to study an Asian language to secure Australia's future in the Asian Century.
  •  
    Completely deluded. Even here in Singapore, surrounded supposedly by chinese speakers the international schools are not getting it right and success stories are unusual ...
James Spagnoletti

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

  • 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.
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  • 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.
Dennis Thomas

Great Teachers Don't Teach | Edutopia - 13 views

  • great teachers engineer learning experiences that maneuver the students into the driver's seat and then the teachers get out of the way.
  • great teacher will devise a way to give the students an urgent reason to learn skills or knowledge and then let them show they have learned it by what they can do. This is called project-based learning.
  • Students learn best when they are in control of their learning
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • great teacher devises learning experiences that force all the students to be engaged much like being in the deep end of the swimming pool. Then the lesson on arm and leg strokes becomes relevant. To learn, the students must do something. We call this performance-based learning.
  • Socrates had it right when he only answered a question with more questions and look what he produced -- some of the greatest minds that ever lived. We call this the Socratic method.
  • Yet what do we find in every public school and university? Teachers talking, talking and talking while students listen, daydream and doze. We call this lecture.
  • One characteristic of an effective teacher is that they don't teach.
Marianne Hart

The Creativity Crisis - Newsweek - 48 views

  • 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
       
      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
       
      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
       
      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
       
      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
       
      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.
  •  
    For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. What went wrong-and how we can fix it.
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