From Why don’t students like school? here are some good pointers.  They don’t really do the book justice, but hey…

May 26th 2009 | Comments(1) | Notes on school education brains psychology teaching

[via Noah].  The NBER spot a possible problem with “progress”.

By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women’s declining relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well-being, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well-being than did men. These declines have continued and a new gender gap is emerging — one with higher subjective well-being for men.

Interesting article over at Atlantic with a really rather beautiful conclusion.

“The project is one of the longest-running—and probably the most exhaustive—longitudinal studies of mental and physical well-being in history. Begun in 1937 as a study of healthy, well-adjusted Harvard sophomores (all male), it has followed its subjects for more than 70 years.

From their days of bull sessions in Cambridge to their active duty in World War II, through marriages and divorces, professional advancement and collapse—and now well into retirement—the men have submitted to regular medical exams, taken psychological tests, returned questionnaires, and sat for interviews. The files holding the data are as thick as unabridged dictionaries.”

And the lead researcher, Geroge Vaillant’s conclusion, based on this exhaustive research?

“Happiness isn’t about me.  Try being funny.  Try falling in love.  Try forgiving someone … Happiness is love.  Full stop.”

… when a friend gets on TV.  However undeservedly.  John, my thoughts are with you

From Daniel Willingham’s excellent “Why Don’t Students like School?” (which I suspect I’ll be quoting more from):

I’ve always been bothered by the advice “make it relevant to the students", for two reasons.  First, it often feels to me that it doesn;t apply.  Is the Epic of Gilgamesh relevant to the students in any way they understand right now?  Is trigonometry?  Making these topics relevant to students’ lives will be a strain, and students will probably think it’s phony.  Second, if I can;t convince students that some material is relevant, does that mean I shouldn’t teach it?  If I’m continually trying to build bridges between students’ daily lives and their school subjects, the students may get the message that school is always about them, whereas I think their is value, interest and beauty in learning about things that don’t have much to do with me.  What I’m suggesting is that students should not be the main force of lesson planning.  Rather, they might be used as initial points of contact that help students understand the main ideas you want them to consider, rather than as the reason or motivation for them to consider these ideas.

I enjoy the talks over at TED. Tim has kindly transcribed the TED Commandments, the rules that every  speaker needs to follow

1. Thou Shalt Not Simply Trot Out thy Usual Shtick
2. Thou Shalt Dream a Great Dream, or Show Forth a Wondrous New Thing, Or Share Something Thou Hast Never Shared Before
3. Thou Shalt Reveal thy Curiosity and Thy Passion
4. Thou Shalt Tell a Story
5. Thou Shalt Freely Comment on the Utterances of Other Speakers for the Sake of Blessed Connection and Exquisite Controversy
6. Thou Shalt Not Flaunt thine Ego. Be Thou Vulnerable. Speak of thy Failure as well as thy Success.
7. Thou Shalt Not Sell from the Stage: Neither thy Company, thy Goods, thy Writings, nor thy Desparate need for Funding; Lest Thou be Cast Aside into Outer Darkness.
8. Thou Shalt Remember all the while: Laughter is Good.
9. Thou Shalt Not Read thy Speech.
10. Thou Shalt Not Steal the Time of Them that Follow Thee

Again, from Dan Gardner’s book Risk:

“What happens when people who share a belief get together to discuss it?  Psychologists know the answer to that and it’s not pretty.  They call it group polarisation.

It seems reasonable to think that when like-minded people get together to discuss a proposed hazardous waste site, or the breast implants they believe are making them sick, or some other risk, their views will tend to coalesce around the average within the group.  But they don’t.  Decades of research has proved that groups usually come to conclusions that are more extreme than the average view of the individuals who make up the group.  When opponents of a hazardous waste site gather to talk about it, they will become convinced the site is more dangerous than originally believed.  When a woman who believes breast implants are a threat gets together with women who feel the same way, she and all the women in the meeting are likely to leave believing they had previously underestimated the danger.  The dynamic is always the same.”

Hence the value of diverse teams, presumably.

April 29th 2009 | Comments(1) | Notes on bias extremism groups polarisation psychology risk

We’re pretty bad at theories, it seems, because we don’t really look for disconfirmation.

In Dan Gardner’s book Risk, he recounts an experiment done to show this that was conducted by Peter Watson.

The challenge is pretty simple: given 3 numbers in sequence, can you figure out what the rule is?  Participants were allowed to write down 3 different numbers to see whether they followed the rule, and try this as many times as they wanted.

So here are the numbers: 2, 4 and 6.

It seems pretty normal, so most would then ask the researchers whether these numbers fitted the rule:

8, 10, and 12.  And yes, they do.

And if they wanted more vigorous testing, they would ask whether the following sets of numbers followed the rule:

14, 16, 18 or 100, 102, 104.  And yes, both do follow the rule

So what’s the rule?  Well most said that it was “any 3 even numbers ascending by 2 each time”.  And they were wrong.  That’s not the rule.  The correct rule is: “any 3 numbers in ascending order”.

