Thursday, December 3, 2009

Mnemonics Compilation Site Helps Stick Facts to Your Brain [Learning]

Mnemonics Compilation Site Helps Stick Facts to Your Brain [Learning]: "

Mnemonics are great memory-boosters when your learning requires rote memorization, like the bones of the skeletal system or edible berries. Next time you need a study aid, check out this compilation of mnemonics on topics that range from physics to religion.

You may already know a few mnemonics without really thinking of them as that. For instance, ' Righty, tighty, lefty loosey' is a common way to remember which way to remove or tighten a screw, and ROY G. BIV helps you recall the colors of the rainbow. This guide has plenty of familiar mnemonics, plus obscure ones that will help you tell camels apart or remind you what James Bond films starred Sean Connery.

What are your favorite mnemonics for remembering things? Share them in the comments.








"

Mnemonics Compilation Site Helps Stick Facts to Your Brain [Learning]

Mnemonics Compilation Site Helps Stick Facts to Your Brain [Learning]: "

Mnemonics are great memory-boosters when your learning requires rote memorization, like the bones of the skeletal system or edible berries. Next time you need a study aid, check out this compilation of mnemonics on topics that range from physics to religion.

You may already know a few mnemonics without really thinking of them as that. For instance, ' Righty, tighty, lefty loosey' is a common way to remember which way to remove or tighten a screw, and ROY G. BIV helps you recall the colors of the rainbow. This guide has plenty of familiar mnemonics, plus obscure ones that will help you tell camels apart or remind you what James Bond films starred Sean Connery.

What are your favorite mnemonics for remembering things? Share them in the comments.








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Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Should children be watching films at school?

From The Times Online:


Should children be watching films at school?: "

Watchingtv


Joanne Jacobs asks this question, about School Time TV on her blog. She writes about how children in (American) schools seem to be watching an inordinate amount of videos during school hours and quotes one mother who discovered that her daughter had watched Enchanted in English class and Ratatouille, The Incredibles, Ice Age and Finding Nemo in German class. This mother asked her daughter:


“How many movies do you watch a week?”


She thought a bit, counting up on her fingers and trying to remember. “Oh — I don’t know — five or six, maybe more. We watch TV pretty much every day in at least one class and any time we have a sub they put in movies or something."


It's worth reading the post to see how many people have had similar experiences. And my feeling is that this happens here too, and not just at the end of term. I recently wrote about using Night at the Museum 2 for educational purposes, so I'm not anti "modern" aids in the classroom, but I do think they need to be relevant. I remember watching Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet at school, but that's about it. My daughter has recently watched (and for no apparent educational reason) Oliver and Harry Potter (which I would quite like to have known about in advance, as it's not something I would necessarily have shown her in case she got too scared!), while my son has seen some of Ice Age 2. I've also heard stories of children who watch videos as a regular part of the school day. What happens during wet-play is another moot point.


What do you think? Are films useful in a classroom, or just as an occasional treat? And are they being used as babysitting tools when children should be learning...?


Read School Gate:


Three DVDS in one day. Shouldn't kids do something more useful at the end of term?


Film rentals go up in line with exam texts. Which is your favourite?


Would you send your child to Hogwarts?

How a hit film can make learning come alive

"

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Video-Game HR Recruiting a Near Reality

From Read Write Web:


Video-Game HR Recruiting a Near Reality: "

Aplus.netEditor's note: we offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write 'Sponsor Posts' and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products.



Would your company recruit skilled employees using a video game?



That isn't a rhetorical question. Recruiting the right people is an unavoidable and costly challenge for many organizations.


Sponsor



Enter SkyTroller (iTunes link). This $1.99 iPhone app lets would-be air traffic controllers assign flight altitudes to aircraft entering their airspace. The game ends on the third 'critical separation loss.' And, if the stars align, high scorers might one day receive a call from an ATC recruiter.



SkyTroller could help address a pressing HR issue. The Federal Aviation Administration, on which Ronald Reagan hit the reset button early in his presidency, faces a huge loss of ATCs around 2016.



The FAA also suffers ongoing ATC shortages, at least according to the ATCs. The FAA insists that US control towers are not understaffed, but echoes of this 'disagreement' can be heard in places like Australia and Europe as well.



Could SkyTroller help match ATC organizations worldwide with people who show the raw talent to keep the skies collision-free? Maybe.



SkyTroller concept originator Dale Leier, a 20-year ATC vet (retired) with Nav Canada, now with iPhone app incubator HeavyLifters Network Ltd., says that the game contains about as much of the real thing as HeavyLifters could wedge into a phone screen.



And NavCan, Leier's old employer, has shown interest. (SkyTroller hasn't yet registered on the FAA's radar.)



Using technology to find promising staff is nothing new. There's even a B-movie precedent, The Last Starfighter, in which aliens recruit the protagonist, an American teen, using a video game based on the gunships used in a far-off intergalactic war. That game notified the recruiter when the teen recorded a high score.



To help aspiring ATCs get jobs, SkyTroller would need a similar alert mechanism, on top of buy-in from the FAA and its sister organizations.



While this recruiting scenario remains incomplete, it still seems promising:




  • One low-cost app that could be used to test budding ATCs.


  • Millions of iPhones and iPod Touches sold that run the app.


  • Perpetual worldwide demand for ATCs.


  • Extra time for newly unemployed owners of these Apple products to figure out if they can help meet that demand.



Do you know of other 'recruiting apps' made for handhelds? Would you develop such an app for your company? Let us know what you think.


Discuss



"

Monday, November 30, 2009

Royal Society puts 60 seminal scientific papers online

Boing Boing, you never let me down...

