Items to Share: 19 January 2014

Education Focus

• What Components Make Group Work Successful? | Faculty Focus 'There’s lots of research documenting the positive effects of group experiences on learning outcomes. Less is known about the specific aspects of group experiences that contribute to their overall positive impact. Thomas Tomcho and Rob Foels decided to explore this question by looking at the research on group learning in the field of psychology, as reported in the journal Teaching of Psychology.'

• End graded observations: this year’s brain gym, and the gorilla in the classroom | Pragmatic Education The evidence shows that grading lessons is not reliable, valid or useful. But intuition and experience tells me that it is also counterproductive and damaging.

• Five myths about Moocs | Opinion | Times Higher Education 'Diana Laurillard explains why a model based on unsupervised learning is not the answer.'

• Do You Really Want to Use a Commercial Learning-Management System? | Vitae from Jonathan Rees: 'the existence of expensive software puts pressure on faculty whether they want to use it or not. In such a system, both the program’s designers and my local IT department have far too much say in determining exactly how I teach.'

• Aha's Ahead - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education 'These moments [...] represent what is, for me, the heart of the humanities classroom. They are difficult to characterize and impossible to quantify. They are not examples of student success, conventionally defined. They are not achievements. I want to call them moments of classroom grace. [...] These moments do not reflect a linear progress from ignorance to knowledge; instead they describe a step away from a complacent knowing into a new world in which, at least at first, everything is cloudy, nothing is quite clear.'

Other Business

• Garbage In, Garbage Out — Editor's Picks — Medium 'People often speak about “lying with statistics.” I would argue that some of the most egregious statistical mistakes involve lying with data; the statistical analysis is fine, but the data on which the calculations are performed are bogus or inappropriate. Here are some common examples of “garbage in, garbage out.”'

• What scientific idea is ready for retirement? | Science | The Observer Every year, John Brockman, editor of Edge, asks a question and gets dozens of luminaries to write their answers as short essays—here is this year's.  

• When ice attacks 'This incredible video shot at Izatys Resort at Mille Lacs Lake, Minnesota shows an "ice shove," where currents, winds, or temperature differences push chunks of lake ice onto land like a drifting iceberg.' 

• BBC iWonder: Introducing Interactive Guides 'a bold new brand whose mission is to unlock the learning potential of all BBC content.We know that people's curiosity is often sparked by BBC programmes, and also by the world around them. BBC iWonder is for these curious minds, and at its' heart is a new content format, interactive guides. Guides will invite people to lean forward, and actively explore a range of factual and education topics from Science and Natural History, Arts, History, Religion and Ethics, Food and more.' 

• Birds That Fly in a V Formation Use An Amazing Trick nationalgeographic.com 

• The Hundred Acre Wood could use a therapist - Boing Boing 'in our efforts to understand mental illness and get help for people who need it, [are we] leaning a bit too far towards medicalizing difference? That's the point a group of pediatric neurologists were trying to get across [...] when they published a commentary in the Journal of the Canadian Medical Association concerning the possible DSM diagnoses of Winnie-the-Pooh and his animal friends.