Group items tagged

" In such times Dada objects amuse everybody, and since these objects are (mostly) made collectively, they are a strong community bond. Amusement (of oneself and others) and the making of art communities are the goals of Dada. Dada is a priori against everything, including goals and itself, but this creative negation is very amusing and is meant to be shared. For one whole century, Dada has delighted in uncovering and using contradictions, paradoxes, and negations, the most important of which are: 1. most people read signs, Dadas make signs, and 2. most people are scared of scary faces, Dada makes scary faces." "

"It is the simplicity of Seinfeld that makes it so appropriate for use in economics courses. Using these clips (as well as clips from other television shows or movies) makes economic concepts come alive, making them more real for students. Ultimately, students will start seeing economics everywhere - in other TV shows, in popular music, and most importantly, in their own lives."

Nice narrative re: the process of making of a dataviz

"For example, Jaclyn is the underlying reason that I've had something of a change of heart about online classes. While I've been making a substantial contribution to my daughter's tuition and living expenses, Jaclyn decided in her sophomore year to get a job so that she could afford to move off campus and live a little better than she would if she stayed in the dorms. In the process, she took some online classes that fit her work schedule better than the traditional courses. Before my daughter started college, I couldn't see much reason for students at a bricks-and-mortar college to take online classes. Now I realize why those courses make so much sense for students who work - either out of necessity or by choice. It was Jaclyn who made it very clear to me that some online courses are much better than others. Good online classes have taught her much more than bad survey courses in the traditional format with 400 students in them. Her experiences were what inspired me to create what I hope will be a quality online class of my own."

"My premise is that we're all sympathetic towards students who dislike mathematics, this course they're forced to take. We all have answers to the question, "What does it take to interest students in mathematics?" Though those answers are often implicit and unspoken, they're powerful. They determine the experiences students have in our classes. I lay out three of the most common answers I hear from teachers, principals, policymakers, publishers, etc., two of which are "make math real world" and "make math relevant." I offer evidence that those answers are incomplete and unreliable. Then I dive into research from Willingham, Kasmer, Roger & David Johnson, Mayer, et al., presenting stronger strategies for creating interest in mathematics education. "

"If a college aims to produce more graduates and make research breakthroughs, Mr. Crow says, it should be designed so that a policy of near-open access enhances the prospects that professors will cure cancer or build flying cars."

""That's our goal: To make a computer much more like a human being, in the sense that it integrates data and can make decisions," Littlewood told me. "So the future definition of computer may be like the original. It may be like a person after all.""

I/we need to consider this with our team and education more broadly. "Theory 1: Nothing we "know" about software development should be assumed to be true. Most of our tools, our mental models, and our practices are remnants of an era (possibly fictional) where software was written by solo practitioners, but modern software is a team sport. Theory 2: Technology is the product of the culture that builds it. Great technology is the product of a great culture. Culture gives us the ability to act in a loosely coupled way; it allows us to pursue a diversity of tactics. Uncertainty is the mind-killer and culture creates certainty in the face of the yawning shapeless void of possible solutions that is software engineering. Culture is what you do, not what you say. It starts at the top. It affects everything. You have a choice about the culture you promote, not about the culture you have. Theory 3: Software development should be thought of as a cycle of continual learning and improvement rather a progression from start to finish, or a search for correctness. If you aren't shipping, you aren't learning. If it slows down shipping, it probably isn't worth it. Maturity is knowing when to make the trade off and when not to. I had some experience with this at Flickr, and I wanted to see how far you could scale it. My private bet was that we'd make it to 50 engineers before things broke down. Theory 4: You build a culture of learning by optimizing globally not locally. Your improvement, over time, as a team, with shared tools, practices and beliefs is more important than individual pockets of brilliance. And more satisfying. Theory 5: If you want to build for the long term, the only guarantee is change. Invest in your people and your ability to ask questions, not your current answers. Your current answers are wrong, or they will be soon. "

A group of renowned disability studies scholars are seeking to clarify what makes a book accessible with a set of guidelines that authors can use to help publishers make their books readable by anyone.

The guidelines, a one-page template letter, read a little like an ultimatum. The letter opens by asking a would-be publisher to confirm in writing that print books and accessible formats will be made available simultaneously, then launches into an explanation of how publishers should handle everything from digital rights management to authoring software.

Lennard J. Davis, professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said the letter is meant less to threaten a boycott and more as a public service announcement. Some authors may not budge from the demands in the letter, he said, but others are likely to use it as a way to spread awareness about accessibility.