What had happened, it seems, is that people didn’t try to disconfirm the rule.  They didn’t ask, for example, whether “3,4,5” followed the rule.

As Dan Gardner says,

“most people do not try to disconfirm.  They do the opposite, trying to confirm the rule by looking for examples that fit it.  That’s a futile strategy.  No matter how many examples are piled up, they can never prove that the belief is correct.  Confirmation doesn’t work”

Something I need to bear in mind while trawling the myriad posts on Everything 2.0.  It seems it’s better to look for indications that I’m wrong rather than bask in the warm webby-goodness of confirmed 2.0 successes.  And intuitively that makes sense.  Rigour is surely preferable to comfort.

April 29th 2009 | Comments(1) | Notes on Brains confirmation experiments proof psychology thinking

“For every problem there is a solution that is simple, clean and wrong.”

- H.L.Mencken

• 3quarksdaily >> Epidemic Thinking
  “the risks that kill people and the risks that upset people are completely different. If you know that a risk kills people, you have no idea whether it upsets them or not. If you know it upsets them, you have no idea whether it kills them or not. “
  Tags: statistics risk fear
• Warren Ellis » The Machines Of Desire
  I come from the classic British tradition, where science fiction is social fiction. Therefore, in my head, the most valid way to come to terms with The Age Of Giant Fictional Machines and the terrifying miasmic presence of the 21st century is in fact to frame the whole discussion in terms of monstrous chunks of implausible technology, remaking the world by drilling or blasting or generally stabbing it with nuclear-driven metal bits, trying to stop things from exploding, and having the Cigarette Of Victory afterwards.

  I think stories like these contain important lessons for our children.

  My child, of course, watches SUPERNATURAL and gets all her news from MOCK THE WEEK. So we?re all doomed anyway. But I wanted to note the thought down
  Tags: culture technology scifi British stories imagination children

• Op-Ed Contributor - End the University as We Know It - NYTimes.com
  The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages an educational system that has become a process of cloning. Faculty members cultivate those students whose futures they envision as identical to their own pasts, even though their tenures will stand in the way of these students having futures as full professors.
  Tags: education academia university curriculum
• Revolutionary Espresso Book Machine launches in London | Books | guardian.co.uk
  It’s not elegant and it’s not sexy ? it looks like a large photocopier ? but the Espresso Book Machine is being billed as the biggest change for the literary world since Gutenberg invented the printing press more than 500 years ago and made the mass production of books possible. Launching today at Blackwell’s Charing Cross Road branch in London, the machine prints and binds books on demand in five minutes, while customers wait.
  Tags: books technology publishing innovation london printing
• The Long Now Blog » Blog Archive » Introducing The Long News
  Each weekday, The New York Times prints around 125 news stories. That?s just one newspaper; add in all other newspapers, plus television, radio, and the internet, and it?s clear thousands upon thousands of news stories are generated every day.

  But how many of these stories will make a difference next year? A decade from now? A century? Ten thousand years?

  That?s the idea behind The Long News: to try to identify news stories whose significance seems likely to grow, rather than diminish, over time.
  Tags: future time slow news journalism

• Stephen Fry lampoons Digital Britain
  Speaking at the Digital Britain Summit on Friday, Fry said that if people found value in the internet, they would naturally learn to use it, rather than be forced to. “We live in a world dominated by the car and it is useful to know how to drive, yet I don’t see debates and steering committees to tell people how to use traffic”
  Tags: UK digital traffic adoption learning
• Screencast-O-Matic
  free and easy way to create a video recording of your screen (aka screencast) and upload it for free hosting all from your browser with no install
  Tags: screencast video tools free
• Technology and Education - list of useful tools
  
  Tags: tools education games software free ict

There’s an excellent post over at Box of Tricks that doesn’t just go gooey-eyed at Web2.0 and openness but puts forward some sound educational benefits for blogging:

