Skip to main content

Home/ educators/ Group items matching "genetics" in title, tags, annotations or url

Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or url

Sort By: Relevance | Date Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Maggie Verster

Scitable is a free science library and personal learning tool - 0 views

  •  
    A free science library and personal learning tool brought to you by Nature Publishing Group, the world's leading publisher of science.
  •  
    "Scitable currently concentrates on genetics, the study of evolution, variation, and the rich complexity of living organisms. As you cultivate your understanding of modern genetics on Scitable, you will explore not only what we know about genetics and the ways it impacts our society, but also the data and evidence that supports our knowledge."
Shaun Fletcher

DNA From The Beginning - 0 views

  •  
    Excellent Resource on Genetics. Quite advanced.
Martin Burrett

Is It for the Good of the Children or The Bank Balance? by @sheep2763 - 1 views

  •  
    "The new code of practice has got rid of behaviour as a category and has replaced it with Social, Emotional and Mental Health Difficulties. This may be the cause of the child's difficulties but the manifestation is often in their challenging behaviour. Within school there are some families where their behaviour could almost be considered to have a genetic component. We appreciate that every child, even identical twins, are individuals and we always treat them as such. Today I wanted to refer a child who appears to have some Social, Emotional or Mental Health Difficulties to our Educational Psychologist. He wanted to have a chat about the child before accepting the referral, fair enough, I was happy to chat."
Ed Webb

Alan Kay, Systems, and Textbooks « Theatrical Smoke - 2 views

  • I discuss his key idea: that systemic thinking is a liberal art, and I explain a corollary idea, that textbooks suck
  • if you don’t have a category for an idea, it’s very difficult to receive that idea
  • the story of the last few hundred years is that we’ve quickly developed important ideas, which society needs to have to improve and perhaps even to continue to exist, and for which there are no pre-existing, genetically created categories. So there’s an idea-receiving capacity gap.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Education’s job should be, says Kay, to bridge this gap. To help, that is, people form these necessary new idea-receiving categories–teaching them the capacity for ideas–early on in their lives, so that as they grow they are ready to embrace the things we need them to know. Let me say that in a better way: so that as they grow they are ready to know in the ways we need them to know.
  • cultivate the ability to conceive of, work with, create, understand, manipulate, tinker with, disrupt, and, generally, appreciate the beauty of systems
  • Seeing systems is an epistemology, a way of knowing, a mindset
  • a game, or a simulation, thought of as a thing we might create (rather than a thing we only act within), is a visceral example of systems thinking
  • It’s the Flatland story–that we need to train our 2D minds to see in a kind of 3D–and Kay’s genius is that he recognizes we have to bake this ability into the species, through education, as close to birth as possible.
  • Systems thinking is to be conceived of as a platform skill or an increased capacity on top of which we will be able to construct new sorts of ideas and ways of knowing, of more complex natures still. The step beyond seeing a single system is of course the ability to see interacting systems – a kind of meta-systemic thinking – and this is what I think Kay is really interested in, because it’s what he does. At one point he showed a slide of multiple systems–the human body, the environment, the internet, and he said in a kind of aside, “they’re all one system . . .”
  • The point is to be able to see connections between the silos. Says Kay, the liberal arts have done a bad job at “adding in epistemology” among the “smokestacks” (i.e. disciplines)
  • What happens when you’re stuck in a system? You don’t understand the world and yourself and others as existing in constant development, as being in process; you think you are a fixed essence or part within a system (instead of a system influencing systems) and you inadvertently trap yourself in a kind of tautological loop where you can only think about things you’re thinking about and do the things you do and you thus limit yourself to a kind of non-nutritive regurgitation of factoids, or the robotic meaningless actions of an automaton, or what Kay calls living in a pop culture
  • A downside of being epistemologically limited to thinking within a system is that you overemphasize the importance of the content and facts as that system orders them
Martin Burrett

Cell Size and Scale - 6 views

  •  
    View the relative size of living cells with this great interactive zooming resource. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Science
Terry Elliott

World Without Walls: Learning Well with Others | Edutopia - 0 views

  • We must also expand our ability to think critically about the deluge of information now being produced by millions of amateur authors without traditional editors and researchers as gatekeepers. In fact, we need to rely on trusted members of our personal networks to help sift through the sea of stuff, locating and sharing with us the most relevant, interesting, useful bits. And we have to work together to organize it all, as long-held taxonomies of knowledge give way to a highly personalized information environment.
    • Jeff Richardson
       