Royal Society puts 60 seminal scientific papers online: "The Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge (aka The Royal Society) is celebrating is 350th birthday next year. Spun out in part of the fantastically cool Invisible College, the Royal Society's members have included Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke, Charles Darwin, Tim Berners-Lee, Lise Meitner, Stephen Hawking, Marie Curie, Francis Crick, and countless other smart folks. The organization kicks off its big anniversary year with Trailblazing, a new interactive timeline that includes 60 choice articles from the journal Philosophical Transactions. From the Royal Society's announcement :


 Wikipedia Commons 9 9D Sprat

Leading scientists and historians have chosen 60 articles from amongst the 60,000 published since the journal first began in 1665. Trailblazing will make the original manuscripts available online for the first time alongside fascinating insights from modern-day experts who are continuing the work of scientific giants such as Newton, Hooke, Faraday and Franklin and making vital new breakthroughs of their own in areas such as genetics, physics, climate change and medicine.


Highlights include:


• The gruesome account of an early blood transfusion (1666)


• Captain James Cook’s explanation of how he protected his crew from scurvy aboard HMS Resolution (1776)


• Stephen Hawking’s early writing on black holes (1970)


• Benjamin Franklin’s account of flying a kite in a storm to identify the electrical nature of lightning – the Philadelphia Experiment (1752)


• Sir Isaac Newton’s landmark paper on the nature of light and colour (1672)


• A scientific study of a young Mozart confirming him as a musical child genius (1770)


• The Yorkshire cave discovery of the fossilized remains of elephant, tiger, bear and hyena heralding the study of deep time (1822)


Royal Society's Trailblazing (Thanks, Bob Pescovitz!)


Image: 'Frontispeice to Thomas Sprat's A History of the Royal Society (1667)'




"

K12Online09 Presentation Schedule Available

Last year's K-12 Online Conference was excellent and this year's promises to be even better. Take a look at their schedule.


K12Online09 Presentation Schedule Available: "

Our schedule of presentations for the 2009 K-12 Online Conference is now online and available! This schedule is linked from the following locations:



  1. At the top of our conference blog, in the header as the SCHEDULE link.

  2. In the right sidebar of our conference blog, as the “2009 Schedule” link above our archive links.

  3. On our conference Ning, as the main “Events” tab link at the top of each page.

  4. On our conference wiki, on the main homepage, on the “For Participants” page, and in the left sidebar as “2009 Schedule.”


Per the posted schedule, our 2009 K-12 Online Conference begins tomorrow at 12 pm GMT, which is 7 am EST, with Kim Cofino’s pre-conference keynote, “Going Global: Culture Shock, Convergence, and the Future of Education.” Use this link to view the exact time when the keynote will “go live” in your local time zone.


If you have not already, read Kim’s post from October 11th giving more background about what’s coming in her keynote.


Bookmark / favorite our 2009 Conference Schedule page! As presentations are published each day of our main conference weeks, links to those videos will be added to the conference schedule as well as posted here on our conference blog. (They’ll “go live” here on the blog first.) Presenters will also be adding embedded links to their videos on our conference Ning, and adding discussion posts for their presentations in our Ning forum.


If you have not already, please join our conference Ning to participate in discussions there throughout and following our 2009 conference.



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Ask the Administrator: How to Change a Culture?

This is a really perceptive article from Inside Higher Ed that addresses the issues of cultural change in an academic environment. Much of it applies to k-12 settings as well.

Ask the Administrator: How to Change a Culture?: "Dean Dad"

Justice

If you haven't seen Michael Sandel's lectures, rush over to the series web site.


Justice: "

Talking of political philosophers’ job descriptions, Michael Sandel’s Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? (UK) has been out for a while now, but only just reviewed in the NYT (by Jonathan Rauch). It has the virtues that Sandel has honed over the years (and were notably absent from his first, influential, book): he has the remarkable ability to keep things clear and complex at the same time, and resists the temptation to repeat himself for the sake of the ungenerous or slow-witted reader. Rauch is right that the chapter on Kant is a gem, but equally striking is the chapter on Rawls which is accurate (as the earlier book wasn’t always), fair-minded, and to the point (and even, at the end, inspiring). The Economist review says, that he nudges the reader toward Aristotle, by being harder on the consequentialist and Kant-inspired accounts of justice, but that’s not really my read of the book: unless his experience has been radically different from mine, he believes that his students (and, probably, many of his readers) are unduly reluctant to incorporate a concern with personal virtue into their judgments and the book attempts to overcome that bias, putting the different accounts on a more level playing field. Every page makes some real world or literary reference that will be familiar to the non-philosophical reader. A couple of social scientist friends have recommended it to me as something to recommend to other social scientists as an excellent introduction to the field.



But more to the point, his TV show is almost all up online now, free.





I’ve only watched the first and eleventh episodes, which are both brilliant: the rest will wait till the break when my eldest has time to watch them with me. I’ve not been to see him teach this course, and now I probably won’t bother (at least I read the book). I have to say that his teaching seems superb—at the start he looks a bit of a showman, but that impression disperses quickly, and it must be the case that most of the students in the class are thinking most of the time during the class. His certainty that the class will not get away from him when he hands it over to the students, and (justified) confidence that he can structure things so that they teach each other are… awesome.



A question occurred to me while I was watching it: will the fact that we can all watch Sandel doing this now, on TV, radically improve the quality of moral philosophy teaching at American universities in the coming year or so?



(Parenthetically, this might be a good moment to thank Alan Bostick for his acerbic comment 4 years ago that had a substantial impact on the way that I teach).

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