King's Corner

While I drew legitimately on the article title, I think the original author chose an attention-getting title rather than the real focus: effective learning. I know I did. Few people actually seem to want to learn; they want to get good grades. Ironically, though, learning effectively is the easiest way to get good grades, so it’s not pure fraud to dangle “Ace your exams.”

Take a look at How I Was Able to Ace Exams Without Studying. This will be a win-win: you’ll get better grades, and I’ll get the satisfaction of knowing you learned something along the way.

It’s an ongoing frustration of mine that I don’t have (or, perhaps, take) the time to write on this and other blogs. I can’t believe I haven’t posted since December. But the evidence is right there.

I still don’t have time to go into depth, but I wanted to share a post called What We Know, Don’t Know, and Never Knew. It’s from a personal finance blog, but it gets at something very much at the heart of education. I often tell students, “You must be willing to feel dumb on the way to getting smart.” Too many people quit because they’re uncomfortable, whereas if you’re really learning something you don’t already know, you are bound to feel uncomfortable. This post looks at another side: the likelihood that you will continue to feel dumb, even when most other people would view you as accomplished and competent.

This is the first post in a new category for this blog, called simply “Buccaneering.” The idea comes from an approach to education explicated by James Bach in his book Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar: How Self-Education and the Pursuit of Passion Can Lead to a Lifetime of Success. Some people love the book, some hate it, but there is food for thought here. Learning is a much more complex thing, and yet a much simpler thing, than many in the education establishment would have it. I’ll have several posts jumping off from these ideas, but I’m hoping we’ll have some discussion around the idea of what constitutes education.

You can get some quick background by taking a look at Bach’s own blog, How I Learn Stuff.

This isn’t a new video, but it’s new to me, and has been getting a lot of attention in recent years. Sir Ken Robinson, a very entertaining speaker, makes solid points about the nature of the public education system and what needs to change about it. Take a look at “Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity” on TED.com.

Though the video dates from 2006, CNN just published an opinion piece by Robinson about the video’s impact.

One of the great things about parody, of course, is that it is all at once funny and not-funny-because-it’s-too-true. Robert Lanham has produced a syllabus for a course called Internet-Age Writing, and it makes me laugh and cry, just like those people I heard about in a student’s speech who named their dog “Fungus.” What worries me is the number of people who will not get the cultural references on either side of this thing. Note: if you skim it instead of read it, you are already Too Far Gone.

This is for both speech and journalism students. People sometimes have trouble separating evidence from the conclusions drawn from that evidence. Here’s a great example. Recently a study in Wisconsin, which has had a school voucher program in place for a while, found “parity” between representative samples of both public school and voucher-funded private school students. (That means they performed about the same grade-wise.) I don’t know how long the link will remain live, but right now you can read a newspaper story at the Journal-Sentinel.

Even though the researchers have repeatedly warned of the dangers of basing too much on the results of one study, media and politicians seem to have jumped on the results, with all claiming it supports whatever their position is.

Opponents of school vouchers are saying, in essence, “See! See! Private schools aren’t doing it any better. So we can finally just drop all this voucher nonsense and keep doing things the way we were.”

Proponents of school vouchers are saying, in essence, “Let me get this straight. The private schools are achieving the same results as public schools while costing a third less, a savings of several thousand dollars per student. How is it again that this proves vouchers are a bad idea? I don’t get it.”

This alone should help students understand why persuasion must go well beyond simply piling up facts.

….it’s about what you’re going to do instead. Mike Elgan has some solid ideas about getting rid of textbooks altogether, and what to do instead. I have trouble finding anything I don’t like about this post. It’s why we chose the current textbook we’re using in speech, which is really a practical handbook. I love the idea of requiring a contribution to Wikipedia. One class I’m teaching this semester is going to build a tag cloud in del.icio.us. He even mentions Hayek! What’s not to love?

(Thanks to Mary Nunaley for the link to this in Facebook.)

NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday featured Michael Demers, a geography professor at New Mexico State University, talking about how he uses Second Life to help his students learn more effectively. You can listen to the segment online.

Of course, so far I haven’t been able to get it to play myself. [sigh] Your luck may be better.

Update: I managed to get it to play. Worth listening to!

One of our own will be conducting a workshop for faculty across all of Second Life interested in using SL for teaching. This notice went out yesterday from the Community Colleges in SL group to all its members:

Group Notice From: Pipsqueak Fiddlesticks

Hi Everyone,
We are canceling this Wedneday’s meeting in favor of a teachshop on Monday 12/8/08 by Travis Willsmere of Pellissippi State Community College. Travis has wide experience in-world and will be sharing some of his knowledge with us. Landmark will be sent soon so watch for it. I hope you all are well and surviving finals! Pip

I will post a link to the site, along with the exact time, when it becomes available.

You know, I can find more in the first five minutes I’m awake every day that needs doing than I have time to get done all day.

Without going into all the links involved in finding this (thanks, Greg, for getting me started!), I want to share with you a great resource especially for the community college faculty who read this blog. If you have Second Life installed on the machine you’re sitting at, you should be able to go to the CCSL presence by following this link:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Eduisland%203/81/151/25

You need to also find the group and join it for free.

They have a lot of resources for teaching in SL, and as nearly as I can tell, they are somehow connected with the EduIsland folks who can provide space for teachers who want to use SL, but whose institutions do not yet have Island or other space for them. I am way behind on how this works, but I will post more information when I get it.

In the meantime, you probably also want to check out their Web site, a Wiki with tons of useful information.