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Martin Burrett

Storytelling For Assessment by @JamietheColes - 13 views

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    "You are obsessed with stories. I am obsessed with stories. We are obsessed with stories. Even when you go to sleep at night, your mind stays awake telling itself stories in your dreams.  It's predicted that modern humans began to speak language around 100,000 years ago. It's no great leap of the imagination to assume they started telling stories not long after.  We're obsessed with stories. But why? It's how we make sense of the world. We have a deep neurological compulsion to find patterns. "
Diana Irene Saldana

Video Reviews by Kids, For Kids | Kids Movie Reviews | Kids Book Reviews | Kids Apps | Kids Social Network | Kids Film School | http://www.kidzvuz.com - 58 views

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    Safe place for kids, 7-12 years old, to review a variety of sources: tech, toys and games, movies and TV, books and magazines, food, sports, pets, travel, obsessions, contests.
dmassicg

Why Smartphone-Obsessed Generation Y Can't Put Down Their Phones - 95 views

  • The smartphone: man's new best friend -- at least for Generation Y.
Aelius Rusticus

Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 61, Stanley Elkin - 0 views

  • It’s a rare joke that is funny. Only situations are funny.
    • Aelius Rusticus
       
      I asked my cat why he didn't help me with the elaborate vegetable soup I was preparing. When he had no quick answer, I suggested it was because he had no stock in it. My wit, pedestrian in the grand scheme, nonetheless amused me in the moment. Funny situation or funny word-play? or neither?
  • “The point of life was the possibility it always held out for the exceptional.”
  • to do the kinds of things which people don’t really do in real life but which they do do in fiction—to follow their own irrational—but sane—obsessions which, achieved, would satisfy them. Alas, these guys never catch up with their obsessions.
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  • There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think, “Jesus Christ, how many more months do I have left?” or years, I hope. I am totally preoccupied with death. I mean my own death. Barth, for example, has said that he comes from very good stock and expects to live a long time. Bill Gass thinks that one of the reasons he takes so much time writing his novels—it took him ten years to write Omensetter’s Luck—is that he has an infinite amount of time left to him. I don’t believe that I have an infinite amount of time left to me. Probably I would be a healthier man if I did believe it.
  • making a scratch on a stone?
  • it’s not a question of making imaginary leaps or having a third eye. It’s a question of using the two eyes I have—and looking hard and close at things.
  • That kind of observation can be taught. I also try to teach them how to recognize a situation, what legitimately is a situation and what isn’t. Those are the only things that can be taught. I can’t teach a person style. I can’t teach him to write, in terms of language. But I can teach them that things look like other things.
  • Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers, a collection of short stories (1966)
  • junk jewelry’s meteorological condition—its Fall line and Spring.
  • I don’t believe that less is more. I believe that more is more. I believe that less is less, fat fat, thin thin and enough is enough.
  • particular existential writers?
  • the SELF takes precedence.
  • Camus
  • in the better restaurants.
  • Barth is wonderful, but the Barth I really admire is back there in the Golden Age of Barth.
  • Bellow I think is a magnificent writer—probably, with Gass, the best writer in America.
  • I think Gass is the best word-man in America.
  • There’s marvelous language in Pricksongs and Descants but it’s subsidiary to the experiment with structure. I tell you this for your own good, Bob. The reason I like Gass so much is that Gass is not fucking around with structure. He is fucking around with language. That to me is legitimate and acceptable, and the furthest out you can go is the best place to be. That’s what’s so magnificent about Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote very conventional plays, but the language wasn’t conventional.
  • the great gift of fiction—is that it gives language an opportunity to happen.
  • palimpsest of metaphor right there on the page. One gets a notion of the conceit and one is inspired to work with it as a draftsman might work with some angle that he is interested in getting down correctly.
Marc Patton

