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Another interesting study about expertise similar to the video related to chess players " https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWuJqCwfjjc&feature=player_embedded ". Should we use and extend the experts points of view while producing new technological tools for learning?

The human brain learns two ways - either through avoidance learning, which trains the brain to avoid committing a mistake, or through reward-based learning, a reinforcing process that occurs when someone gets the right answer. Scientists have found that making a mistake can feel rewarding, though, if the brain is given the opportunity to learn from its mistakes and assess its options.

"Scientists have long understood that the brain has two ways of learning. One is avoidance learning, which is a punishing, negative experience that trains the brain to avoid repeating mistakes. The other is reward-based learning, a positive, reinforcing experience in which the brain feels rewarded for reaching the right answer." The "avoidance learning" is which I have learned from my father thanks to his raising children technique. He always wanted that we, as his children, should be faultless. And that understanding (of course he is not a pedagog :)) affected me negatively in my subsequent years. In fact, the second one, reward-based learning, is essential if someone wants to apply discussion and peer learning in his/her classroom as students who avoid making mistakes will avoid having communication with others, generating assertive questions, defend his/her arguments, asking help even if s/he struck at a ridiculous point, etc. Making mistakes is a part of learning. We need to emphasize this in our classrooms.

GraphoGame based on the scientific follow-up study of Finnish children at familial risk for dyslexia. It's effiicent in instructing children's literacy skills.

College professors and instructors can learn a lot from the chapters of a digital textbook that they assign students to read. Reynol Junco, an associate professor in Iowa State University's School of Education, says digital books provide real-time analytics to help faculty assess how students are doing in the class.

In this research, digital textbook is used for predicting students outcomes. With help of digital text book, instructors can track the time students spend reading. On the other hand, with regular textbooks, instructor do not know how students are doing or whether they read the assigned material or not until they give a graded assignment. Digital text book gives opportunity to teacher to monitor their students' actions and can take precation to make students read the material.With help of digital text book, instructors can track the time students spend on reading. By this way, instructor can gain some information like the material complexity for students reading level and s/he can adapt course material or take other precautions to help students succeed.

Many UK children have become less confident about succeeding in life by the time they leave school, a report says. The study by think-tank Demos says some pupils feel school is just preparing them for exam success. It urges the government to help schools and colleges explore how self-belief, perseverance and resilience can be instilled in pupils.

I think that not only UK chidren but also our children less confident and unhappy in real life. If same research is done in Turkey, I think that similar results can be obtained. Students spend 12 years in school (primary school, secondary and high school). And they learn socialising, success, failure in school. In traditional classrooms, success is gaining high score in exam, ranked in first three in competition and failure is gaining lower scores on exam. When students leave the school, they face with new environment that is not similar to school. I think, therefore, they can not adopt to this new environment they feel unhappy and less confident. For this reason, schools should bring the skills and qualities that are needed for out of the school. Community service course, role playing, field works should be done in the schools to introduce real life experinces to students. In addition, changing the laerning activites, assesment procedures in school also can be helpful for real life experinces.

In several videos it was said that we start to prepare our pupils for jobs that are not invented yet. It is because there are lots of information production and exchange throughout world now, which makes lots of jobs become obsolete in short period of times. Our students need to have skills to locate, synthesis, and evaluate information and adapt theirselves to new contexts instead of having static knowledge about specific jobs.

This study conducted in Standford University School of Medicine reveals that brain scans from 8-year-old children can predict gains in their mathematical ability over the next six years. That is a great development to learn students' math ability and provide proper type and level of education accordingly.

This paper is about functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, a groundbreaking research for learning sciences. It allows learning scientists to understand which brain parts are activated during learning. For example "lateralization of brain" hypothesis (it was saying that one hemisphere is responsible for wholistic-creative learning one is for analytical) is refuted using fMRI. Because both hemispheres were active no matter when people engaged in creative thinking or analytical thinking.

It is an application for mobile phones which you can view elements as virtual from your screen. You can view all elements seperately and also, if you put together them, they can from a product that you can see from the screen. The principle is very simple, after you install the application to your phone you can download the pdf of element cubes from the websites. You can also, view the demo from the website of app; http://elements4d.daqri.com/#demo

I think this app looks fine to visualize an abstract topic which is elements. I agree with you Armağan about the necessity of appropriate curriculum. For example, an activity could be helpful that allows to students arrange the locations of elements based on their atomic radius in a periodic table. Therefore, the students can observe atomic radius of elements is increasing or decreasing when running left to right in rows and running up and down in columns of the periodic table. Like Selçuk said that those applications are used in other fields too. I've seen some works of Bilal Özçakır when I joined at a presentation. He visualizes the geometric shapes in 3D from QR codes. For example, you see a geometric shape from every perspective of it and you test yourself with how top or bottom perspectives of a geometric shape looks like by looking its one side. Thus, you have a realistic experience with virtual objects in immediacy.

I wrote at OdtüClass forum that interested people get learn from the beginning about developing at least basic applications. When I talked with Özçakır, he also said to me he learned the whole process from the online sources with his efforts. Of course, instead of open-source applications; the aim will be be to gain money but I think appearing more amateur applications cause many advantages at these areas.

This box can be informative and fun AR environment for primary or elementary school students to form topographies and simulate real time water flow in geology and science lessons.

I hated geography lesson when I was in high school and while I see those kinds of application, I wish studying at high school now with those technological tools :) I think it can be really beneficial and also gain creativity of students.

