These are my links for January 1st through March 30th:

• Free Education Software – Opensource
  A little bit too much 7zip, perhaps, but not a bad resource.
  Tags: software opensource education tools
• Garbage Burrito – A Mac-esque Rails Development Environment on Windows
  “I’ve come to believe that TextMate is not just the favorite Rails editor because a titanium Mac Book looks good with DHH’s blazer, but there is also a common philosophy between them. A simple elegant language should have a simple and elegant editor.”
  Tags: rails ruby tools programming environment windows

• tiltshiftmaker.com – Transform your photos into tilt-shift style miniatures
  “Tilt-shift miniature style photos are pictures of real-life scenes that are manipulated to look like model photographs.”
  Tags: tools photos online
• Dan Ariely on our buggy moral code | Video on TED.com
  
  Tags: science psychology behaviour video economics moral cheating
• Sentenc.es – A Disciplined Way To Deal With Email
  This sounds interesting, if a little draconian. “Treat all email responses like SMS text messages, using a set number of letters per response. Since it?s too hard to count letters, we count sentences instead”
  Tags: communication writing productivity email time

This MIT lecture by Sanjoy Mahajan was, I thought, well worth watching.

He talks about a range of things. Mainly how the art of problem solving is distinct from the skill of pattern matching, and how to cultivate the former.

He identifies the following types of problem solving approaches (as some):

1. Reducing to already solved cases
2. Look for simple/extreme cases to look for pattern
3. guessing
4. symmetry
5. be lazy
6. use good representations (e.g. drawings), and
7. analogy

And in terms of teaching them he recommends the following:

1. Name the types of approach (so you can recognise what you
2. Diversity of examples to use the technique in (and not the same problem rephrased)
3. Ask yourself Wheeler’s Question: “What one or two sentences could you tell your earlier self (the self that hadn’t solved the problem yet) that would make the solution really easy?”. This is essentially a shorter version of Gladwell’s Outlier idea. It is deliberative practice rather than just practice per se, and makes sure you are actually learning from the right kind of practice.

• Reid
  This paper presents findings related to how the nature of class changes when asynchronous online courses are used rather than classrooms. The qualitative study involved interviews with 32 university professors who have taught both in?class and online courses. The findings provide insight into how when the medium of teaching changes, there is also significant change in the composition and indeed the very nature of class.
  Tags: education research elearning changes

• Reid
  This paper presents findings related to how the nature of class changes when asynchronous online courses are used rather than classrooms. The qualitative study involved interviews with 32 university professors who have taught both in?class and online courses. The findings provide insight into how when the medium of teaching changes, there is also significant change in the composition and indeed the very nature of class.
  Tags: education research elearning changes

• russell davies: fair play
  “where this thing really scored is in an element I’ve not noticed in a lot of the talk about play – fairness. And kids are utterly, utterly obsessed with fairness. It’s the most important element in any game. And human rule-enforcement is automatically deemed unfair. There is no referee, umpire or god-like grandparent that can escape being seen as unfair at some point, for some decision. But the commanding voice of Cosmic Catch escapes all that. The relentless, ineluctable judgement of the RFID machine brooks no argument, is prey to no human frailties and biases and is immediately seen as fair. Or actually Fair. Or even FAIR.

  All of which makes for better playing. “
  Tags: games children rfid toys fairness

• How Not To Sort By Average Rating
  [via anu]CORRECT SOLUTION: Score = Lower bound of Wilson score confidence interval for a Bernoulli parameter

  Say what: We need to balance the proportion of positive ratings with the uncertainty of a small number of observations. Fortunately, the math for this was worked out in 1927 by Edwin B. Wilson”
  Tags: maths statistics programming rating algorithms

• Academic Earth – Video lectures from the world’s top scholars
  “Thousands of video lectures from the world’s top scholars.”
  Tags: reference video education videos free university

• Block Posters – Create large wall posters from any image for free!
  create any size wall posters from any size image
  Tags: tools design graphics photos art poster display
• Facebook et al risk ‘infantilising’ the human mind | Media | guardian.co.uk
  “That’s exactly what my mum said about reading the Beano.”
  Tags: