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"Vischeck is a way of showing you what things look like to someone who is color blind. You can try Vischeck online- either run Vischeck on your own image files or run Vischeck on a web page. You can also download programs to let you run it on your own computer" (What is it, ¶1, 2014.03.28).
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Designing conference posters - Colin Purrington
Purrington, C. B. (n.d.). Designing conference posters [blog page]. Retrieved March 28, 2014, from http://colinpurrington.com/tips/academic/posterdesign
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Learned Helplessness | Education.com
Fincham, Frank. (2009, December 23). Learned helplessness. Retrieved Mach 25, 2014, from http://www.education.com/reference/article/learned-helplessness/
- Learned helplessness results from experiencing uncontrollable events that cause individuals to expect future lack of control. It is characterized by decreased motivation, failure to learn, and negative emotions such as sadness, anxiety, and frustration.
- Learned helplessness is formally defined as a disruption in motivation, affect, and learning following exposure to noncontingent (uncontrollable) outcomes. There are three crucial elements to its definition: contingency, cognition, and behavior.
- Children who display learned helpless versus mastery oriented patterns perform equally well prior to encountering failure, but those who are mastery oriented show superior performance following a failure experience.
- There is some evidence that the learned helpless and mastery oriented patterns are socialized by parents.
- Effort attribution feedback is likely most successful in the early stages of learning and for difficult tasks, when greater effort can produce better results and its credibility is high. However, Dale Schunk has found that ability feedback (e.g., “You're good at this”) given when children succeeded early in the course of learning enhanced achievement better than effort feedback.
- (Implications of learned helpless for educators, ¶1)
- Although feedback that focuses on controllable attributions (e.g., effort, strategy use) is widely recommended, research suggests that focusing students' attention on the goal of learning rather than on showing how well they can perform has beneficial effects in combating helplessness.
- (Implications of learned helpless for educators, ¶2)
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How the Brain Processes Visual Communication
Great tips for presentation building
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MultiBrief: Learned helplessness in the classroom
- In an educational setting, students may feel that any effort is fruitless, as they do not understand the content, and so refuse to make any effort whatsoever. Learned helplessness may also result from low expectations of students, and students not being held accountable in the classroom to engage in academic tasks or activities.
- When everyone is seen as a learner with diverse skills, strengths and areas of need, students are more likely to thrive and attempt to progress.
- Students can and should also clarify directions and instructions with their peers. This is becoming increasingly important as we ask students to read and access more complex text, and as students are asked to complete more complex tasks, having a finished product is helpful for students, as well as a rubric or clear evaluation criteria.
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Sunday, March 30, 2014
Diigo bookmarks (weekly)
Sunday, March 23, 2014
Diigo bookmarks (weekly)
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- successful online students
- The Illinois Online Network (ION) highlights the qualities online students should possess to succeed in the online learning environment.19
- Table 3 outlines the connections between the eight characteristics of successful online learners and the four True Colors
- In this study, we defined "success" as earning an A or B in the course
- In general, then, projects assigned throughout the semester should be designed with a communication component, scheduled with deadlines, and challenge students to gain knowledge, but they should also be flexible, allowing students to use creativity in completing the assignment.
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Google+ Communities – Where I’m At |
Interesting possibilities here for course-based G+ community pages and sites.
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Commonwealth of Learning - Perspectives on Distance Education: Towards a Culture of Quality
"[T]his third publication on the theme of quality in the COL Perspectives on Distance Education series widens the discussion beyond external quality assurance processes to a more generic focus on a "culture of quality." It is a logical extension of the earlier two publications, which came out in 1994 and 1997 and drew our attention to quality assurance concerns, clarifying the basic concepts and documenting the various quality assurance practices as well as the diverse challenges they pose in different contexts" (Description, 2014.03.18).
