live very much in the present. Therefore, long-term goals and rewards (e.g., grades and report cards) are often ineffective motivators.
Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or url
12More
Motivating the Child with Attention Deficit Disorder - 3 views
-
-
-
basically two time frames — now and not now.
-
This Now/Not Now worldview causes great frustration for the child, his teachers, and his parents, and must be seriously considered when designing activities and approaches for motivating the child with ADD.
- ...7 more annotations...
-
respond more positively to a curriculum that allows him choices and options. He will also be more likely to participate actively in tasks when there is a degree of creativity and novelty
-
the presentation should be creative, colorful, multimodal, and enjoyable.
-
pervasive and complex disorder that impacts nearly all of the child's activities and interactions.
-
The child's impulsivity ("Ready, fire, aim!") can present serious safety concerns; his distractibility makes it extraordinarily difficult for him to understand and follow instructions; his memory difficulties make even rote learning troublesome; his executive processing problems (ability to plan and prioritize) present great challenges when he attempts to plan simple daily activities; his organizational deficiencies cause him tremendous problems with homework, household tasks, and long-term projects.
-
two most important words when dealing with these special children: "support" and "challenge."
-
The adult should continually challenge the child by presenting him with activities designed to improve his behavior and his learning, while simultaneously providing him with the support that he requires to meet these goals. Support without challenge is meaningless. Challenge without support is equally ineffective.
-
Among the specific teaching strategies that may foster the child's motivation are:
-
Good description of the limitations they have and how it affects them in school.
7More
AASA :: Feature: Quality and Equity in Finnish Schools (Sahlberg) - 1 views
-
teachers and administrators had designed a curriculum that suggests this school invests heavily in ensuring all students have access to effective instruction and individualized help
-
Finland invests 30 times more funds in the professional development of teachers and administrators than in evaluating the performance of students and schools, including testing. In testing-intensive education systems, this ratio is the opposite, with the majority of funding going to evaluation and standardized testing
-
Finnish schools use two strategies to enhance equity in schooling: (1) school-based curricula that give teachers and administrators the power to define values, purpose and overall educational goals for their school; and (2) emphasis on and access to professional development to help schools reach these goals.
- ...3 more annotations...
-
all children, regardless of family background or personal conditions, have a good school in their community. Because Finnish educators and policymakers believe schools can change the course of children’s lives, these schools must address the health, nutrition, well-being and happiness of all children in a systematic and equitable manner
-
research demonstrates that investing as early as possible in high-quality education for all students and directing additional resources toward the most disadvantaged students as early as possible produces the greatest positive effect on overall academic performance
-
Standardized testing that compares individuals to statistical averages, competition that leaves weaker students behind and merit-based pay for teachers jeopardize schools’ efforts to enhance equity. None of these factors exists in Finland
-
"A Finnish education ambassador shares how his country's school system ensures all students have access to quality instruction, sans constant testing"
31More
shared by Andrew McCluskey on 11 Feb 13
- No Cached
Occupy Your Brain - 111 views
schoolingtheworld.org/...occupy
education education reform education system schooling pedagogy indigenous indigenous pedagogies knowledge alternative education standardization state standards national standards global standards power authority intellect
shared by Andrew McCluskey on 11 Feb 13
- No Cached
Ant Heald liked it
-
One of the most profound changes that occurs when modern schooling is introduced into traditional societies around the world is a radical shift in the locus of power and control over learning from children, families, and communities to ever more centralized systems of authority.
-
Once learning is institutionalized under a central authority, both freedom for the individual and respect for the local are radically curtailed. The child in a classroom generally finds herself in a situation where she may not move, speak, laugh, sing, eat, drink, read, think her own thoughts, or even use the toilet without explicit permission from an authority figure.
-
In what should be considered a chilling development, there are murmurings of the idea of creating global standards for education – in other words, the creation of a single centralized authority dictating what every child on the planet must learn.
- ...26 more annotations...
-
In “developed” societies, we are so accustomed to centralized control over learning that it has become functionally invisible to us, and most people accept it as natural, inevitable, and consistent with the principles of freedom and democracy. We assume that this central authority, because it is associated with something that seems like an unequivocal good – “education” – must itself be fundamentally good, a sort of benevolent dictatorship of the intellect.
-
We endorse strict legal codes which render this process compulsory, and in a truly Orwellian twist, many of us now view it as a fundamental human right to be legally compelled to learn what a higher authority tells us to learn.
-
And yet the idea of centrally-controlled education is as problematic as the idea of centrally-controlled media – and for exactly the same reasons.
-
The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect all forms of communication, information-sharing, knowledge, opinion and belief – what the Supreme Court has termed “the sphere of intellect and spirit” – from government control.
-
by the mid-19th century, with Indians still to conquer and waves of immigrants to assimilate, the temptation to find a way to manage the minds of an increasingly diverse and independent-minded population became too great to resist, and the idea of the Common School was born.
-
We would keep our freedom of speech and press, but first we would all be well-schooled by those in power.
-
A deeply democratic idea — the free and equal education of every child — was wedded to a deeply anti-democratic idea — that this education would be controlled from the top down by state-appointed educrats.
-
The fundamental point of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that the apparatus of democratic government has been completely bought and paid for by a tiny number of grotesquely wealthy individuals, corporations, and lobbying groups. Our votes no longer matter. Our wishes no longer count. Our power as citizens has been sold to the highest bidder.
-
Our kids are so drowned in disconnected information that it becomes quite random what they do and don’t remember, and they’re so overburdened with endless homework and tests that they have little time or energy to pay attention to what’s happening in the world around them.
-
If in ten years we can create Wikipedia out of thin air, what could we create if we trusted our children, our teachers, our parents, our neighbors, to generate community learning webs that are open, alive, and responsive to individual needs and aspirations? What could we create if instead of trying to “scale up” every innovation into a monolithic bureaucracy we “scaled down” to allow local and individual control, freedom, experimentation, and diversity?
-
The most academically “gifted” students excel at obedience, instinctively shaping their thinking to the prescribed curriculum and unconsciously framing out of their awareness ideas that won’t earn the praise of their superiors. Those who resist sitting still for this process are marginalized, labeled as less intelligent or even as mildly brain-damaged, and, increasingly, drugged into compliance.
-
the very root, the very essence, of any theory of democratic liberty is a basic trust in the fundamental intelligence of the ordinary person. Democracy rests on the premise that the ordinary person — the waitress, the carpenter, the shopkeeper — is competent to make her own judgments about matters of domestic policy, international affairs, taxes, justice, peace, and war, and that the government must abide by the decisions of ordinary people, not vice versa. Of course that’s not the way our system really works, and never has been. But most of us recall at some deep level of our beings that any vision of a just world relies on this fundamental respect for the common sense of the ordinary human being.
-
This is what we spend our childhood in school unlearning.
-
If before we reach the age of majority we must submit our brains for twelve years of evaluation and control by government experts, are we then truly free to exercise our vote according to the dictates of our own common sense and conscience? Do we even know what our own common sense is anymore?
-
We live in a country where a serious candidate for the Presidency is unaware that China has nuclear weapons, where half the population does not understand that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, where nobody pays attention as Congress dismantles the securities regulations that limit the power of the banks, where 45% of American high school students graduate without knowing that the First Amendment of the Constitution guarantees freedom of the press. At what point do we begin to ask ourselves if we are trying to control quality in the wrong way?
-
Human beings, collaborating with one another in voluntary relationships, communicating and checking and counter-checking and elaborating and expanding on one another’s knowledge and intelligence, have created a collective public resource more vast and more alive than anything that has ever existed on the planet.
-
But this is not a paeon to technology; this is about what human intelligence is capable of when people are free to interact in open, horizontal, non-hierarchical networks of communication and collaboration.
-
Positive social change has occurred not through top-down, hierarchically controlled organizations, but through what the Berkana Institute calls “emergence,” where people begin networking and forming voluntary communities of practice. When the goal is to maximize the functioning of human intelligence, you need to activate the unique skills, talents, and knowledge bases of diverse individuals, not put everybody through a uniform mill to produce uniform results.
-
You need a non-punitive structure that encourages collaboration rather than competition, risk-taking rather than mistake-avoidance, and innovation rather than repetition of known quantities.
-
if we really want to return power to the 99% in a lasting, stable, sustainable way, we need to begin the work of creating open, egalitarian, horizontal networks of learning in our communities.
-
They are taught to focus on competing with each other and gaming the system rather than on gaining a deep understanding of the way power flows through their world.
-
And what could we create, what ecological problems could we solve, what despair might we alleviate, if instead of imposing our rigid curriculum and the destructive economy it serves on the entire world, we embraced as part of our vast collective intelligence the wisdom and knowledge of the world’s thousands of sustainable indigenous cultures?
-
They knew this about their situation: nobody was on their side. Certainly not the moneyed classes and the economic system, and not the government, either. So if they were going to change anything, it had to come out of themselves.
-
As our climate heats up, as mountaintops are removed from Orissa to West Virginia, as the oceans fill with plastic and soils become too contaminated to grow food, as the economy crumbles and children go hungry and the 0.001% grows so concentrated, so powerful, so wealthy that democracy becomes impossible, it’s time to ask ourselves; who’s educating us? To what end? The Adivasis are occupying their forests and mountains as our children are occupying our cities and parks. But they understand that the first thing they must take back is their common sense.
-
They must occupy their brains.
-
Isn’t it time for us to do the same?
-
Carol Black, creator of the documentary, "Schooling the World" discusses the conflicting ideas of centralized control of education and standardization against the so-called freedom to think independently--"what the Supreme Court has termed 'the sphere of intellect and spirit" (Black, 2012). Root questions: "who's educating us? to what end?" (Black, 2012). -
This is a must read. Carol Black echoes here many of the ideas of Paulo Freire, John Taylor Gatto and the like.
13More
Woodland, J. (2011) Psychology for the classroom: E-Learning. Oxon: Routledge - 4 views
-
-
Chapter 4 - Pedagogy Motivation through the possible 'white heat of technology' - the newness. * Emotional engagement *Immediacy * Action Engagement * Cognitive Engagement - see the Hierarchy of Engagement on page 75. * Creative and Critical Thinking - Bono's Six Thinking Hats and Technology * Using VLEs * Social Interaction - Oliver and McLaughlin (1996) proposed five levels of teacher-learner interaction: social, procedural, expository, explanatory and cognitive. * Engagement * Assessment -
Chapter 2 - Theory: * Piaget's stages of cognitive development and technologies. * Skiiner's programmed learning theory - technology programmes that are task analysis, sequencing of learning and presentation of concepts through step by step positive reinforcement. * Wenger Communities of Practice * Gilly Salmon (2005) five-step model of levels of maturity in online environments: access and motivation/ online socialisation/ information exchange/ knowledge construction/ learner development. * GBL and Avatars discussed.
-
Those against technology - Tanya Byron stating they technology is affecting children's minds.
-
Changing attitudes whilst online - different identities - different ways some converse.
-
* Motivation of learning - attention, confidence, satisfaction, appreciation and relevance
-
Key aspects of book of relevance: * explains e-Learning - cybergogy (online pedagogy) * 3 modes of learning - expository, active and interactive * synchronous and asynchronous learning alongside cognitive and social natures of learning
-
-
grounding in both theory and pedagogical application
-
current research,
- ...5 more annotations...
-
s illustrative case studies
-
cybergogy
-
behaviourism, cognitivism and constructivism in the context of e-learning.
-
social networking;
-
cybergogy and new learning domains
1More
shared by Stephane Crete on 29 Apr 13
- No Cached
the positive edtech contaminator | Inner conversations about education, technology and ... - 1 views
thepositiveedtechcontaminator.wordpress.com
Twitter PNL edtech conversations education technology change
shared by Stephane Crete on 29 Apr 13
- No Cached
2More
Class Charts - seating plans and behavior management - 159 views
-
This is a superb classroom management tool where you can track the behaviour of your class and keep them motivated. Simply click on the child and assign them a positive or negative behaviour point. You can also track their reading and spelling ages and make your own customised data set. Use this information to help you arrange the children within your class. You can have multiple classes on your teacher's account and you can share data with colleagues using different accounts. The data is encrypted to ensure data security. The system works on the majority of web enabled devices. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Classroom+Management+%26+Rewards -
With Class Charts you get data rich seating charts and streamlined behaviour management. You can even collaborate with other teachers and work as a team to tackle behaviour.
14More
shared by mrshathaway on 15 Aug 18
- No Cached
Evaluating a Website or Publication's Authority - Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers - 25 views
webliteracy.pressbooks.com/...te-or-publications-reliability
website_reliability information_literacy
shared by mrshathaway on 15 Aug 18
- No Cached
-
most of us would like to ascribe authority to sites and authors who support our conclusions and deny authority to publications that disagree with our worldview
-
Wikipedia’s guidelines for determining the reliability of publications. These guidelines were developed to help people with diametrically opposed positions argue in rational ways about the reliability of sources using common criteria.
-
defined by process, aim, and expertise.
- ...11 more annotations...
-
fact-checkers of all political stripes are happy to be able to track a fact down to one of these publications since they have reputations for a high degree of accuracy, and issue corrections when they get facts wrong.
-
a reliable source for facts should have a process in place for encouraging accuracy, verifying facts, and correcting mistakes
-
Process
-
researchers and certain classes of professionals have expertise, and their usefulness is defined by that expertise
-
Expertise
-
while we often think researchers are more knowledgeable than professionals, this is not always the case
-
Reporters, on the other hand, often have no domain expertise
-
Aim
-
Aim is defined by what the publication, author, or media source is attempting to accomplish
-
One way to think about aim is to ask what incentives an article or author has to get things right
-
In general, you want to choose a publication that has strong incentives to get things right, as shown by both authorial intent and business model, reputational incentives, and history
7More
shared by trisha_poole on 25 Feb 11
- No Cached
Education Week: Effective Use of Digital Tools Seen Lacking in Most Tech.-Rich Schools - 100 views
www.edweek.org/...21computing.h30.html
EMT502 technology effective edtech tools digital pedagogy digitallearning digital techintegration flexiblelearning blendedlearning fbl education elearning
shared by trisha_poole on 25 Feb 11
- No Cached
-
Those factors include integrating technology into intervention classes; setting aside time for professional learning and collaboration for teachers; allowing students to use technology to collaborate; integrating technology into core curricula at least weekly; administering online formative assessments at least weekly; lowering the student-to-computer ratio as much as possible; using virtual field trips at least monthly; encouraging students to use search engines daily; and providing training for principals on how to encourage best practices for technology implementation. Only about 1 percent of the 1,000 schools surveyed by Project RED followed all those steps, and those that did “saw dramatic increases in student achievement and had revenue-positive experiences,” Ms. Wilson said.
-
-
cut their photocopying and printing budgets in half.
-
-
-
This is similar to what is happening in Australia, particularly NSW, I think.
-
- ...1 more annotation...
-
requires leadership,professional development, collaboration, and new forms of pedagogy and assessment
-
Most schools that have integrated laptop computers and other digital devices into learning are not following the paths necessary to maximize the use of technology in ways that will raise student achievement and help save money, a report concludes."We all know that technology does things to improve our lives, but very few schools are implementing properly," said Leslie Wilson, a co-author of the study, "The Technology Factor: Nine Keys to Student Achievement and Cost-Effectiveness," released last month. She is the chief executive officer of the Mason, Mich.-based One-to-One Institute, which advocates putting mobile-computing devices into the hands of all students.
10More
Eight Ways To Build Blended Learning Class Culture | EdSurge News - 60 views
-
the following eight actions have a positive impact on the blended learning culture among our students.
-
1. Identify Online Learning Behavior You Want To See
-
128 27 Romain Bertrand · May 15, 2014Eight Ways To Build Blended Learning Class CultureHow to get students to value and care about the work they do onlineRomain Bertrand
- ...7 more annotations...
-
2. Model and Narrate These Behaviors Constantly
-
3. Celebrate Rock Star Online Learners!
-
4. Make Students Explain Their Reasoning Online
-
5. Provide Students With Written Feedback
-
6. Use Data To Make The Right Connections In Class
-
7. Provide Support During Online Learning Time
-
8. Create Activities Tailored To Student Needs
32More
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
-
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. -
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
-
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
7More
Untitled Site - 3 views
-
This step is to be done independently!
-
This step is to be done independently!
-
In your groups, compare which instruments you all chose to explore and learn.
- ...4 more annotations...
-
-
In your groups, compare which instruments you all chose to explore and learn.
-
In your groups, compare which instruments you all chose to explore and learn
-
instruments
11More
The Role of Learning Management Systems in Middle Schools - 14 views
-
a
-
ll learning styles and levels can be met. Teachers can organize their classes and post different documents, assignments, tests, etc. for their students to work on without the students knowing they are receiving something that has been specifically developed for their own level.
-
many benefits in middle level education
- ...8 more annotations...
-
paper copies of their absent work; now teachers post worksheets, links, videos, and other resources
-
flipped classrooms can be created
-
communication increases. Groups are developed within the system for sharing resources, sending messages, and connecting with staff and students.
-
attracted to technology outside school;
-
built-in reward system in which teachers can give badges to students for good attendance, participation, etc. to reinforce positive behaviors.
-
opportunity to communicate
-
Class participation and collaborative work increases
-
Parents
13More
Looking in the Wrong Places | Edge.org - 5 views
-
We should be very careful in thinking about whether we’re working on the right problems. If we don’t, that ties into the problem that we don’t have experimental evidence that could move us forward. We're trying to develop theories that we use to find out which are good experiments to make, and these are the experiments that we build. We build particle detectors and try to find dark matter; we build larger colliders in the hope of producing new particles; we shoot satellites into orbit and try to look back into the early universe, and we do that because we hope there’s something new to find there. We think there is because we have some idea from the theories that we’ve been working on that this would be something good to probe. If we are working with the wrong theories, we are making the wrong extrapolations, we have the wrong expectations, we make the wrong experiments, and then we don’t get any new data. We have no guidance to develop these theories. So, it’s a chicken and egg problem. We have to break the cycle. I don’t have a miracle cure to these problems. These are hard problems. It’s not clear what a good theory is to develop. I’m not any wiser than all the other 20,000 people in the field.
-
I’m still asking myself the same question that I asked myself ten years ago: "What is going on in my community?" I work in the foundations of physics, and I see a lot of strange things happening there. When I look at the papers that are being published, many of them seem to be produced simply because papers have to be produced. They don’t move us forward in any significant way. I get the impression that people are working on them not so much because it’s what they’re interested in but because they have to produce outcomes in a short amount of time. They sit on short-term positions and have short-term contracts, and papers must be produced.
-
The field that I mostly work in is the foundations of physics, which is, roughly speaking, composed of cosmology, the foundations of quantum mechanics, high-energy particle physics, and quantum gravity. It’s a peculiar field because there hasn’t been new data for almost four decades, since we established the Standard Model of particle physics. There has been, of course, the Higgs particle that was discovered at the LHC in 2012, and there have been some additions to the Standard Model, but there has not been a great new paradigm change, as Kuhn would have put it. We’re still using the same techniques, and we’re still working with the same theories as we did in the 1970s.
- ...10 more annotations...
-
That makes this field of science rather peculiar and probably explains why there hasn’t been much progress. But it’s not like we don’t have any questions that need to be answered. There are a lot of questions that have been around for decades. For example, what is dark energy? What is dark matter? What are the masses of the Standard Model particles? And what’s up with the foundation of quantum mechanics? Is a theory that's fundamentally not deterministic, where we cannot predict outcomes, the last word that we have, or is there something more to it? Is there maybe another underlying structure to reality?
-
but we haven't reached the fundamental level. Maybe we will never reach it. Certainly, the theories that we have right now are not all there is. The question is, of course, if we don’t have any guidance by experiment, how do we make progress? And are we doing the right thing?
-
We’ve reached this point where we have to carefully rethink if the criteria that we’re using to select our theories are promising at all. If one looks at the history of this field in the foundations of physics, progress has usually been made by looking at questions that, at least in hindsight, were well posed, where there was an actual mathematical contradiction. For example, special relativity is incompatible with Newtonian gravity. If you try to resolve this incompatibility, you get general relativity.
-
There are various similar examples where such breakthroughs have happened because there was a real problem. There was an inconsistency and people had to resolve it. It had nothing to do with beauty. Maybe beauty was, in some cases, the personal motivation of the people to work on it. There’s certainly some truth to this, but I don’t think it’s good to turn this story around and say that if we only pay attention to this motivation that comes from ideals of beauty it will lead to progress.
-
If we are working with the wrong theories, we are making the wrong extrapolations, we have the wrong expectations, we make the wrong experiments, and then we don’t get any new data. We have no guidance to develop these theories. So, it’s a chicken and egg problem. We have to break the cycle. I don’t have a miracle cure to these problems. These are hard problems. It’s not clear what a good theory is to develop. I’m not any wiser than all the other 20,000 people in the field.
-
The way that research is funded in foundations of physics and in many other fields just puts a lot of things at a disadvantage that are not pursued anymore. Typically, everything that takes longer than three years to complete, no one will start it because they can’t afford it. They can literally not afford it.
-
Who makes the decisions about the funding? Superficially, people say that it's a funding agency, so it’s the university who get to hire people. But that puts the blame on the wrong party. In the end it’s the community itself who makes the decisions. What do the funding agencies do if they get a proposal? They send it to reviewers. And who are the reviewers? They're people from the same community. If you look at how hiring decisions are being made, there’s some committee and they are people from the same community. They have some advisory boards or something, which contains people from the same community.
-
Even if that wasn’t so, what the people in these committees would be doing is looking at easy measures for scientific success. Presently, the most popular of these measures are the number of publications and the number of citations. And maybe also whether the person has published in high-impact journals. So, these are the typical measures that are presently being used. But what do they measure? They primarily measure popularity. They indicate whether somebody’s research is well received by a lot of people in the same community. And that’s why once a research area grows beyond a certain critical mass, you have sufficiently many people who tell each other that what they’re doing is the good thing to do. They review each other’s papers and say that that’s great and it's what we should continue to do. It’s a problem in all communities that grow beyond a certain size.
-
I later came to the United States and then Canada, and that gave me the opportunity to learn a lot about quantum gravity. I also figured out that much of what goes on in quantum gravity is very detached from reality. It’s pretty much only mathematics. Yes, the mathematics is there, but I still don’t know if it’s the mathematics that describes reality.
-
That’s the very reason why we don’t normally think of gravity as a weak force. It’s the only force that is left over on long distances, and the reason for this is that it adds up. It gets stronger the more mass you pile up. More precisely, we should say that the reason we find it so hard to measure quantum gravitational effects is that we either have a particle that has very pronounced quantum properties, like, say, a single electron or something like that, but then it’s so light that we cannot measure the gravitational field. Or we have some object that is so heavy that we can measure the gravitational field, but then it doesn’t have quantum properties. Okay, so that’s the actual problem.
33More
Mental skills for musicians: Managing music performance anxiety and enhancing performance. - 1 views
-
In asurvey of 2,212 classical musicians, 40% re-ported that anxiety interfered with their perfor-mances (Kirchner, Bloom, & Skutnick–Henley,
-
, see Kenny (2005) andMcGinnis and Milling (2005
-
Few studies have investigated whether a cog-nitive intervention can reduce anxiety and en-hance performance in musicians (Lehrer, 1987;Steptoe & Fidler, 1987)
- ...30 more annotations...
-
did notreturn any recent studies investigating the effec-tiveness of a purely cognitive intervention in thetreatment of MPA; consequently, research inthis particular area is needed
-
Past re-search has focused on combined interventions;however, often these programs run for over 6weeks and it is unknown which aspects of theintervention are most effective (e.g., Nagel,Himle, & Papsdorf, 1989)
-
State–Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI).The STAI is widely used in anxiety researchand is considered to be a valid and reliable scale(Kenny, 2006).
-
The PAI (Nagel, Himle, & Papsdorf, 1981) isbased on the STAI and is a music inventoryassessing the three-systems model of anxiety
-
heart rate at 10 min, 5
-
Signs of anxiety included trem-bling knees, lifting shoulders, stiff back and/orneck, trembling hands, stiff arms, face deadpan,shaking head, moistening and/or biting lips, dis-tressed facial expressions, and sweating.
