Items to Share: 11 August

Education Focus

• Ideas: Faking It "The son of friends of ours is required by his teacher to spend twenty minutes a day reading and report on doing so. He is being taught that reading is a chore to be done only under compulsion. Someone who follows the rules may never discover that reading is fun, since he will be cutting the book into twenty minute chunks instead of reading right through it. Our conclusion was that the best solution was to read the book and lie to the teacher, reporting a single two hours as six daily twenty minute sessions. The teacher, or whoever made the rules he is following, starts with the observation that reading a lot correlates with desirable outcomes and concludes that the way to get those outcomes is to compel children to read—whether they like it or not. The likely result is exactly the opposite of the one intended." The power of hidden messages...

• What’s different about the inverted classroom? - Casting Out Nines - The Chronicle of Higher Education Very sensible and practical piece about using the flipped classroom model in the STEM disciplines.  

• Putting emotional intelligence to the test - news - TES "Does it exist and, if it does, should it have a place in schools? Two educational heavyweights battle it out on either side of the debate" 

• 21st century skills | IOE London blog Interesting piece on the challenge of devising curricula for a rapidly changing environment.  

• For Public Colleges, the Best Tuition Is No Tuition - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education  Lessons from Finland for US education.

Other Business

• TYWKIWDBI ("Tai-Wiki-Widbee"): A Monarch (butterfly) ecloses : or emerges. Beautiful pictures. 

• BBC - Blogs - Adam Curtis - BUGGER : Isn't the history of espionage and counter-espionage most elegantly explained by the hypothesis of the total ineptitude of the services involved? Both funny and disconcerting, as one might expect of Adam Curtis. "The recent revelations by the whistleblower Edward Snowden were fascinating. But they - and all the reactions to them - had one enormous assumption at their heart. That the spies know what they are doing."