Digital text-mining tools can help researchers understand document collections that are prohibitively large for a close-reading. Our collection of runaway slave advertisements from Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi totals over 2,500 individual ads! Not only would it be extremely time consuming to read this entire collection, the consistently short, boilerplate format of runaway ads can make it difficult to really distinguish between them. The ads from Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi start to all look practically indistinguishable, making it difficult for close-reading alone to recognize pattern breaks between the states, without the assistance of computational data. This is where Voyant comes in. We hoped that the "distant-reading" capabilities of Voyant would be able to pick up on larger word usage trends that are not immediately apparent when reading with the human eye.

Embrace imperfection. Makers are more interested in learning and experimenting rather than perfection and that's OK. They try (and fail) often to perfect their projects and to make lots of small bets which eventually lead them to THE BIG IDEA. Makers do it for the fun first and iterate and refine as they go.

Love the process. A focus on trusting the process rather than outcome is essential to the Maker mentality. Creativity and making is an ongoing rhythm, a lifestyle which is more a way of being than a hobby or isolated event.

Other thoughts on this interesting link. Writing a grant focused on the iterative process of improving health care this is exactly what the funders are looking for. How to set up teams (with the 'right' mix of individuals) that are working in an environment where they can fail (without hurting anybody) and improve processes both for the team and the rest of the organization. The later is much harder - how to disseminate good processes that others can then improve upon in complex organizations. But yes the goal is to always work on the process improvement (the makers mentality as it is called in this piece).

"Digital literacy is getting a sense of your networks. It's like learning a new city, invisible but beautiful, and baffling when you don't know how a new city works. But then, as you roam around, it can start to make sense. You get more comfortable, and in time, your rhythms come together with its, and you can feel the city. You can cross the street safely and get what you need from the city. You can make friends there, and find safety, and love, and community. We all live in this common city now, and we just need to learn to see it. We live in an age of networks, and it's an amazing age."

Game making can be one of the best ways to get students thinking creatively while cultivating useful technical literacies, and there's a ton of absorbing tools that students won't tire of over the long break. Here are three options to choose from depending on the type of technology students have at home.

"Some may consider online learning to be the anti-classroom.  A rebellion against the chalkboard and the Blackboard in favor of virtual classrooms, avatars in sweater vests lecturing in a Charlie Brown monotone…  I simply look at it as a different kind of team approach to learning.  More opportunities for inputs.  If anything, it makes the scholarship more rigorous.  As both teachers and students, it is becoming increasingly difficult to hide behind airs of academia when the scholarship can be researched, published, evaluated and revised in a nano-second.  It makes educational leadership even more important when the skills necessary to synthesize information both in person and on line are changing, and changing quickly."

"Intellectual skills, in contrast, have to do with a person's ways of reasoning, hypothesizing, exploring, understanding, and, in general, making sense of the world.  Every child is, by nature, an intellectual being--a curious, sense-making person, who is continuously seeking to understand his or her physical and social environments.  Each child is born with such skills and develops them further, in his or her own ways, through observing, exploring, playing, and questioning.  Attempts to teach intellectual skills directly inevitably fail, because each child must develop them in his or her own way, through his or her own self-initiated activities.  But adults can influence that development through the environments they provide.  "

Neat tool for making charts via URL constructs.

"Dr. Moorman conducted a study focused on what meaning VTS had for students exploring how they used VTS in patient care.  Guided by a series of 3 questions, a facilitator chose a work of art and asked students the following questions: 'What is going on in this painting?' 'What are you seeing that makes you say that?' (requiring students to give visual evidence), and 'What more can you find?' (requiring them to look again and scaffold off of others' comments).  Students found their observational skills improved and that they were more open to hearing other's opinions.  They found that they were more likely to give detail to back up observations in their clinical situations and listen to others during report. They also found they used the same line of questioning that the facilitator used when they were seeking more information during clinical rotations during patient care.    "

We had a faculty member who took our students to the VMFA every year for this exercise. The students loved it. I didn't understand its point at the time, but this makes a great deal of sense.

I wish I could automate some things like this in rampages . . . like if you do a bare URL that doesn't link . . . I'd like to auto comment with some directions on how to make a link. Seems doable in terms of programming.

"In order to make it easier to track activity in Hypothes.is, I created a program called Hypothes.is Collector. The idea is that you can type in user name, a URL, a tag, or a group ID and click the button to see all of the related annotations. The program will create a new sheet with an archive of up to 200 annotations based on the search terms.  It will then create a third sheet that will count how many of these annotations were made on each URL in the set by each user."

"These constructive quotes communicate that mistakes are desirable, which is a positive message and part of what we want students to learn. An appreciation of mistakes helps us overcome our fear of making them, enabling us to take risks. But we also want students to understand what kinds of mistakes are most useful and how to most learn from them. "