Items to share: 7 April 12 (late)

 Education focus

• Can Technology Help Education? (Farnam Street)
  Steve Jobs had his doubts, apparently. (I don't know enough about US schooling to comment on the unions.)
  
  
• Two great problems that go great together. (More or Less Bunk)
  And here may be one reason for Jobs' reservations.
   
• We don’t need no grade inflation: Jonathan Hartford (Spiked)
  Spiked is generally stimulatingly contrarian. This story is all too familiar, though. It scores by going behind the scenes and looking at impact in the A level classroom.
   
• A Don's Life: Gove's "new" A' level scheme?
  Excellent post from Mary Beard on what needs to be reformed about A levels.
  
  
• Thoughts on Art and Teaching: Assessment in Practice Conference at Glasgow School of Art
  Interesting thoughts from Jim Hamlyn, particularly on the Ben Craven paper; isn't all assessment ultimately norm-referenced? I wrote along similar lines here.
  
  
• Evaluating students: the halo effect — Crooked Timber
  Quoting Kahneman on the "halo effect" in grading.
  
  
• Phil Race's latest "Ripples" model
  Phil has consolidated/updated the "Ripples" model--here is the latest version to download.
   
• Intelligence and Other Stereotypes: The Power of Mindset (Scientific American Blog Network)
  

Other items

• David Goodhart on Immigration and Multiculturalism (The Browser)
  Excellent interview with book recommendations.
  
  
• 10 Photographers You Should Ignore (Wired)
  ... if you want to find your own vision, that is. Trouble is, just how many others can you avoid being like?
    
• NeuroSynth
  Just amazing. Type in the label of a mental activity and this returns an fMRI scan synthesised from 4k+ real studies where the report included the chosen label.
     
• Oscillatory Thoughts: Automated Science, Deep Data, and the Paradox of Information
  And this is the post which pointed to Neurosynth.
   
• Biologist E.O. Wilson on Why Humans, Like Ants, Need a Tribe - The Daily Beast
   
• Letters of Note: C. S. Lewis on Writing
  

 And an Easter present:

• Dropbox just got even better! Disclosure, for everyone who signs up on my recommendation I get more free space--but then so can you when you recommend it in turn. And I don't know if it works from a blog. Who cares? This is the easiest conceivable FREE "cloud backup solution". Yuck. Did I write that? (As long as you are not a paranoid security nut.)

You can also browse this "stack" here.