Utah 3D panoramic pictures - 35 views

shared by Marc Patton on 14 Aug 12 - Cached
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    Martin van Hemert is a photographer based in Utah. He is actively involved in architectural, product, and fine art photography. Throughout his career, he has consistently been drawn to more labor intensive forms of the art, from baking films in hydrogen for astronomical photography, to long exposures and light painting of outdoor scenes photographed on 4×5 sheet films, to his current obsession with spherical panoramas. Born to a family of Dutch immigrants, he studied music at the University of Utah, following which he made the logical choice of a career in photography. Martin and his wife are the parents of three grown children and one un-grown grandchild, and live in rural Utah County with a small herd of horses. Their rodent control staff boasts 7 members.
Matt Renwick

How our photo obsession is threatening our memories - Quartz - 35 views

  • when the students took photos, they remembered fewer objects overall
  • when we count on external devices such as a computer, we actually remember less
  • The key to remembering more is revisiting and sharing our photos.
Roland Gesthuizen

Why You Should Stop Obsessing Over Your Competitors - 22 views

  • You cannot discover new oceans unless you have the courage to step away from the shore
  • doing something unprecedented is not just adventurous but imperative, and that the far bigger risk is focusing on current competitors as the barometer of strategy.
  • Eliminating competition by trying to beat it is dangerously shortsighted. It deflects the attention and the resources of an organization away from the far more important and exciting question of how to shape consumer lifestyles. 
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    Gabor George Burt is an internationally recognized expert on innovation, creativity and strategy development. His book Slingshot explores the connection between systematic creativity and smart strategy.
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    Some good lessons here for school leadership that is always focussed on what other schools are doing.
Lisa C. Hurst

Inside the School Silicon Valley Thinks Will Save Education | WIRED - 9 views

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    "AUTHOR: ISSIE LAPOWSKY. ISSIE LAPOWSKY DATE OF PUBLICATION: 05.04.15. 05.04.15 TIME OF PUBLICATION: 7:00 AM. 7:00 AM INSIDE THE SCHOOL SILICON VALLEY THINKS WILL SAVE EDUCATION Click to Open Overlay Gallery Students in the youngest class at the Fort Mason AltSchool help their teacher, Jennifer Aguilar, compile a list of what they know and what they want to know about butterflies. CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/WIRED SO YOU'RE A parent, thinking about sending your 7-year-old to this rogue startup of a school you heard about from your friend's neighbor's sister. It's prospective parent information day, and you make the trek to San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood. You walk up to the second floor of the school, file into a glass-walled conference room overlooking a classroom, and take a seat alongside dozens of other parents who, like you, feel that public schools-with their endless bubble-filled tests, 38-kid classrooms, and antiquated approach to learning-just aren't cutting it. At the same time, you're thinking: this school is kind of weird. On one side of the glass is a cheery little scene, with two teachers leading two different middle school lessons on opposite ends of the room. But on the other side is something altogether unusual: an airy and open office with vaulted ceilings, sunlight streaming onto low-slung couches, and rows of hoodie-wearing employees typing away on their computers while munching on free snacks from the kitchen. And while you can't quite be sure, you think that might be a robot on wheels roaming about. Then there's the guy who's standing at the front of the conference room, the school's founder. Dressed in the San Francisco standard issue t-shirt and jeans, he's unlike any school administrator you've ever met. But the more he talks about how this school uses technology to enhance and individualize education, the more you start to like what he has to say. And so, if you are truly fed up with the school stat
Enid Baines

Top 10 Ways to Wake-up Students in Class - SimpleK12 - 51 views

  • . Require students to give answers in their best British accent.
  • Have Chuck Norris randomly appear in one of your Power Points roundhouse kicking a wolf. For some reason, students are obsessed with him.
  • Play a sound clip of the Mission Impossible theme, have them act as 007 until the music stops. Then, whoever they end up next to, that is their partner for the activity
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  • Place random discussion or reading comprehension questions on sticky notes underneath a handful of desks. When you are ready to ask questions, ask them to peek and read-aloud the questions.
elsjekool

Paul Ford: What is Code? | Bloomberg - 35 views

  • There are keynote speakers—often the people who created the technology at hand or crafted a given language. There are the regular speakers, often paid not at all or in airfare, who present some idea or technique or approach. Then there are the panels, where a group of people are lined up in a row and forced into some semblance of interaction while the audience checks its e-mail.
  • Fewer than a fifth of undergraduate degrees in computer science awarded in 2012 went to women, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology
  • The average programmer is moderately diligent, capable of basic mathematics, has a working knowledge of one or more programming languages, and can communicate what he or she is doing to management and his or her peers
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  • The true measure of a language isn’t how it uses semicolons; it’s the standard library of each language. A language is software for making software. The standard library is a set of premade software that you can reuse and reapply.
  • A coder needs to be able to quickly examine and identify which giant, complex library is the one that’s the most recently and actively updated and the best match for his or her current needs. A coder needs to be a good listener.
  • Code isn’t just obscure commands in a file. It requires you to have a map in your head, to know where the good libraries, the best documentation, and the most helpful message boards are located. If you don’t know where those things are, you will spend all of your time searching, instead of building cool new things.
  • Some tools are better for certain jobs.
  • C is a simple language, simple like a shotgun that can blow off your foot. It allows you to manage every last part of a computer—the memory, files, a hard drive—which is great if you’re meticulous and dangerous if you’re sloppy
  • Object-oriented programming is, at its essence, a filing system for code.
  • Where C tried to make it easier to do computer things, Smalltalk tried to make it easier to do human things.
  • Style and usage matter; sometimes programmers recommend Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style—that’s right, the one about the English language. Its focus on efficient usage resonates with programmers. The idiom of a language is part of its communal identity.
  • Coding is a culture of blurters.
  • Programmers carve out a sliver of cognitive territory for themselves and go to conferences, and yet they know their position is vulnerable.
  • Programmers are often angry because they’re often scared.
  • Programming is a task that rewards intense focus and can be done with a small group or even in isolation.
  • For a truly gifted programmer, writing code is a side effect of thought
  • As a class, programmers are easily bored, love novelty, and are obsessed with various forms of productivity enhancement.
  • “Most programming languages are partly a way of expressing things in terms of other things and partly a basic set of given things.”
  • Of course, while we were trying to build a bookstore, we actually built the death of bookstores—that seems to happen a lot in the business. You set out to do something cool and end up destroying lots of things that came before.
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    A lengthy but worthy read for all non-programmers on code.
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    Explains code
Brianna Crowley

Why Schools Don't Teach Innovation - Walt Gardner's Reality Check - Education Week - 10 views

  • most schools are designed and operated to penalize failure. Yet unless students are allowed to fail, they can't learn.
  • young innovators are intrinsically motivated.
  • Reformers can't have it both ways. If they want schools to develop the next Steve Jobs or J.J. Rowling, they have to let go of their obsession with test scores as indispensable evidence of quality education
Steve Ransom

The fantasies driving school reform: A primer for education graduates - The Answer Sheet - The Washington Post - 5 views

  • Richard Rothstein
  • In truth, this conventional view relies upon imaginary facts.
  • Let me repeat: black elementary school students today have better math skills than white students did only twenty years ago.
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  • As a result, we’ve wasted 15 years avoiding incremental improvement, and instead trying to upend a reasonably successful school system.
  • But the reason it hasn’t narrowed is that your profession has done too good a job — you’ve improved white children’s performance as well, so the score gap persists, but at a higher level for all.
  • Policymakers, pundits, and politicians ignore these gains; they conclude that you, educators, have been incompetent because the test score gap hasn’t much narrowed.
  • If you believe public education deserves greater support, as I do, you will have to boast about your accomplishments, because voters are more likely to aid a successful institution than a collapsing one.
  • In short, underemployment of parents is not only an economic crisis — it is an educational crisis. You cannot ignore it and be good educators.
  • equally important educational goals — citizenship, character, appreciation of the arts and music, physical fitness and health, and knowledge of history, the sciences, and literature.
  • If you have high expectations, your students can succeed regardless of parents’ economic circumstances. That is nonsense.
  • health insurance; children are less likely to get routine and preventive care that middle class children take for granted
  • If they can’t see because they don’t get glasses to correct vision difficulties, high expectations can’t teach them to read.
  • Because education has become so politicized, with policy made by those with preconceptions of failure and little understanding of the educational process, you are entering a field that has become obsessed with evaluating only results that are easy to measure, rather than those that are most important. But as Albert Einstein once said, not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts.
  • To be good educators, you must step up your activity not only in the classroom, but as citizens. You must speak up in the public arena, challenging those policymakers who will accuse you only of making excuses when you speak the truth that children who are hungry, mobile, and stressed, cannot learn as easily as those who are comfortable.
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    An important read for anyone who truly wants to understand what's really important in education and the false reform strategies of our current (and past) administration.
Andy Whiteway