1. Showcasing your pupils’ work - Th mere fact their work is going to be published, possibly to a worldwide audience, is a powerful motivating factor. It also allows your students to feel ownership of their work and show it off proudly to friends and family.
2. Assessment for learning - The commenting functionality in blogs allows students to feedback on each other’s work and fosters self evaluation. Often this feedback students receive from their peers has a powerful influence on them and serves to reinforce that given by the teacher.
3. Engaging and motivating students - Web 2.0 offers a vast range of exciting and interactive learning possibilities that are designed to be shared on the internet. Blogs can take advantage of this as the outcome of these Web 2.0 creative tasks can generally be easily embedded into posts.
4. Showcasing students’ videos - Our students live in a world where videos are created and shared by ordinary people. They do it all the time with their digital cameras and mobile phones. We can channel some of this enthusiasm and creativity by asking our students to film their own videos, which we can then showcase in our blog.
5. Promoting target language use - By recording oral classroom activities such as dialogues or role-plays: if students know they are going to be recorded and the recording put on the subject blog, they then try harder and are more motivated to speak in the target language. This also gives parents and relatives an opportunity to see what their children get up to in class, thus helping bridge the home-school divide.
6. Sharing teacher resources - Why not share that PowerPoint or that .pdf document with your students or other teachers by making them accessible in your blog?
7. Sharing students’ resources - If one or more of your students create their own resources, such as vocabulary lists, study guides, grammar explanations, etc, you can also share these with the other students via the blog.
8. Hosting listening materials (including podcasts) - A blog is the perfect platform to deliver listening resources and podcasts, because the resources are hosted online and are therefore constantly and repeatedly available. You post it once but it can be listened to or downloaded an infinite number of times. If you are intrigued by or interested in creating your own podcast, then you ought to watch this video.
9. Linking to external resources - A blog can be a one-stop-shop for all your students’ language learning needs by linking to those resources which you have previously deemed suitable.
10. Media rich content - As hinted above, students lead a media-rich life - they share videos daily - A blog helps tap into this media-rich online lifestyle by directing them to those videos which you have sourced and you have decided are educationally sound, therefore promoting learning.
11. Promoting independent study - By linking to external resources such as videos or interesting websites or online newspaper articles, you are helping to develop your students’ intellectual curiosity, which in turn fosters learning autonomy.

I love this. And I love the idea that abstract mathematical concepts can sometimes best be understood by tactile, asymbolic play.

Nice fine by Will Richardson. Concord, a school in Melbourne, thanks in large part to Richard Olsen’s effortshave been using open source and home grown apps to begin to teach the benefits of publishing and networking. As Will says,

What’s most compelling to me here is not necessarily the tool set, however, as much as the vision that brought this to fruition. While most all of this work is done locally on an internal network, the concepts are preparing kids at Concord for the very global network they’ll inhabit once they leave the system. And here is the best part: Concord is a special needs school, a place where kids with all sorts of disabilities attend. The work that these kids do in these contexts is very rewarding on a number of levels.

The larger point here is that this isn’t too far out of the reach of most schools provided they have the courage and the leadership to make it happen. Aside from the photo-sharing tool, the rest is freely available. There’s nothing really too difficult about it aside, perhaps, from creating good teaching around the tools. Makes you wonder what so many other schools are waiting for.

Concord School Web-Based Social and Collaborative Learning

Anyway, makes me think that there must be some non-cloud options for similar things. Flickr etc. are great, but for school’s where privacy is a massive concern to parents, it would be nice to have some internally hostable options.

From a good talk by Danah

For all of the attention paid to “digital natives” it’s important to realize that most teens are engaging with social media without any deep understanding of the underlying dynamics or structure. Just because they understand how to use the technology doesn’t mean that they understand the information ecology that surrounds it. Most teens don’t have the scaffolding for thinking about their information practices.

It’s critical to realize that just because young folks pick up a technology before you do doesn’t inherently mean that they understand it better than you do. Or that they have a way of putting it into context. What they’re doing is not inherently more sophisticated – it’s simply different. They’re coming of age in a culture where these structures are just a given. They take them for granted. And they repurpose them to meet their needs. But they don’t necessarily think about them.

[via 3QD]

• 45 Social by Social Propositions « Sociability
  Good stuff, esp. “Design to support conversations, relationships, stories - not to organise documents. If everything?s neat and tidy, it?s because no-one?s there.” Might need condensing for school
  Tags: social web2.0 strategy community social_computing school

• MHD I: Demonstrate Magnetohydrodynamic Propulsion in a Minute - Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories
  Rember the silent caterpillar drive from the movie The Hunt for Red October? The caterpillar drive was a fictional magnetohydrodynamic propulsion system. Magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) propulsion is a means of using electrical current, instead of a noisy propeller, to push a ship through the water.

  Surprisingly enough, a working example of this futuristic drive system is quite easy to build. Assuming that you’ve got the materials handy, you can build one in about a minute. You’ll need a strong magnet, two pieces of thick copper wire, a little dish of warm water, salt and pepper, and a regular battery.
  Tags: science clubs magnets school

• LED Throwies
  . A Throwie consists of a lithium battery, a 10mm diffused LED and a rare-earth magnet taped together. Throw it up high and in quantity
  Tags: clubs school magnets science

• How to set up a Ruby on Rails 2.2.2 web site with Site5 « Forward
  bit of a lifesaver …
  Tags: rails coding hosting_nightmare

• Paperclip : Admoo Labs
  now with gem support
  Tags: rubyonrails code file_attachment

Had a nice surprise in my mailbox this morning from Slideshare:

“Hi MrYoung,

We’ve noticed that your slideshow on SlideShare has been getting a LOT of views in the last 24 hours. Great job … you must be doing something right.

Why don’t you tweet or blog this? Use the hashtag #bestofslideshare so we can track the conversation.

Congratulations,
-SlideShare Team”

The slideshow in question was one on child safety online and is 18 months old - not exactly hot off the press - so feeling a bit bemused.

April 01st 2009 | Comments(1) | Life on #bestofslideshare bemusement slides