-
Nagel et al.reported that the average preintervention scorewas 55 and the average postintervention scorewas 38, with a score of 39 or less indicating a
-
person has few problems with performance anx-iety
-
Researchers have found that MPA af-fects instrumentalists and vocalists of all agesand abilities, including students, professionals,amateurs, and children (Brotons, 1994; Kenny,2006; Liston, Frost, & Mohr, 2003)
-
Few studies have investigated whether a cog-nitive intervention can reduce anxiety and en-hance performance in musicians (Lehrer, 1987;Steptoe & Fidler, 1987)
-
Few studies have investigated whether a cog-nitive intervention can reduce anxiety and en-hance performance in musicians (Lehrer, 1987;Steptoe & Fidler, 1987
-
The cognitive intervention had no significanteffect on anxiety levels. Sweeney and Horan’s(1982) study indicated that a cognitive restruc-turing program may be helpful in the treatmentof MPA; their program, featuring cognitive re-structuring, significantly reduced anxiety.
-
d it is unknown which aspects of theintervention are most effective (e.g., Nagel,Himle, & Papsdorf, 1989)
-
The STAI is widely used in anxiety researchand is considered to be a valid and reliable scale
-
Performance Anxiety Inventory (PAI)
-
cognitive, behavioral, and physiological fac
-
and has beenwidely used in treatment outcome research
-
Behavioral Anxiety Index (BAI)
-
igns of anxiety included trem-bling knees, lifting shoulders, stiff back and/orneck, trembling hands, stiff arms, face deadpan,shaking head, moistening and/or biting lips, dis-tressed facial expressions, and sweating
-
Participants were then taught howthoughts, behaviors, and feelings interact andinfluence performance
-
practical exercise, how people waste their en-ergy trying to control uncontrollable factors,thereby impairing performance
-
This exercise wasdesigned to demonstrate how thoughts cansometimes be irrational and can be changed inlight of new evidence
-
how to use self-talk effectively and how touse cues
-
Participants practiced how to identify negativethoughts, stop the thoughts, and use cues to helpthem overcome the negative thoughts.
-
Imagery is a mentalexercise that can help athletes maintain concen-tration, decrease anxiety, and improve confi-dence; thus, it may also be helpful for somemusicians (Gregg & Clark, 2007).
-
Participants in the wait-list controlgroup waited 3 weeks until their second perfor-mance, which was on the same night as theirfirst worksho
-
MPA is a pervasive problem affecting musi-cians of all ages and abilities. As compared withthe research on mental skills training in athletes,relatively little is known about the assessment,treatment, and theoretical underpinnings ofMPA
-
Kenny (2006) suggested that improving perfor-mance quality will have a positive, self-reinforcing effect on the musician and enhanceconfidence in future performances.
-
We predicted that anxiety levels would de-crease in the treatment group from pre- to post-test. This hypothesis was partially supported.Specifically, there was a significant reductionon the PAI in the treatment group. Although theparticipants improved after the intervention,they were still not within the optimal rangeaccording to Nagel et al. (1981
-
Although the decrease in anxiety was notas large in our study, our participants droppedfrom the high performance anxiety category tothe moderate performance anxiety category
23More
Guideline on Some Questions and Answers about Grammar - 36 views
-
Grammar names the types of words and word groups that make up sentences not only in English but in any language
-
sentence structure
-
conventions and style of language.
- ...20 more annotations...
-
apply knowledge of language structure, language conventions (e.g., spelling and punctuation)"
-
language use, patterns, and dialects
-
Students benefit much more from learning a few grammar keys thoroughly than from trying to remember many terms and rules.
-
Experiment with different approaches
-
show students how to apply it not only to their writing but also to their reading and to their other language arts activities.
-
If they know how to find the main verb and the subject, they have a better chance of figuring out a difficult sentenc
-
Traditional drill and practice will be the most meaningful to students when they are anchored in the context of writing assignments or the study of literary models
-
apply it to authentic texts.
