Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Bonus words, wait list and more upgrades
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Find us @ Google Apps Marketplace
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Making practice less onerous
My point this morning was in large part that repetition and drill matter, and that once you've figured out that they're actually helping you, they 'suck' a lot less.
It's not just a matter of Calvinist ethics (sorry, Kurt) - it's an opportunity for learners to move forward by doing things a lot, shifting ahead a bit at a time. The great leaps are fun as well, but build on smaller steps.
My concern with this is that while letting kids figure out what works for them is a good idea and that different kids will figure out different things, actually becoming good at things is about a lot more than discovering them or creating them.
Reading sheet music is one thing - learning to play an instrument is another. And I figured out what integration and differentiation were about long before I got to calculus, but I probably should have flunked my second semester of calculus because I just couldn't wrap my head around how to actually make it work. (Which shocked me, because math up to then had just flowed naturally for me.)
Ideally I'd love to have discovery and creativity motivate learners' actions - but they still need to motivate learners into a tremendous amount of repetition to get there.
Kurt said 'Computers and the internet can be used to scale the learning by discovery paradigm.' Yes, and they can also be used to manage, moderate, and fine-tune repetition. Hopefully we can combine all of that into something that gives people instruction at a pace they can maintain, thrilled by their progress, but also in a way that sticks with them."
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Learning has it's own rewards, BUT...
Friday, November 5, 2010
Cognitive Misers
B) No
C) Cannot be determined"More than 80 percent of people choose C. But the correct answer is A. Here is how to think it through logically: Anne is the only person whose marital status is unknown. You need to consider both possibilities, either married or unmarried, to determine whether you have enough information to draw a conclusion. If Anne is married, the answer is A: she would be the married person who is looking at an unmarried person (George). If Anne is not married, the answer is still A: in this case, Jack is the married person, and he is looking at Anne, the unmarried person. This thought process is called fully disjunctive reasoning - reasoning that considers all possibilities. The fact that the problem does not reveal whether Anne is or is not married suggests to people that they do not have enough information, and they make the easiest inference (C) without thinking through all the possibilities. Most people can carry out fully disjunctive reasoning when they are explicitly told that it is necessary (as when there is no option like 'cannot be determined' available). But most do not automatically do so, and the tendency to do so is only weakly correlated with intelligence. "Here is another test of cognitive miserliness, as described by Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Shane Frederick. "A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? "Many people give the first response that comes to mind - 10 cents. But if they thought a little harder, they would realize that this cannot be right: the bat would then have to cost $1.10, for a total of $1.20. IQ is no guarantee against this error. Kahneman and Frederick found that large numbers of highly select university students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton and Harvard were cognitive misers, just like the rest of us, when given this and similar problems." Author: Keith E. Stanovich
Title: "Rational and Irrational Thought: The Thinking That IQ Tests Miss"
Publisher: Scientific American
Date: November/December 2009
Pages: 35-36
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
The Myths Behind the Things We Do
" 'We have known these principles [for improved study] for some time, and it's intriguing that schools don't pick them up, or that people don't learn them by trial and error,' said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. 'Instead, we walk around with all sorts of unexamined beliefs about what works that are mistaken.' (...)
Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are 'visual learners' and others are auditory; some are "left-brain" students, others "right-brain." In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journalPsychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas. (...)
Cognitive scientists do not deny that honest-to-goodness cramming can lead to a better grade on a given exam. But hurriedly jam-packing a brain is akin to speed-packing a cheap suitcase, as most students quickly learn - it holds its new load for a while, then most everything falls out. ... [In contrast] an hour of study tonight, an hour on the weekend, another session a week from now - so-called spacing - improves later recall without requiring students to put in more overall study effort or pay more attention, dozens of studies have found."
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Read through a pile of novels or go to jail?
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Google's contribution to nonprofits
The communication within the team, the beauty of the campus and of course, the cafeteria.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Thank you, thank you, Google!
New site is live...
Monday, August 23, 2010
New site about to launch...
Thursday, July 8, 2010
From 0 to 296 in three days... amazing!
Please, if you read this and haven't voted, or know of people who would vote for our vocabulary tutoring campaign, this is the link:
http://bit.ly/learnthatword
It just takes a few seconds!
Vote! Share with your friends! We can do this!
If you haven't voted yet, please click on http://bit.ly/learnthatword and give us a click... if you did vote, please considering sending the link to your friends and family, or repost on Facebook! By the way: We hear from a lot of people who click the "like" button and then are confused about what to do next. When you click that, often a "verification required" link pops up that you need to click next and enter the captcha. That's the last step before voting... Thank you!!
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Word Cup... last rounds!
Please check out the schedule at www.wordcupcafe.org and try out!
If you qualified for the semifinals, please make sure the take the quiz before August 1st, or your invitation will expire.
Good luck!
The race is on... please vote for us @ Chase Community Giving
Our nonprofit has entered the race to win a Chase Community grant, and we need your help! The grants are given to the top 200 nonprofits based on votes.
We heard about this just recently, and still need about 800 votes before 7/12 to make it, we've done great so far... but we need to get many more votes.
Can you help us out by voting for our Vocabulary Junction campaign, making free tutoring available to third graders nationwide? Please also repost this on facebook, via email, in forums/networks, etc.
As a thank you for taking time to vote, we will credit 10 learning credits to you.
In the near future, when www.LearnThatWord.org replaces www.eSpindle.org, users will only pay for measured learning results, and 10 credits represent about a month of free tutoring!
Here's how it works:
1 - Click on this link: http://bit.ly/learnthatword. (You have to be logged into your Facebook account)
3 - On the next screen, approve that Chase can connect with you and get access to your public Facebook info (they will list your name and profile images after you vote). 4 - On the following screen, click "like" by clicking on the highlighted button (you can "unlike" Chase at any time). Click on the verification required link and fill in the captcha.
4 - Click "vote for this charity"... Thank you!! Send an email to support@eSpindle.org with your Facebook name and your eSpindle username, and we'll credit your account.
5 - Please share this info with your friends and everyone who cares about education: Facebook, emails, forums, networks. http://bit.ly/learnthatword... this is urgent!!
Let's start closing the Vocabulary Divide that causes so many elementary students to struggle. We still need about 800 votes before 7/12... just a little miracle that should be well possible with a little help of our friends!
Thank you for your support!!

