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gary chinn

In college, it's not so much who lectures as how the teaching is done, Nobelist's study... - 2 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...AFbGFH1G_story.html

clickers Teaching science

shared by gary chinn on 13 May 11 - No Cached
bkozlek liked it
  • He found that in nearly identical classes, Canadian college students learned a lot more from teaching assistants using interactive tools than they did from a veteran professor giving a traditional lecture. The students who had to engage interactively using the TV remote-like devices scored about twice as high on a test compared to those who heard the normal lecture, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science.
  • gary chinn on 13 May 11
     
    story about clicker use that vicki williams found. I'd be less inclined to think it was that big a deal (it's only one study, not a meta-analysis, etc), but it's being published in Science is huge in terms of visibility.
Cole Camplese

An affordable digital biology textbook that never goes out-of-date | Science | guardian... - 5 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...3

textbooks iPad Teaching

shared by Cole Camplese on 25 May 11 - No Cached
  • What would you say if I told you that there's a new introductory biology textbook being published that is affordable, lightweight and never goes out of date?
  • Allan Gyorke on 25 May 11
     
    I hope that lifelong access becomes the new norm. I keep hearing publishing companies talking about online textbooks with access that would be limited to a set period (a semester or six months). That's fine if you're taking a single course that you don't really care about - but I don't want students to feel that way about their learning. Courses build upon each other. Good reference materials should serve a purpose for years, not months.
  • ...2 more comments...
  • bartmon on 25 May 11
     
    Absolutely, publishers are missing the boat here. I'm involved in a handful of focus groups on reading compliance, and whenever this comes up the majority of the students cite the limited access model as the main reason they won't go with online textbooks. Even if they don't end up keeping the book, they want that option...not a 4-6 month access window.
  • Cole Camplese on 25 May 11
     
    Strange ... I didn't keep any textbooks until grad school. I used them and returned them for gas money and simply moved on to the next semester.
  • Allan Gyorke on 25 May 11
     
    I returned many of mine, but kept the foundation books that I'd need for other courses - calculus, mechanics, chemistry, etc... Many of them were used for more than one course (e.g. Math 140 and 141). I'd hate to have to buy the same book twice and then not have it afterward for other courses.
  • bartmon on 25 May 11
     
    I think that's typically what these students do in the focus group, but it was all about 'having the option' to keep the book at the end of the course. Might be some sort of perception of options thing going on here. The other popular comment was "I look at computer screens all day, I definitely don't want to look at a computer screen to read fine print another 1-2 hours a day". A couple students really bashed their profs about the quality of PDFs they are putting online, meaning that profs are STILL photocopying PDFs from journals, that cut words from a column and are angled funny in the PDF. Claimed these were unreadable online and they had to print them out to 'guess' at some of the words and fill them in by hand.
Cole Camplese

ELearning Platform Reviews - ETS - 3 views

ets.tlt.psu.edu/...ELearning_Platform_Reviews

ETS elearning reviews psutlt learning

shared by Cole Camplese on 07 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Cole Camplese on 07 Sep 11
     
    In early 2010, Cole Camplese, then Director of Education Technology Services at Penn State, created a Web site (hereafter referred to as the OCDM wiki) that invited University Park learning designers and administrators to provide a summary of their unit's online course development models in order to capture a snapshot of practice at Penn State's main campus. In Summer 2010, an invitation was sent to the entire learning design community at Penn State to elicit the same information for other campus locations.  In January 2011, Ann Taylor, Assistant Director of the Dutton e-Education Institute in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences and Chair of the Senate Outreach Committee, joined Camplese in his efforts to gather and analyze information about University-wide course development models. Several additional invitations were made to the University community, asking learning designers and administrators to update and/or to add their unit's online course development model summary to the OCDM wiki.
Cole Camplese

Push Pop Press: Al Gore's Our Choice - 2 views

pushpoppress.com/ourchoice

design ipad book future psuhack

shared by Cole Camplese on 29 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Cole Camplese on 29 Apr 11
     
    I don't care if you agree with the science, this represents the first real interactive text designed for iOS that I have seen.  I can't even imagine how much this thing cost to make, but it looks really stunning.  But at 4.99 it seems like a mind bending opportunity to learn about interaction design.
Derek Gittler

Why publish science in peer-reviewed journals? - 2 views

www.genomesunzipped.org/...-in-peer-reviewed-journals.php

Peer Review Crowdsourcing

shared by Derek Gittler on 14 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Derek Gittler on 14 Jul 11
     