-
Try using texts of different kinds, such as newspapers and the students' own writing, as sources for grammar examples and exercises.
-
entence combining: students start with simple exercises in inserting phrases and combining sentences and progress towards exercises in embedding one clause in another.
-
practice using certain subordinate constructions that enrich sentences.
-
All native speakers of a language have more grammar in their heads than any grammar book
-
If a word can be made plural or possessive, or if it fits in the sentence "The _______ went there," it is a noun. If a word can be made past, or can take an -ing ending, it is a verb
-
whole sentence or a fragment
-
verb phrase
-
subject
-
pronoun f
-
Students can circle the sentence subjects in a published paragraph, observe this pattern at work, and then apply it to their own writing.
-
Most sentences start with information that is already familiar to the reader, such as a pronoun or a subject noun that was mentioned earlier.
-
end focus.
1More
China Scales Back Subsidies for Electric Cars - 1 views
-
China is beginning to end subsidies to encourage innovation and end dependence on the State
5More
Technology Is Changing How Students Learn, Teachers Say - The New York Times - 13 views
-
hat the education system must adjust to better accommodate the way students learn, a point that some teachers brought up in focus groups themselves
-
roughly 75 percent of 2,462 teachers surveyed said that the Internet and search engines had a “mostly positive” impact on student research skills. And they said such tools had made students more self-sufficient researchers.
-
But nearly 90 percent said that digital technologies were creating “an easily distracted generation with short attention spans.”
- ...2 more annotations...
-
About 60 percent said it hindered students’ ability to write and communicate face to face, and almost half said it hurt critical thinking and their ability to do homework.
-
Other teachers said technology was as much a solution as a problem.
5More
shared by mgranger on 01 Apr 11
- Cached
Media and Technology Resources for Educators | Common Sense Media - 15 views
www.commonsensemedia.org/educators
InternetSafety digitalcitizenship cyberbullying Internet_safety cipa
shared by mgranger on 01 Apr 11
- Cached
-
gital driver's license
-
with complete confidence. Our online trainings show you how. More about parent professional development Research Credentials Check out our DNA. Our programs are built on respected digital ethics research. More about parent research credentials Turn wired students into great digital citizens Get all the tools you need with our FREE Digital Literacy and Citizenship Curriculum and Parent Media Education Program. The relevant, ready-to-use instruction helps you guide students to make safe, smart, and ethical decisions in the digital world where they live, study and play. Every day, your students are tested with each post, search, chat, text message, file download, and profile update. Will they connect with like minds or spill ... read more Get started Browse our classroom lessons and parent education resources by grade level or topical area. select gradeK123456789101112 select topicCell phones & digital communicationCyberbullying & online relationshipsDigital creation, plagiarism & piracyFamily media managementGaming & online worldsInternet safetyMedia's influence on kidsOnline privacy and securityOnline research & learningSocial networking & communityViolence in media Get Started Educator Updates Common Sense announces di gital driver's license Common Sense Media announced plans to create a digital driver’s license, an interactive online game that will teach kids the basics of how to be safe and responsible in a digital world. Read more about our plans for interactive curriculum modules
-
-
Lesson plans, articles, and tools to teach Digital Citizenship and Internet Safety -
Internet safety FREE curriculum and implementation guides. The site has admin, teacher, and student resources. Digital Passport is one of the Internet Safety programs available.
5More
Educational building blocks: how Minecraft is used in classrooms - 85 views
-
Levin actually views these negative behaviors as a positive aspect of the lesson, and will often stop the game to address these concerns. He sees it as a way to help shape the way his students behave in an online environment, showing them the importance of acting in a responsible and considerate manner.
-
Class begins with the students away from the game, as Levin explains the goals for the day. Then they go to work, often in pre-built worlds created by Levin which feature specific tasks to accomplish or puzzles to solve. But they always need to work together.
-
"With its open-ended nature and robust creation tools, Minecraft has been used to create some amazing things. And as one teacher learned, those very same elements that make the game so compelling also make it a great educational tool.
-
Using Minecraft to solve problems as a class and learn how to work together.
-
Some good learning angles with this multiplayer Hamelin. Have used it myself :-)