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Ed Webb

M.I.T. Lets Student Bloggers Post Without Censoring - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...02blogs.html

bloggers blogging education MIT admissions

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Oct 09 - Cached
  • M.I.T.’s bloggers, who are paid $10 an hour for up to four hours a week, offer thoughts on anything that might interest a prospective student.
  • “High school students read the blogs, and they come in and say ‘I can’t believe Haverford students get to do such interesting things with their summers,’ ” he said. “There’s no better way for students to learn about a college than from other students.”
  • “We saw very quickly that prospective students were engaging with each other and building their own community,”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • annual “Meet the Bloggers” session at Campus Preview Weekend.
  • “The annual blogger selection is like the admissions office’s own running of the bulls,”
  • Ms. Kim once wrote about how the resident advising system was making it impossible for her to move out of her housing — expressing enough irritation that the housing office requested that the admissions office take her post down. Officials refused, instead having the housing office post a rebuttal of her accusations; eventually, the system was changed.
Ed Webb

Mind - Research Upends Traditional Thinking on Study Habits - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...07mind.html

learning cognition neuroscience education testing psychology

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • instead of sticking to one study location, simply alternating the room where a person studies improves retention. So does studying distinct but related skills or concepts in one sitting, rather than focusing intensely on a single thing. “We have known these principles for some time, and it’s intriguing that schools don’t pick them up, or that people don’t learn them by trial and error,” said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Instead, we walk around with all sorts of unexamined beliefs about what works that are mistaken.”
  • The brain makes subtle associations between what it is studying and the background sensations it has at the time, the authors say, regardless of whether those perceptions are conscious. It colors the terms of the Versailles Treaty with the wasted fluorescent glow of the dorm study room, say; or the elements of the Marshall Plan with the jade-curtain shade of the willow tree in the backyard. Forcing the brain to make multiple associations with the same material may, in effect, give that information more neural scaffolding.
  • Cognitive scientists do not deny that honest-to-goodness cramming can lead to a better grade on a given exam. But hurriedly jam-packing a brain is akin to speed-packing a cheap suitcase, as most students quickly learn — it holds its new load for a while, then most everything falls out. “With many students, it’s not like they can’t remember the material” when they move to a more advanced class, said Henry L. Roediger III, a psychologist at Washington University in St. Louis. “It’s like they’ve never seen it before.”
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  • An hour of study tonight, an hour on the weekend, another session a week from now: such so-called spacing improves later recall, without requiring students to put in more overall study effort or pay more attention, dozens of studies have found.
  • “The idea is that forgetting is the friend of learning,” said Dr. Kornell. “When you forget something, it allows you to relearn, and do so effectively, the next time you see it.”
  • cognitive scientists see testing itself — or practice tests and quizzes — as a powerful tool of learning, rather than merely assessment. The process of retrieving an idea is not like pulling a book from a shelf; it seems to fundamentally alter the way the information is subsequently stored, making it far more accessible in the future.
  • “Testing not only measures knowledge but changes it,” he says — and, happily, in the direction of more certainty, not less.
  • “Testing has such bad connotation; people think of standardized testing or teaching to the test,” Dr. Roediger said. “Maybe we need to call it something else, but this is one of the most powerful learning tools we have.”
  • The harder it is to remember something, the harder it is to later forget. This effect, which researchers call “desirable difficulty,”
Ed Webb

Open-Xchange Tries To Liberate Your Contact List - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com - 0 views

bits.blogs.nytimes.com/...-to-liberate-your-contact-list

web2.0 services contacts aggregation privacy

shared by Ed Webb on 05 Aug 09 - Cached
  • the idea that separating more personal services like Facebook from business-oriented services like LinkedIn makes little sense in the Internet age.
  • All you have to do is enter your LinkedIn login information
  • “The revolution is that, all of a sudden, the Internet can be a network of intelligent agents, doing work for their users, rather than a place where big commercial interests aim to gather as many users on their platform as possible,”
Ed Webb

The Google Wave chatting tool is too complicated for its own good. - By Farhad Manjoo -... - 0 views

www.slate.com/...2232311

Wave tools opinion collaboration technology

shared by Ed Webb on 14 Oct 09 - Cached
  • The Google Wave chatting tool is too complicated for its own good.
  • Chatting on Wave is like talking to an overcurious mind reader.
  • This behavior is so corrosive to normal conversation that you'd think it was some kind of bug. In fact, it's a feature—indeed, it's one of the Wave team's proudest accomplishments.
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  • In many cases, the software creates new headaches by attempting to fix aspects of online communication that don't need fixing.
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