    "In this post, I will argue that cutting journals out of scientific publishing to a large extent would be unconditionally a good thing, and that the only thing keeping this from happening is the absence of a "killer app"."
bartmon

Portal 2 Authoring Tools for schools: Newell explains | Joystiq - 0 views

www.joystiq.com/...ls-for-schools-newell-explains

shared by bartmon on 23 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • turning the game into a more direct learning experience, with custom tools to match educational programs. "We just add another layer on top of the authoring tools to simplify the production of those spaces," Valve head Gabe Newell explained to us this afternoon.
  • the level creation tool for the PC version of Portal 2 gets another layer of interaction on top of the placement of, say, platforms or boxes. "If you give us a lesson plan, we can give you a tool that allows kids to build content to lock down those lessons,"
  • "The layering on top of it of the framework for giving people a direct physical experience of physics is there, but you have to tell me exactly how you want to measure whether or not your students are successful or not."
  • bartmon on 23 Jun 11
     
    This is crazy...one of the top developers (Valve) building an 'educational layer' on top of Portal 2's authoring environment specifically for education, likely physics education. Even crazier...Gabe wants the implementation ASSESSED! We already have a great relationship with Valve, being an early adopter of SourceU that runs our Steam installs. Anyone know science/physics profs we can approach for this? I plan on sifting through the Institute's database to see if we have any contacts that might want to play in this space.
Derek Gittler

University of Iowa - Civil War Diaries Crowdsourcing Transcription Project - 2 views

digital.lib.uiowa.edu/...transcripts.html

Civil War Libraries Library Digital Library Iowa Crowdsourcing

shared by Derek Gittler on 08 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Derek Gittler on 08 Jun 11
     
    This reminded me of Cole Camplese's comments on the instant crowdsourcing of video recording the sessions at the 2011 TLT Symposium, Clay Shirky's example of that socially-written mathematics (?) paper, and a bit of Chris Long's posts on using digital tools in research.
  • Allan Gyorke on 08 Jun 11
     
    The socially-written paper was about "P vs NP", which is a computer science/mathematics problem. A fairly simple explanation is here: http://www.claymath.org/millennium/P_vs_NP/ But yeah - crowdsourcing stuff like this is great when you have a community of people who really care about it. It's like having an army of amateur archeologists.
gary chinn

Tim Harford's Adapt: How to fund research so that it generates insanely great ideas, no... - 2 views

www.slate.com/...all

innovation science

shared by gary chinn on 17 May 11 - No Cached
  • What did Capecchi do? He took the NIH's money, and, ignoring their admonitions, he poured almost all of it into his risky gene-targeting project. It was, he recalls, a big gamble. If he hadn't been able to show strong enough initial results in the three-to-five-year time scale demanded by the NIH, they would have cut off his funding. Without their seal of approval, he might have found it hard to get funding from elsewhere. His career would have been severely set back, his research assistants looking for other work. His laboratory might not have survived.In 2007, Mario Capecchi was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for this work on mouse genes. As the NIH's expert panel had earlier admitted, when agreeing to renew his funding: "We are glad you didn't follow our advice."
  • Whichever way they sliced the data, Azoulay, Manzo and Zivin found evidence that the more open-ended, risky HHMI grants were funding the most important, unusual, and influential research. HHMI researchers, apparently no better qualified than their NIH-funded peers, were far more influential, producing twice as many highly cited research articles. They were more likely to win awards and more likely to train students who themselves won awards.
  • The HHMI researchers also produced more failures; a higher proportion of their research papers were cited by nobody at all. No wonder: The NIH program was designed to avoid failure, while the HHMI program embraced it. And in the quest for truly original research, some failure is inevitable.
  • gary chinn on 17 May 11
     
    not specific to education at all, but a fascinating & well-written article about innovation, risk-taking and societal choices.
bartmon

Blog meta-analysis - 3 views

firstmonday.org/...2836

shared by bartmon on 26 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • The search process was undertaken on 5 January 2009. Using the “advanced search” feature available on ISI Web of Science, SSCI and AHCI were searched using the keywords blog*, weblog* and web log* (trunctuated so as to find different usage of the basic word, such as blogs, bloggers, blogging, etc.). This indentified papers that focus on blogs but also those that examine blogs in relation with other media. As for temporal limits, all articles published before 1 January 2009, were considered for inclusion. In total, 311 articles were identified.
  • bartmon on 26 Jul 11
     
    This is a fantastic resource for anyone working on the research side of blogs. I've been looking for a meta-analysis of blog research for a while now, and this appears to be the home run so far. 311 articles reviewed. Millet - this is one example of how we might structure a lecture capture meta-analysis.
  • Allan Gyorke on 28 Jul 11
     