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Getting Reading Done With Sente (Tools We Use) | Savage Minds
A getting-things-done based review of the Sente for Mac and iOS, and a few other reference management options.Friedman, P. Kerim. (2013.09.24). Getting Reading Done With Sente (Tools We Use) [blog post]. Retrieved March 18, 2014, from http://savageminds.org/2013/09/24/getting-reading-done-with-sente-tools-we-use/
Sunday, March 16, 2014
Diigo bookmarks (weekly)
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The global pressure on education | Inquirer Opinion
Opinion piece by Randy David for the Philippine Daily Inquirer (2014.03.09).
- All over the world, there is a growing recognition by governments of the need to produce graduates equipped with global competency—individuals who not only can live and work in foreign cultures but can also navigate the complexities of a world society
- Japanese industry worries that its own universities are turning out graduates who cannot function in the global system
- The global pressure on education is exerted primarily by industry but is also coming from families. It takes the form of a demand for high-quality graduates with global knowledge, skills, and values, who can find high-paying jobs and pursue stable careers in the world economy
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John Dewey: The Need for a New Party | New Republic
"[A] statement of the nature of the need and an account of why it is so generally felt are necessary preliminaries to any discussion of how a new party may grow up and what its program will be" (1931.03.18, ¶1).
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Serif vs. Sans: What’s Right for Your Presentation?
"if you are going to pursue offline efforts with your deck, then go the Serif route. If you are doing everything online, go the Sans route. If you are unsure, Sans is presently the most modern and popular style of typeface."
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Higher Education and the Japanese Disease | Nippon.com
"In an age calling for an increasingly globalized workforce, there is widespread alarm about declining standards in the Japanese education sector. Where do the problems lie? Kariya Takehiko, a sociology professor who has taught at universities in Japan and England, analyzes the current situation."
- Japanese universities have become places in which no learning goes on outside the classroom.
- Japan has suffered a clear decline in the talent and skills of its workforce, precisely when these things are more crucial than ever in an increasingly globalized environment. Although many people realize what is wrong, companies, universities, and the society as a whole have been unable to act to change the system.
- it is likely that the short-sighted competition for advantage will lead to a further decline in educational standards and a loss of equal opportunities.
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Chomsky: How America's Great University System Is Getting Destroyed | Alternet
- costs are multiplied by the number of users
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The Wrong Way to Teach Grammar - Michelle Navarre Cleary - The Atlantic
"Just as we teach children how to ride bikes by putting them on ... bicycle[s], we need to teach students how to write grammatically by letting them write. Once students get ideas they care about onto the page, they are ready for instruction—including grammar instruction—that will help communicate those ideas" (¶5).
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Predicting who will publish or perish as career academics
"Unequivocal" findings are precipitating "strong reactions" (Picking winners and losers, ¶4).
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Language Magazine » Let Learning Emerge
Introductory article by Diane Larsen-Freeman (March 2014) about lessons to learn from complexity theory, prior to speaking in Portand, OR, at TESOL 2014.
- Although the components that make up a complex system may be many and may be different from each other, what makes a system complex is the quality of emergence. Emergence is “the spontaneous occurrence of something new” (van Geert, 2008, p.182) that arises from the interaction of the components of a complex system, just as a bird flock emerges from the interaction of individual birds.
- The inert knowledge problem, given its name by Alfred North Whitehead many years ago, refers to the fact that students appear to be able to do something in the classroom at one time but not at a later time. In other words, what they have acquired has become inert — unavailable to use for their own purposes at a later time and place.
- The power law of practice reflects the fact that the effect of practicing something declines over time. In other words, the immediate benefits of practice of the right kind can be considerable, but as time passes, the effect of continuing to practice falls off dramatically and only makes a more modest contribution to proficiency. This is a nonlinear phenomenon.
- Sometimes complex systems are referred to as “complex adaptive systems.” Calling them adaptive recognizes their capacity to change in response to a changing environment. One way that I think this characteristic applies to language is through what is called co-adaptation (Larsen-Freeman & Cameron, 2008). Just as children benefit from speech customized for them, second language learners can benefit from the modifications or adaptations that are made in speech to them in order to enhance its comprehensibility for them. But notice I wrote co-adaptation. The language resources of both conversational partners are changed by the interaction.
