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Cindy Edwards

Electronic Journal for the Integration of Technology in Education - 60 views

  • Characters in alphabets began as pictures with meaning (West, 1997).
  • As history repeats itself, we may find that a great deal of information is better presented visually rather than verbally.
  • culture's
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  • predominant mode of literacy depends on the technology and mass media it embraces (Sinatra, 1986).
  • Kellner (1998) proposes that multiple literacies are necessary to meet the challenges of today's society, literacies that include print literacy, visual literacy, aural literacy, media literacy, computer literacy, cultural literacy, social literacy, and ecoliteracy.
  • Learning through orderly, sequential, verbal-mathematical, left-hemisphere tasks is a pattern seen frequently in education (West, 1997). Those whose thought processes are predominantly in the right-hemisphere where visual-spatial and nonverbal cognition activities rule frequently may have difficulty capitalizing on a learning style that is not compatible with their abilities.
  • If visual literacy is regarded as a language, then there is a need to know how to communicate using this language, which includes being alert to visual messages and critically reading or viewing images as the language of the messages.
  • Technology, particularly the graphical user interface of the World Wide Web, requires skills for reading and writing visually in order to derive meaning from what is being communicated.
  • Because visual literacy precedes verbal literacy in human development,
  • learning evolves from the concrete to the abstract; visual symbols are nonverbal representations that precede verbal symbols (Sinatra, 1986).
  • West (1997) conveys an innovative mathematics approach whereby students “do” mathematics rather than “watch” mathematics. The technique emphasizes learning through interactive graphics without words. “The words go into an idea only after the idea has already settled in our mind”(West, p.
  • The literature suggests that using visual elements in teaching and learning yields positive results.
Jennie Snyder

Atul Gawande: How Do Good Ideas Spread? : The New Yorker - 36 views

  • Why do some innovations spread so swiftly and others so slowly
  • Consider the very different trajectories of surgical anesthesia and antiseptics, both of which were discovered in the nineteenth century.
  • The first public demonstration of anesthesia was in 1846.
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  • nsisted that he had found a gas that could render patients insensible to the pain of surgery.
  • The idea spread like a contagion, travelling through letters, meetings, and periodicals. By mid-December, surgeons were administering ether to patients in Paris and London. By February, anesthesia had been used in almost all the capitals of Europe, and by June in most regions of the world.
  • On October 16, 1846, at Massachusetts General Hospital, Morton administered his gas through an inhaler in the mouth of a young man undergoing the excision of a tumor in his jaw.
  • Four weeks later, on November 18th, Bigelow published his report on the discovery of “insensibility produced by inhalation” in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal.
  • There were forces of resistance, to be sure. Some people criticized anesthesia as a “needless luxury”; clergymen deplored its use to reduce pain during childbirth as a frustration of the Almighty’s designs.
  • Yet soon even the obstructors, “with a run, mounted behind—hurrahing and shouting with the best.” Within seven years, virtually every hospital in America and Britain had adopted the new discovery.
  • Sepsis—infection—was the other great scourge of surgery. It was the single biggest killer of surgical patients, claiming as many as half of those who underwent major operations
  • nfection was so prevalent that suppuration—the discharge of pus from a surgical wound—was thought to be a necessary part of healing.
  • In the eighteen-sixties, the Edinburgh surgeon Joseph Lister read a paper by Louis Pasteur laying out his evidence that spoiling and fermentation were the consequence of microorganisms. Lister became convinced that the same process accounted for wound sepsis.
  • Lister had read about the city of Carlisle’s success in using a small amount of carbolic acid to eliminate the odor of sewage, and reasoned that it was destroying germs. Maybe it could do the same in surgery.
  • During the next few years, he perfected ways to use carbolic acid for cleansing hands and wounds and destroying any germs that might enter the operating field.
  • The result was strikingly lower rates of sepsis and death.
  • Far from it.
  • Surgeons soaked their instruments in carbolic acid, but they continued to operate in black frock coats stiffened with the blood and viscera of previous operations—the badge of a busy practice.
  • hey reused sea sponges without sterilizing them.
  • It was a generation before Lister’s recommendations became routine and the next steps were taken toward the modern standard of asepsis—that is, entirely excluding germs from the surgical field, using heat-sterilized instruments and surgical teams clad in sterile gowns and gloves.
  • Maybe ideas that violate prior beliefs are harder to embrace. To nineteenth-century surgeons, germ theory seemed as illogica
  • The technical complexity might have been part of the difficulty. Giving Lister’s methods “a try” required painstaking attention to detail.
Alison Westgate

Cantor, "The Nightmare of Romantic Idealism" - 0 views

  • With respect to man, he appears as a creator and thus as a divine figure; with respect to Zeus, he takes on the role of a rebel against divine authority and eventually of a tortured creature, thus becoming a symbol of human suffering at the hands of the gods.
  • But if one tries to align the characters in Frankenstein with traditional mythic archetypes, one runs into difficulties. Although Frankenstein at first seems to offer a potentially confusing array of mythic correspondences, by trying to sort out the mythic roles assigned to the central characters, we can approach the thematic heart of the book.
  • With respect to man, he appears as a creator and thus as a divine figure; with respect to Zeus, he takes on the role of a rebel against divine authority and eventually of a tortured creature, thus becoming a symbol of human suffering at the hands of the gods.
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    • Alison Westgate
       
      You should read Percy Shelley's version of Prometheus.
Maureen Greenbaum

Florida's remedial law leads to decreasing pass rates in math and English | InsideHigherEd - 10 views

  • There's a little bit of a social stigma. It's easier for students to say they're not good at math. It's much harder to have conversations about having difficulty with writing or reading
    • Maureen Greenbaum
       
      Same a tech ...people (students and others who say I'm not good ...my children...
  • students who failed college-level math or English courses were more likely to put off retaking those courses or not return to college. 
  • these problems can be solved if developmental courses counted toward a student's degree plan. But that solution won't fix everything. 
D. S. Koelling

The Liberal Arts Are Work-Force Development - Do Your Job Better - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 35 views

  • Now consider that, according to the American Association of Community Colleges, about half of all freshmen and sophomores are enrolled at the nation's 1,300 two-year colleges, and many of those students transfer to four-year institutions. For a large percentage of people who earn bachelor's degrees, then, the liberal-arts portion of their education was acquired at a two-year college. Next, factor in all of the community-college students who enter the work force after earning two-year degrees or certificates, and whose only exposure to the liberal arts occurred in whatever core courses their programs required. The conclusion becomes obvious: Two-year colleges are among the country's leading providers of liberal-arts education, although they seldom get credit for that role.
  • Employers rank communication and analytical skills among the most important attributes they seek in new hires, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Perhaps those of us who teach those very skills at community colleges should embrace the integral role we play in preparing the nation's workers rather than rejecting the idea of work-force development as somehow beneath us.
  • More important, this new perspective could have a positive effect on student success. If we come to see ourselves as preparing students not just for transfer but ultimately for the work force, students may be more likely to understand the relevance of the skills that we teach them and better able to use those skills for some purpose other than just getting a passing grade.
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  • Require lots of writing. As the management guru Peter Drucker argued, communication is the one skill required of all professionals, regardless of field. "As soon as you take one step up the career ladder," he said, "your effectiveness depends on your ability to communicate your thoughts in writing and in speaking."
  • Clearly, one of the best things we can do for students is to require them to write—a lot.
  • Focus on critical thinking. A common complaint of employers, as reflected in the NACE survey, is that many workers have difficulty thinking for themselves. They may be thoroughly trained, having mastered all of the concepts in the textbooks, but, inevitably, situations arise that weren't covered in the books. When that happens, the ability to think critically, independently, and creatively becomes indispensable.
  • Bring the real world into the classroom. Another strategy we can adopt, if we want our courses to be more relevant, is to make our class discussions, case studies, experiments, and assignments as real-world-based as possible. For example, in my composition courses, I not only allow students to choose their own essay topics, but I also encourage them to write about issues related to their prospective majors. I also assign reading (in addition to the old textbook standbys) from newspapers, popular magazines, even the Internet.
  • Make the connection. Take advantage of every opportunity to connect what students are doing in class with what they will be doing some day as employees. My students hear the term "the real world" so much that, by the middle of the term, they're starting to roll their eyes. But it's important for them to understand that the work we're doing now in class isn't just a series of meaningless exercises, another set of hoops for them to jump through on their way to a degree. They're going to have to do these things for real one day—describe processes, do research to find solutions, draw comparisons—and my course may be the last time anyone ever actually teaches them how.
jojomitty

Microsoft Buys Edu Edition of Minecraft Releases OneNote Classroom Tool -- THE Journal - 24 views

    • jojomitty
       
      Mentoring would be wonderful for those of us who are not familiar with the workings of Minecraft but would like to use it in class.
  • free trial version
  • Minecraft transcends the differences in teaching and learning styles and education systems around the world. It's an open space where people can come together and build a lesson around nearly anything."
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    • jojomitty
       
      Technology = equalizer for students
  • make sure no student ever got behind in their education because of difficulties with reading... We wanted to make sure that was as little a barrier as possible, so they can focus on what they're learning."
    • jojomitty
       
      This is a huge bonus for ELL students!
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