ALT Lab

"This represents perhaps the most foundational of all the connections that Stephen Lehmkuhle and his colleagues have been steadily knitting together in Rochester: that between facts and ideas. Traditional college instruction-epitomized by the lecture-is largely a process of orally transmitting facts from the brain of a teacher to a student. It's a tremendously inefficient method-even harmful. UMR chemistry professor Rajeev Muthyala points to research finding that undergraduates often finish lecture-based introductory science classes with less expertise than when they started. They get worse."

"Mapping Networks of Reprinting in 19th-Century Newspapers and Magazines" Really cool digital humanities project

"Programming languages shape the way their users think-which helps explain how tech startups work and why they are able to reinvent themselves. "

"he clarity does not need to come all at once, however; we also like the idea of providing several and consequent layers of exploration on the multiple dataset we analyze. We call it a "non-linear storytelling" where people can get lost in singular elements, minor tales, and last-mile textual elements within the greater visualization."

"This adorable animated GIF is apparently the official answer Google sent to a Daily Dot reporter in response to his seeming scoop on a new YouTube livestreaming plan. "

This is fabulous, Tom. Thanks for sharing. Forwarding on to my students !read

"There are five "perpetuity"s in the 15 volumes, and definitely none of them are that quote. There are no instances in which "Thoreau" and "beard" appear together, nor any variation of neckbeard. There are only a handful of references to Louisa May Alcott in the set, and none of them are that anecdote. So I think you can consider it conclusively debunked. "

"We build software that shapes our cities. More specifically, (1) we create micro-institutions in physical space, (2) we design social processes that allow others to replicate and evolve those micro-institutions, and (3) we write software that enables those social processes. We use this process to create more robust, decentralized, human-scale systems in our cities. We are particularly focused on reinventing our current systems for learning, agriculture, and transportation."

We've known this stuff for decades, but, still...

No citation but worth looking at . . . "Claims about the success of brainstorming rest on easily tested assumptions. One assumption is that groups produce more ideas than individuals. Researchers in Minnesota tested this with scientists and advertising executives from the 3M Company. Half the subjects worked in groups of four. The other half worked alone, and then their results were randomly combined as if they had worked in a group, with duplicate ideas counted only once. In every case, four people working individually generated between 30 to 40 percent more ideas than four people working in a group. Their results were of a higher quality, too: independent judges assessed the work and found that the individuals produced better ideas than the groups. "

How the library guides image searches . . .

Not in agreement with the 'taskmaster' element but I have similar concerns about teaching evaluations. "Michele Pellizzari, an economics professor at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, has a more serious claim: that course evaluations may in fact measure, and thus motivate, the opposite of good teaching. "

"In 1998, a National Science Foundation report made a remark that begins to hit the mark a little closer: "It is important to understand how individuals assess their own knowledge of these subjects. For many purposes … it is the individual's self-assessment of his or her knowledge that will either encourage or discourage a given behavior." This starts to tear down the wall of judging people based on how "well-informed" or "attentive" they are (terms that permeate these statistics reports) to science, and instead places more significance on an individual's assessment of themselves. To go further, I'd argue that "knowledge" isn't as telltale of a measurement as "experience"."