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Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing | Council of Writing Program Administrators
"This Framework describes the rhetorical and twenty-first-century skills as well as habits of mind and experiences that are critical for college success" (Executive Summary, ¶2).
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The Case for Academics as Public Intellectuals | AAUP
In this article, Nicholas Behm, Sherry Rankins-Robertson, and Duane Roen argue, "Talking only to one another is never enough."
- Doug Hesse, a rhetorician at the University of Denver, has argued in the Washington Post that machine grading is not capable of measuring how well a piece of writing “fits a given readership or audience; how well it achieves a given purpose; how much ambition it displays; how well it conforms to matters of fact and reasoning; and how well it matches formal conventions expected by its audience.”
- Les Perelman, research affiliate with MIT’s comparative media studies program and president of the Consortium for Research and Evaluating of Writing, has shared his insights about the weaknesses of machine scoring in interviews that have appeared in such venues as the New York Times and Inside Higher Ed. Perelman stated in a May 5, 2013, interview with the Australian Broadcast Network that artificial-intelligence programs cannot match human raters because computers can count but they cannot understand meaning. He said, “Language is much more complex, and until we can get a computer that can actually understand the meaning of words, it’s not going to be able to analyze argument or the important parts of writing.”
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Tomorrow's Professor eNewsletter: 1313. The Case for Academics as Public Intellectuals
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- Fostering a healthy democracy, ¶3
- Les Perelman, research affiliate with MIT's comparative media studies program and president of the Consortium for Research and Evaluating of Writing, has shared his insights about the weaknesses of machine scoring in interviews that have appeared in such venues as the New York Times and Inside Higher Ed. Perelman stated in a May 5, 2013, interview with the Australian Broadcast Network that artificial-intelligence programs cannot match human raters because computers can count but they cannot understand meaning. He said, "Language is much more complex, and until we can get a computer that can actually understand the meaning of words, it's not going to be able to analyze argument or the important parts of writing." These scholars and others have drawn on numerous research findings and a policy statement on machine scoring published by the National Council of Teachers of English.
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"First of all, blogging is writing, 21st-century style, plain and simple. Blogging constitutes a massive genre. It comes in many forms, addresses myriad topics, and can certainly range in quality. For my money (which usually means free), blogging provides the best venue for teaching student writing. As bloggers, young people develop crucial skills with language, tone their critical thinking muscles, and come to understand their relationship to the world" (¶1, 2014.03.11).
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
The languages of Japan
- Japan's Endangered Languages Still Considered Mere Dialects (GlobalVoices, 2014.03.01).
I used the DigitalColor Meter app (a Mac app.) to check the area north and east of Korea and Japan [in a map from Before It's News, 2013], both of which were color-coded as isolates. Though it was [coded] the same color, the area to the NE of Korea and Japan may actually be a Yupik branch of Eskimo-Aleut (Wikipedia, Eskimo-Aleut languages, ¶4).
That same area NE of Korea and Japan is color-coded as Paleo-Siberian in another map (Wikipedia, Primary Human Language Families Map). The Primary Human Language Families Map still coded Korean as an isolate, but coded Japonic as a separate family of languages, one which may include Ryukyuan languages (Lewis, 2013).
There is plenty of controversy about relationships among Japanese, Korean, and other languages, for instance: "According to its [Altaic's] proponents, Altaic is a language family comprising at least Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic" (Wikipedia, Classification of Japonic, Altaic hypothesis, ¶1).
The idea of a Japanese-Korean relationship overlaps the extended form of the Altaic hypothesis..., but not all scholars who argue for one also argue for the other. For example, Samuel Martin, who was a major advocate of a Japanese-Korean relationship, only provided cautious support to the inclusion of these languages in Altaic, and Talat Tekin, an Altaicist, includes Korean, but not Japanese, in Altaic....
Pereltsvaig (2012) summed up controversy about an Altaic language family, suggesting similarities [among those languages] might be due to borrowing rather than genetic[, but the matter is by no means resolved]. Lewis (2013) reexamined related issues.
…
References
Lewis, Martin W. (2013). Altaic and Related Languages. GeoCurrents. Retrieved from http://www.geocurrents.info/cultural-geography/linguistic-geography/altaic-and-related-languages
Pereltsvaig, Asya. (2012). The Altaic family controversy. GeoCurrents. Retrieved from http://www.geocurrents.info/place/russia-ukraine-and-caucasus/siberia/the-altaic-family-controversy
Sunday, March 09, 2014
Diigo bookmarks (weekly)
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Two Sides Of The Same Coin: The Employment Crisis And The Education Crisis - Forbes
- Skills like problem solving, leadership, teamwork, empathy, and social/emotional intelligence are still being left out of the curricula of most schools, which contributes to the widening of the talent gap.
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FAQs-III: Groupwork in distance learning (Felder & Brent, 2001)
"Even in traditional classes students may do little or no work but get the same grade as their more industrious colleagues, and serious conflicts may arise between teammates with varying levels of ability and senses of responsibility. The problems may be even worse when groups are virtual and don’t have the self-regulating capability provided by face-to-face meetings. It is therefore particularly important in distance classes to adhere to the defining principles of cooperative learning, especially positive interdependence (if anyone fails to do his or her part everyone loses in some way), individual accountability (all team members are held accountable for all the material in the assignment), and regular self-assessment of team functioning."
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Writing Tips: Using Sentence Length to Mirror Action | Rachel Starr Thomson
"One of language's most fascinating tricks is its ability to mirror the action it depicts" (Thomson, 2006.09.27).
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Prezi - Blog - 10 Most Common Rookie Mistakes in Public Speaking
"Terry Gault ... provides insight into how to become a better presenter by avoiding a few common mistakes" (deck, ¶1, 2014.03.05).
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Avalanche Information, Education and Forecasting for West Central Montana
"This site is sponsored by the West Central Montana Avalanche Foundation (WCMAF), a 501(c)(3) Nonprofit Corporation. WCMAF is dedicated to promoting avalanche safety education and awareness by providing information to all interested user groups regarding terrain, weather and snow conditions that contribute to avalanche danger in West Central Montana" (2014.03.04)
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"Looking to publish your research but don’t know exactly how? Dealing with procrastination or stress related to academic publishing? If you are feeling apprehensive about your writing or are becoming interested in publishing scholarly work, Practical Tips for Publishing Scholarly Articles is for you. Rich Furman and Julie T. Kinn have updated this fantastic resource with even more exercises and advice to help you through the writing and publishing process. Furman and Kinn guide readers through each step of publication from idea generation through structuring an article and journal selection to submission, revision, and collaboration" (deck, ¶1, 2014.03.03).
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http://lyceumbooks.com/downloads/PracticalTips4Pub2E_CH05.pdf
PRACTICAL TIPS FOR PUBLISHING SCHOLARLY ARTICLES Writing and Publishing in the Helping Professions Chapter 5: Selecting a Journal
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http://lyceumbooks.com/downloads/PracticalTips4Pub2E_CH03.pdf
PRACTICAL TIPS FOR PUBLISHING SCHOLARLY ARTICLES Writing and Publishing in the Helping Professions Chapter 3: Writing as a Disciplined Practice
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Civil Rights Division 508 Home Page
"Section 508 (508 statute php , 508 statute pdf) requires that Federal agencies' electronic and information technology is accessible to people with disabilities, including employees and members of the public" (Overview, ¶1, 2014.03.03).
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"Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is developed through the W3C process in cooperation with individuals and organizations around the world, with a goal of proving a single shared standard for web content accessibility that meets the needs of individuals, organizations, and governments internationally" (¶1, 2014.03.03).
Sunday, March 02, 2014
Diigo bookmarks (weekly)
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International Paper Sizes, Formats & Standards Explained
"The purpose of this site is to explain current international standard paper sizes, covered by the ISO 216 Standard, and to provide size charts to allow a quick lookup of sizes."