Building an Internet Culture - 0 views

  • ten conclusions that might guide a country's development of a culturally appropriate Internet policy
  • Do not spend vast sums of money to buy machinery that you are going to set down on top of existing dysfunctional institutions. The Internet, for example, will not fix your schools. Perhaps the Internet can be part of a much larger and more complicated plan for fixing your schools, but simply installing an Internet connection will almost surely be a waste of money.
  • Learning how to use the Internet is primarily a matter of institutional arrangements, not technical skills
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  • Build Internet civil society. Find those people in every sector of society that want to use the Internet for positive social purposes, introduce them to one another, and connect them to their counterparts in other countries around the world. Numerous organizations in other countries can help with this.
  • Machinery does not reform society, repair institutions, build social networks, or produce a democratic culture. People must do those things, and the Internet is simply one tool among many. Find talented people and give them the tools they need. When they do great things, contribute to your society's Internet culture by publicizing their ideas.
  • For children, practical experience in organizing complicated social events, for example theater productions, is more important than computer skills. The Internet can be a powerful tool for education if it is integrated into a coherent pedagogy. But someone who has experience with the social skills of organizing will immediately comprehend the purpose of the Internet, and will readily acquire the technical skills when the time comes
  • Conduct extensive, structured analysis of the technical and cultural environment. Include the people whose work will actually be affected. A shared analytical process will help envision how the technology will fit into the whole way of life around it, and the technology will have a greater chance of actually being used.
  • Don't distribute the technology randomly. Electronic mail is useless unless the people you want to communicate with are also online, and people will not read their e-mail unless they want to. Therefore, you should focus your effort on particular communities, starting with the communities that have a strong sense of identity, a good record of sharing information, and a collective motivation to get online.
    • Andy Whiteway
       
      This community could so easily be the students - but how often do schools seem to be obsessed with givgin staff lots of access to technology and email but block/restrict students' use of it?
Ed Webb

The Scarlet "P" | TechTicker - 0 views

  • To me “sound pedagogy” isn’t a guarded gateway through which all things must pass before becoming true learning, it’s an ideal that should permeate and inform everything.
    • Ed Webb
       
      nicely put!
  • the perpetual conflict between the educational technology unit and the learning and teaching unit
  • The educational technologist are seen to be tech-obsessed, light on pedagogy and prone to obscure abbreviations; while the academics are stereotyped as waffley anti-technologists with a love of chalk-and-talk. Adding to this complexity, each sphere tends to be characterised by a distinct culture and common language. Often times the divisions are so clearly delineated that, despite units merging on paper, the two spheres operate largely independently of one another.
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  • We won’t always agree with one another, but once we start using language instead of hiding behind it we can begin to actually communicate.
Benjamin Light

The Costs of Overemphasizing Achievement - 83 views

  • First, students tend to lose interest in whatever they’re learning. As motivation to get good grades goes up, motivation to explore ideas tends to go down. Second, students try to avoid challenging tasks whenever possible. More difficult assignments, after all, would be seen as an impediment to getting a top grade. Finally, the quality of students’ thinking is less impressive. One study after another shows that creativity and even long-term recall of facts are adversely affected by the use of traditional grades.
    • Deb White Groebner
       