I thought besides making sand castles on the beach, primary or elementary students can play sand to learn topographies and water flow at the same time. And yeah why not, for high school students it can also be fun and beneficial for improving their creativity :)

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Ted Talk about how the flow term is appeared. Beyond, how he started to deal with psychology and the only aim of him to find an answer to "What makes a life worth living?" He searched an answer at different area and find the best answer at psychology. Although he know nothing about Carl Jung, even he doesn't know the name of him (I am surprised to that); after participating at one of his conference; he affected and started to deal with psychology. Finally, after this studies, he appeared the term, 'flow'.

I also add the most famous painting of Dali, persistence of memory. Because flow term remind me that painting. I think we are at our surreal world at the flow instance and also the time term is completely lost. http://www.dalipaintings.com/images/paintings/the-persistence-of-memory.jpg

I like this painting of Dali! Although it can be commented in various ways, we can comment it from the point of view of flow theory like; in the flow moment you don't realize time flies until that moment ends. Thus, I agree with you that it really fits into distortion of sense of time.

It is a currently presented a paper based on a dissertation completed by Gokce Kurt currently at Marmara University, Dept. of English Language Teaching, Istanbul, Turkey. Paper was presented at the meeting of the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education, New Orleans, LA. It examines the TPACK development of Turkish PTs of English as they participated into a study explicitly focusing on the framework of TPACK and designed following Learning Technology by Design approach.

The article states "Intelligent Tutoring Systems are not as effective as one-to-one human tutoring." The reason is that in one-to-one human tutoring a tutar is able to identify learners' affective state as well as their attention span. So, the article proposes the Mutimodal Intelligent Tutoring Systems (MITS), which provides information about learners' attention span and affective state.

This is an interesting study. I would be curious to read more about the multimodality of the ITSs, specifically how different type of interactions (audio, visual, etc.) have impact on learner's development. People in this area also started conducting research on "multimodal learning analytics".

"Codecademy - Learn to code interactively, for free"

What makes a tutor intelligent? Its design to simulate a human tutor's behavior and guidance. Evrim Hocam I see your point:) but I think it's a basic intelligent system, isn't it?

Mustafa, I was just wondering how the literature on ITSs define "intelligence" in their context. What makes a system intelligent? Let's elaborate more on this in class.

Today Filiz and I had a chance to the attend the Mendeley meeting of library. I am really glad to meet with Mendeley :) I think it will be very helpful for my future studies. Also I have a message for you from library. Until January we have the oppotunity of using institutional version of Mendeley which is more functional than the standard one. If the number of users is sufficient our library may consider prolonging the subscription. In order to use the institutional version of Mendeley you should subscribe with your metu mail adress and when you sign up you have to find the METU group and join it.

Great!!! We will have two library specialists this week in class to talk about library resources and software. We can explore Mendeley together as a group. As far as I remember we can create an online shared resource repository in Mendeley.

I'm really cruious about Mendeley. Please help me to be familiar with it.

Based on Evrim Hoca's questions, while googling I came across this. While considering the motivation we disregard one important point I guess. What about the social and economic status of learners and its influence on motivation? Here the news tell us about the accesibility problem. If some are not able to access can we talk about the motivation?

I am studying on learning environments in socioeconomically disadvantaged schools Yelda, :) May be I can provide some information during the course. Thanks for sharing this :)

Yelda, I have no idea about the target population of MOOCs when they first broke out..But I know they have many pros like no-cost for students (mostly), quality (some Ivy League universities are leading), opportunity for who has no chance to enroll a famous university, no presequities like diplom and chance of discussing things through an online platform (diversity)..So motivation is not one of the pros but cons. Because those MOOC institutions does not offer any college credit but a certificate which does not help you for employment and they are free, nothing forces you to complete..Anyway I have already enrolled a 6 weeks Cryptography Course (I am a Courseran now) offered by a Stanford Professor.

Online math practice problems offer hints and integrated Step-by-step solutions. Prefer pen and paper? Generate a printable worksheet for study sessions and quizzes. (After registration, you can try it for 7 days)

This is what I like most! Hints are useful and i could decide the level also. Thanks for sharing.

thanks for sharing, wish it was more than 7 days :)

I think that sharing our motivations of pursuing masters or PhD would be interesting. The attached video is a fun video of getting a Phd in humanities.

While I was working at a primary school, one of my students asked me:" Öğretmenim, neden hala okuyorsunuz? Tatile falan gitseniz daha iyi bence:)" I had two day off for graduate courses, that's why he thought I would go on a holiday:) (Or maybe I looked tired:) People who do not know me very well question my motivation for being a Phd student. But, those who know me well think that I should engage in academic studies. Interestingly, whenever I feel demotivated, they try to motivate me:) I love searching, learning new things and sharing them with people around me. Şermin is right: it is the hunger for knowledge and it is the most effective motive for graduate students:)

My motive for doing Master is to feel competent in my expertise field .But the main thing underlying is like everybody else is to learn and look for the best.I have always wondered `What is the best practice in teaching?` `How can I improve my skills both personally and professionally? Quest for the answers are keeping me motivated.

This is a study conducted in Turkey for adapting a scale on Cognitive Absorption. As I understand it is a concept that takes into account absorption, cognitive engagement and flow as a framework. I wonder what other concepts might there be, that takes flow theory as a base, can be good to highlight.