|
||||||
|
During teaching, there is a fascinating (and unfortunately common) problem: Students are VERY reluctant to suggest an answer, for fear that they might be wrong. Salman Kahn, noticed this phenomenon after he started doing videos for his niece and nephew: (I’m paraphrasing) “The last thing they needed was for me to be there expecting an [...] Carl Wieman (who won a Nobel for deepening our understanding of Bose-Einstein condensation) lays out some of the important findings and methodology in his talk “Science Education in the 21st Century: Using the Tools of Science to Teach Science“. In that talk he outlines some of the important responsibilies of expert tutors: Focus on the [...] I’ve recently absorbed American RadioWorks feature on “Tomorrow’s College“. Especially interesting was the program “Don’t Lecture Me, where the story of some physicists gathered data about the learning and understand of their students, only to discover that the traditional lecture model of a knowledgeable expert disseminating information to a passive audience is ineffective. Research [...] I read a few articles that I’d like to pull together and place under the growing umbrella of what might probably become my personal teaching philosophy. First, when you look at eXtreme Programming, it consists of a collection of reinforcing practices. I’m not going to review them here because I just want to highlight the [...] Recently, I came across this SEED article, Divide Midns, Specious Souls; which has this deliciously anti-religious, pro-science quote: Within the wide range of works arranged along the axis of soulism, from Life After Death: The Evidence, by Dinesh D’Souza, to Absence of Mind, by Marilynne Robinson, it is clear there is very little understanding [...] Yesterday, I had an interesting thought. My advisor once made the cultural observation that many people in Computer Science invent their own language and then immediately write a self-hosting compiler. I agree that a compiler is quite a feat of engineering and serves as a nice test case to demonstrate that the language you’ve invented [...] So far, in my reading of Minsky’s Society of Mind, his hypothesis, that the mind is an agglomeration of specialized agents working in conjunction with each other completely meshes with observations of my own behavior. In particular, I’ve noticed that when I get stuck thinking about a problem, I’ll endlessly repeat, in my head, the [...] I was briefly reading Minsky’s Society of Mind and found these passages memorable. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we’ve connected it to all the other things we know. That’s why it’s almost always wrong to seek “the real meaning” of anything. A thing with just one meaning has [...] Dictionaries are really great tools, but they can only go so far. The really good ones (The OED) will give the user a really good ‘feel’ for the word, a sense of the connotations that go beyond the straightforward definition. A thesaurus can also be really useful, especially when you’re searching for a specific word, [...] |
||||||
|
Copyright © 2012 eric the fruitbat - All Rights Reserved |
||||||