      SO true!
    • Terie Engelbrecht
       
      Very true; especially the "avoiding challenging tasks" part.
  • Unhappily, assessment is sometimes driven by entirely different objectives--for example, to motivate students (with grades used as carrots and sticks to coerce them into working harder) or to sort students (the point being not to help everyone learn but to figure out who is better than whom)
  • Standardized tests often have the additional disadvantages of being (a) produced and scored far away from the classroom, (b) multiple choice in design (so students can’t generate answers or explain their thinking), (c) timed (so speed matters more than thoughtfulness) and (d) administered on a one-shot, high-anxiety basis.
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  • The test designers will probably toss out an item that most students manage to answer correctly.
  • the evidence suggests that five disturbing consequences are likely to accompany an obsession with standards and achievement:
  • 1. Students come to regard learning as a chore.
  • intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation tend to be inversely related: The more people are rewarded for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward.
  • 2. Students try to avoid challenging tasks.
  • they’re just being rational. They have adapted to an environment where results, not intellectual exploration, are what count. When school systems use traditional grading systems--or, worse, when they add honor rolls and other incentives to enhance the significance of grades--they are unwittingly discouraging students from stretching themselves to see what they’re capable of doing.
  • 3. Students tend to think less deeply.
  • 4. Students may fall apart when they fail.
  • 5. Students value ability more than effort
    • Deb White Groebner
       
      This is the reinforcement of a "fixed mindset" (vs. (growth mindset) as described by Carol Dweck.
  • They seem to be fine as long as they are succeeding, but as soon as they hit a bump they may regard themselves as failures and act as though they’re helpless to do anything about it.
  • When the point isn’t to figure things out but to prove how good you are, it’s often hard to cope with being less than good.
  • It may be the systemic demand for high achievement that led him to become debilitated when he failed, even if the failure is only relative.
  • But even when better forms of assessment are used, perceptive observers realize that a student’s score is less important than why she thinks she got that score.
  • just smart
  • luck:
  • tried hard
  • task difficulty
  • It bodes well for the future
  • the punch line: When students are led to focus on how well they are performing in school, they tend to explain their performance not by how hard they tried but by how smart they are.
  • In their study of academically advanced students, for example, the more that teachers emphasized getting good grades, avoiding mistakes and keeping up with everyone else, the more the students tended to attribute poor performance to factors they thought were outside their control, such as a lack of ability.
  • When students are made to think constantly about how well they are doing, they are apt to explain the outcome in terms of who they are rather than how hard they tried.
  • And if children are encouraged to think of themselves as "smart" when they succeed, doing poorly on a subsequent task will bring down their achievement even though it doesn’t have that effect on other kids.
  • The upshot of all this is that beliefs about intelligence and about the causes of one’s own success and failure matter a lot. They often make more of a difference than how confident students are or what they’re truly capable of doing or how they did on last week’s exam. If, like the cheerleaders for tougher standards, we look only at the bottom line, only at the test scores and grades, we’ll end up overlooking the ways that students make sense of those results.
  • the problem with tests is not limited to their content.
  • if too big a deal is made about how students did, thus leading them (and their teachers) to think less about learning and more about test outcomes.
  • As Martin Maehr and Carol Midgley at the University of Michigan have concluded, "An overemphasis on assessment can actually undermine the pursuit of excellence."
  • Only now and then does it make sense for the teacher to help them attend to how successful they’ve been and how they can improve. On those occasions, the assessment can and should be done without the use of traditional grades and standardized tests. But most of the time, students should be immersed in learning.
  • the findings of the Colorado experiment make perfect sense: The more teachers are thinking about test results and "raising the bar," the less well the students actually perform--to say nothing of how their enthusiasm for learning is apt to wane.
  • The underlying problem concerns a fundamental distinction that has been at the center of some work in educational psychology for a couple of decades now. It is the difference between focusing on how well you’re doing something and focusing on what you’re doing.
  • The two orientations aren’t mutually exclusive, of course, but in practice they feel different and lead to different behaviors.
  • But when we get carried away with results, we wind up, paradoxically, with results that are less than ideal.
  • Unfortunately, common sense is in short supply today because assessment has come to dominate the whole educational process. Worse, the purposes and design of the most common forms of assessment--both within classrooms and across schools--often lead to disastrous consequences.
  • grades, which by their very nature undermine learning. The proper occasion for outrage is not that too many students are getting A’s, but that too many students have been led to believe that getting A’s is the point of going to school.
  • research indicates that the use of traditional letter or number grades is reliably associated with three consequences.
  • Iowa and Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills,
    • Benjamin Light
       