      Good reason for teaching dig citizenship
    • Terry Elliott
       
      What Will suggests here is rising complexity, but for this to succeed we don't need to fight our genetic heritage. Put yourself on the Serengeti plains, a hunter-gatherer searching for food. You are thinking critically about a deluge of data coming through your senses (modern folk discount this idea, but any time in jobs that require observation in the 'wild' (farming comes to mind) will disabuse you rather quickly that the natural world is providing a clear channel.) You are not only relying upon your own 'amateur' abilities but those of your family and extended family to filter the noise of the world to get to the signal. This tribe is the original collaborative model and if we do not try to push too hard against this still controlling 'mean gene' then we will as a matter of course become a nation of collaborative learning tribes.
  • Collaboration in these times requires our students to be able to seek out and connect with learning partners, in the process perhaps navigating cultures, time zones, and technologies. It requires that they have a vetting process for those they come into contact with: Who is this person? What are her passions? What are her credentials? What can I learn from her?
    • Terry Elliott
       
      Aye, aye, captain. This is the classic problem of identity and authenticity. Can I trust this person on all the levels that are important for this particular collaboration? A hidden assumption here is that students have a passion themselves to learn something from these learning partners. What will be doing in this collaboration nation to value the ebb and flow of these learners' interests? How will we handle the idiosyncratic needs of the child who one moment wants to be J.K.Rowling and the next Madonna. Or both? What are the unintended consequences of creating an truly collaborative nation? Do we know? Would this be a 'worse' world for the corporations who seek our dollars and our workers? Probably. It might subvert the corporation while at the same moment create a new body of corporate cooperation. Isn't it pretty to think so.
  • Likewise, we must make sure that others can locate and vet us.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • technical know-how is not enough. We must also be adept at negotiating, planning, and nurturing the conversation with others we may know little about -- not to mention maintaining a healthy balance between our face-to-face and virtual lives (another dance for which kids sorely need coaching).
    • Terry Elliott
       
      All of these skills are technical know how. We differentiate between hard and soft skills when we should be showing how they are all of a piece. I am so far from being an adequate coach on all of these matters it appalls me. I feel like the teacher who is one day ahead of his students and fears any question that skips ahead to chapters I have not read yet.
  • The Collaboration Age comes with challenges that often cause concern and fear. How do we manage our digital footprints, or our identities, in a world where we are a Google search away from both partners and predators? What are the ethics of co-creation when the nuances of copyright and intellectual property become grayer each day? When connecting and publishing are so easy, and so much of what we see is amateurish and inane, how do we ensure that what we create with others is of high quality?
    • Terry Elliott
       
      Partners and predators? OK, let's not in any way go down this road. This is the road our mainstream media has trod to our great disadvantage as citizens. These are not co-equal. Human brains are not naturally probablistic computer. We read about a single instance of internet predation and we equate it with all the instances of non-predation. We all have zero tolerance policies against guns in the school, yet our chances of being injured by those guns are fewer than a lightning strike. We cannot ever have this collaborative universe if we insist on a zero probability of predation. That is why, for good and ill, schools will never cross that frontier. It is in our genes. "Better safe than sorry" vs. "Risks may be our safeties in disguise."
  • Students are growing networks without us, writing Harry Potter narratives together at FanFiction.net, or trading skateboarding videos on YouTube. At school, we disconnect them not only from the technology but also from their passion and those who share it.
  • The complexities of editing information online cannot be sequestered and taught in a six-week unit. This has to be the way we do our work each day.
  • The process of collaboration begins with our willingness to share our work and our passions publicly -- a frontier that traditional schools have rarely crossed.
  • Look no further than Wikipedia to see the potential; say what you will of its veracity, no one can deny that it represents the incredible potential of working with others online for a common purpose.
  • The technologies we block in their classrooms flourish in their bedrooms
  • Anyone with a passion for something can connect to others with that same passion -- and begin to co-create and colearn the same way many of our students already do.
  • I believe that is what educators must do now. We must engage with these new technologies and their potential to expand our own understanding and methods in this vastly different landscape. We must know for ourselves how to create, grow, and navigate these collaborative spaces in safe, effective, and ethical ways. And we must be able to model those shifts for our students and counsel them effectively when they run across problems with these tools.
  •  
    Article by Wil Richardson on Collaboration
Ed Webb

Why do people dance? | Education | The Guardian - 3 views

  • Lovatt says his own experience proves dance can provide confidence that spills into other areas of life. Suffering from profound reading difficulties at school, he left with no qualifications, and was unable to read until he was 23. "I taught myself to read while working as a dancer in theatres," he says. "I was surrounded by talent and thought it was ridiculous that I couldn't read, so I just sat down and, very slowly, learned."Next, Lovatt studied A-levels, then a degree in psychology and English at Roehampton Institute, ultimately gaining a PhD and taking a senior researcher post at Cambridge University. Now, he combines dancing "nearly every day" with dance research at Hertfordshire University, where he teaches the psychology of performing arts.
  • the best way to attract a compatible mate is to relax and just move naturally to the rhythm
  • "Dance lessons are a bit like plastic surgery," says Lovatt. "They mask the true expression of your genes."
  •  
    Not sure I buy the genetic determinism. But I love the story of Dr Lovatt's educational path and I strongly advocate dance for everybody!
1 - 9 of 9
Showing 20 items per page