Archive for December, 2004

Definition of a College professor: someone who talks in other people's sleep... (W. H. Auden) So how long can students concentrate in a lecture? A brilliant speaker, giving a one-off lecture (and this is important), can hold the attention of a group of interested adults for an hour, easily. But the same person going to […]

Since Europeans arrived in Australia, they have done a lousy job of protecting the environment. Land and water degradation - due to farming of marginal land - are only some of the woes. The introduction of successful predators like the domestic cat to the ecosystem has meant the rapid decline of many small native animals. […]

We get our newer lecturers to sit in on a peer buddy's lesson. They observe the students - what they are doing, how they are reacting, what they appear to be learning, what points they go to sleep and when they are most engaged in the lesson. It's always an interesting experience to go along […]

Is the US close to going under? The current spending spree, brought on by inflated house prices, a low-taxing and high-spending president and a crazy world that continues to buy those Treasurys like they are going out of style (which they will, soon), cannot continue indefinitely. As the US$ continues to tumble, will the central […]

Further to my JIT Learning post about forums on the Web... I came across "Lissa Explains" - started by an 11 year-old who hid her Website from her friends because she didn't want to be seen as a geek. Now, at 17, she gets 'several million' page views a month - must be getting pretty […]

Some of the forums on the Web are awesome - the community of learners/helpers out there is really interesting to observe. [I have been looking at javascript coding forums to try to solve a problem I came up with - it is easy to spend a lot of time going through unrelated problems and their […]

The case of Jay Greenberg (a brilliant 12-year musical prodigy who is being compared to Mozart) reminded me of the research being done at Sydney University. Experimental subjects have their brains (temporal lobe in particular) stimulated to "turn off" our natural tendency to focus on a small number of things at once. Once this has […]

Problem Based Learning (PBL) could be a way to make math education more interesting and meaningful.

Gene (of National Library Board) gave his usual 'shameless' kind of presentation today for Life Sciences lecturers at my institution. I expected shocked looks on audience faces - and I was not disappointed. So why is he so creative? My take is that the National Library has not demotivated his enthusiasm for off-the-wall approaches. Most […]