    I need one of these for podcasting!
Elizabeth Pyatt

10 Award-Winning Scientific Simulation Videos - 0 views

www.wired.com/...science-simulation-videos

video visualization

shared by Elizabeth Pyatt on 10 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Elizabeth Pyatt on 10 Aug 11
     
    This kind of visualization not scalable yet, but will it be soon? "Thanks to increasingly cheap, fast and efficient computing power, scientific simulations are now a crucial tool for researchers who want to ask once impractical scientific questions or generate data that laboratory experiments can't. "The human eye can pick out patterns in simulations that are are otherwise hard to describe, and they can do it better than any computer," said visualization scientist Joseph Insley of Argonne National Laboratory ."Plus, with the incredible amount of data gathered these days, it's difficult to analyze it any other way."
Cole Camplese

Virtual and Artificial, but 58,000 Want Course - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...16stanford.html

open opencourseware ci597 psutlt Design

shared by Cole Camplese on 16 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • A free online course at Stanford University on artificial intelligence, to be taught this fall by two leading experts from Silicon Valley, has attracted more than 58,000 students around the globe — a class nearly four times the size of Stanford’s entire student body.
  • The three online courses, which will employ both streaming Internet video and interactive technologies for quizzes and grading, have in the past been taught to smaller groups of Stanford students in campus lecture halls. Last year, for example, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence drew 177 students.
  • How will the artificial intelligence instructors grade 58,000 students? The scientists said they would make extensive use of technology. “We have a system running on the Amazon cloud, so we think it will hold up,” Dr. Norvig said.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Dr. Widom said that having Stanford courses freely available could both assist and compete with other colleges and universities. A small college might not have the faculty members to offer a particular course, but could supplement its offerings with the Stanford lectures.
  • Cole Camplese on 16 Aug 11
     
    Amazing trend happening with open and online courses. This is the second one of these I have heard about in a week. Maybe we need to try something similar with CI597?
  • gary chinn on 22 Aug 11
     
    good discussion about this course from CS faculty. they bring up some excellent points and have a healthy skepticism about the project: http://computinged.wordpress.com/2011/08/18/stanford-on-line-ai-course-draws-58000-but-is-it-real/
gary chinn

Now You See It: How the Science of Attention is Changing Work and Education | Brain Pic... - 1 views

www.brainpickings.org/...now-you-see-it-cathy-davidson

cognition learning education

shared by gary chinn on 22 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Davidson uses the insights from these experiments as a lens through which to examine the nature and evolution of attention, noting that the educational system is driven by very rigid expectations of what “attention” is and how it reflects “intelligence,” a system in which students who fail to meet these expectations and pay attention differently are pigeonholed somehow deficient of aberrant, square pegs in round holes. Yet neuroscience is increasingly indicating that our minds pay attention in a myriad different ways, often non-linear and simultaneous, which means that the academy and the workplace will have to evolve in parallel and transcend the 20th-century linear assembly-line model for eduction and work.
  • gary chinn on 22 Aug 11
     
    am currently reading 'brain rules' & 'how learning works,' and I think this book might be a good addition to the list.
bkozlek

Milwaukee 7th-grader among winners in national video game design contest - JSOnline - 0 views

www.jsonline.com/...118943044.html

psutlt gaming egc

shared by bkozlek on 31 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • A seventh-grader from Milwaukee Montessori School is among the winners of a nationwide video game design challenge launched at the White House last fall. Shireen Zaineb created a game called "Discover.." that earned her a victory in the National STEM Video Game Challenge, which was designed to generate interest in science, technology, engineering and math, also known as STEM. Zaineb's Web-based game teaches players about concepts such as mass, friction, weight and gravity through a series of platforming challenges in which players must jump a character through 2-D environments and collect items.
Cole Camplese

What if he is right? - 2 views

www.digitallantern.net/...wolfe.html

mcluhan ci597 information theory web2.0

shared by Cole Camplese on 17 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • The printing press brought about a radical change. People began getting their information primarily by seeing it -the printed word. The visual sense became dominant. Print translates one sense-hearing, the spoken word-into another sense sight, the printed word. Print also converts sounds into abstract symbols, the letters. Print is or derly progression of abstract, visual symbols. Print led to the habit of categorizing-putting everything in order, into categories, "jobs," "prices," "departments," "bureaus," "specialties." Print led, ultimately, to the creation of the modern economy, to bureaucracy, to the modern army, to nationalism itself.
  • People today think of print as if it were a technology that has been around forever. Actually, the widespread use of print is only about two hundred years old. Today new technologies-television, radio, the telephone, the computer-are causing another revolution. Print caused an "explosion"-breaking society up into categories. The electronic media, on the other hand, are causing an "implosion," forcing people back together in a tribal unity.
  • . There will be a whole nation of young psychic drop- outs-out of it-from the wealthy suburbs no less than the city slums. The thing is, all these TV-tribal children are aural people, tactile people, they're used to learning by pattern recogni tion. They go into classrooms, and there up in front of them are visual, literate, print-minded teachers. They are up there teaching classes by subjects, that is, categories; they've broken learning down into compartments -mathematics, history, geography, Latin, biology-it doesn't make sense to the tribal kids, it's like trying to study a flood by counting the trees going by, it's unnatural.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • "Well . . . they're all working from very obsolete premises, of course. Almost by definition." By definition? "Certainly. By the time you can get a thousand people to agree on enough principles to hold such a meeting, conditions will already have changed, the principles will be useless." McLuhan pulls his chin down into his neck. The Hayakawa conference . . . disappears.
  • One thing that drew them to McLuhan was his belief in "generalism" -pattern recognition. McLuhan, for example, dismisses the idea of university "departments," history, political science, sociology, and so forth; he considers all that obsolete and works in four or five of the old "fields" at once. It is all one field to him.
  • from The New Life Out There by Tom Wolfe (c) 1965 The New York Herald Tribune
bartmon

Newell sees no distinction 'between games and educational games' | Joystiq - 0 views

www.joystiq.com/...en-games-and-educational-games

shared by bartmon on 24 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • "The interesting thing about Portal 2 is it doesn't sort of fit the traditional simplistic model of what a game is. It's not a collection of weapons. It's not a collection of monsters. It's really about science. It's about spatial reasoning, it's about learning physics, it's about problem solving.
  • "There seems to be this distinction between games that are educational, and games that are going to be commercially successful. I'm not really sure I buy into that."
  • A lot of times [the label] 'educational games' is a way of being an excuse for bad game design or poor production values."
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • "Games are becoming increasingly useful as educational tools. From our perspective, it's one of the things we always think about -- we always think about games as a learning experience. You can't design a game without thinking about the progression of experiences and skills that a person is gonna have. The value that we have is that they're self-directed. Rather than that being a problem -- rather than resisting the chaotic nature of an individual one-on-one play experience that people have, we embrace it."
  • "Someone should write a book, "Everything I Needed to Know to be Successful I Learned From World of Warcraft."
  • "In terms of what educational psychologists are sort of starting to discover about what are the highest value educational experiences, games are a lot closer to being those things than traditional middle school/high school kinds of curriculum,"
  • bartmon on 24 Jun 11
     
    Some interesting notes from Gabe Newell's keynote at Games for Change. This is interesting because it's the first time a president and figurehead for one of the biggest game developers out there has really put a stake in the ground for using games as educational tools.
Chris Millet

BBC News - Internet's memory effects quantified in computer study - 5 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...science-environment-14145045

shared by Chris Millet on 17 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Allan Gyorke on 18 Jul 11
     
    Good article. You know CHAT (the learning theory), right? I like it because it considers our tools and environment as part of how we (collectively) learn. Our cell phones and laptops and Google are part of the equation. So yes, Allan's brain may remember less at a given time, but Allan+iPhone+Google remembers many orders of magnitude more and with much more accuracy.
  • Chris Millet on 18 Jul 11
     
    We talked about this quite a bit in our Disruptive Technologies course with Cole and Scott in terms of distributed intelligence, which is similar to what you're saying in that the tools we use are extensions of our minds. Maybe it's because I'm a SciFi geek and have read so many post-apocalyptic books, or perhaps it's just that I know technology too well to trust it, but my biggest fear about what this research is suggesting is that, should our technology disappear, we'll all turn into gibbering idiots because half our mind has been turned off, literally. Realistically, I know that the human brain is much more plastic and our memory would reconfigure itself eventually. And the benefits of extending ourselves like this probably outweigh the risks. But it still gives you pause for thought..
  • Allan Gyorke on 18 Jul 11
     
    Right now, our dependence on instant gratification knowledge isn't too bad, I'm sure we'd have a feeling of disconnection and lots of frustration. I'd consider buying a set of encyclopedias again. I worry more about a scenario like running out of fuel without energy alternatives. The human race is so dependent on fuel for food production and transportation that we'd run into a starvation issue very quickly. We've lost our survival skills and there are just too many of us.
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