      I wonder how the MAP test is set?
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    The message of Daniel Pinks book "Drive" applies here. Paying someone more, i.e. good grades, does not make them better thinkers, problems solvers, or general more motivated in what they are doing. thanks for sharing.
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    Excellent summary!
Joe Virant

Does Easy Do It? Children, Games, and Learning - 29 views

  • The kind of product I shall pick on here has the form of a game: the player gets into situations that require an appropriate action in order to get on to the next situation along the road to the final goal. So far, this sounds like "tainment." The "edu" part comes from the fact that the actions are schoolish exercises such as those little addition or multiplication sums that schools are so fond of boring kids with. It is clear enough why people do this. Many who want to control children (for example, the less imaginative members of the teaching profession or parents obsessed with kids' grades) become green with envy when they see the energy children pour into computer games. So they say to themselves, "The kids like to play games, we want them to learn multiplication tables, so everyone will be happy if we make games that teach multiplication." The result is shown in a rash of ads that go like this: "Our Software Is So Much Fun That The Kids Don't Even Know That They Are Learning" or "Our Games Make Math Easy."
  • What is worst about school curriculum is the fragmentation of knowledge into little pieces. This is supposed to make learning easy, but often ends up depriving knowledge of personal meaning and making it boring. Ask a few kids: the reason most don't like school is not that the work is too hard, but that it is utterly boring.
  • game designers have a better take on the nature of learning than curriculum designers. They have to. Their livelihoods depend on millions of people being prepared to undertake the serious amount of learning needed to master a complex game. If their public failed to learn, they would go out of business. In the case of curriculum designers, the situation is reversed: their business is boosted whenever students fail to learn and schools clamor for a new curriculum!
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  • watching kids work at mastering games confirms what I know from my own experience: learning is essentially hard; it happens best when one is deeply engaged in hard and challenging activities.
  • The preoccupation in America with "Making It Easy" is self-defeating and cause for serious worry about the deterioration of the learning environment.
  • I have found that when they get the support and have access to suitable software systems, children's enthusiasm for playing games easily gives rise to an enthusiasm for making them, and this in turn leads to more sophisticated thinking about all aspects of games, including those aspects that we are discussing here. Of course, the games they can make generally lack the polish and the complexity of those made by professional designers. But the idea that children should draw, write stories and play music is not contradicted by the fact that their work is not of professional quality. I would predict that within a decade, making a computer game will be as much a part of children's culture as any of these art forms.
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    Dr. Seymour Papert describes ways in which gaming enhances learning. June, 1998.
Roland Gesthuizen

How do you solve a problem like Maria? The right of children to seek adventure. | newteachersblog - 44 views

  • It seems to me that some where along the line, we as the teaching profession lost the collective and professional will to challenge the stifling constraints of ‘health and safety’ and face-down the ‘nay-sayers whose obsession with ‘risk assessments’  vetoed almost every opportunity for children to experience real adventure.
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    "Adventure activities are every child's birthright. I also think they are every child's educational entitlement. And I think, like Maria Kutschera, we should be speaking truth to power and aver the rights of children to experience adventure even where parents (and politicians) will misguidedly negate them."
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