Musings of a Modern Day Cyberneticist
Tressie McMillan Cottom (tressiemc)Any attempt at knowledge production has to answer the basic question of what it is. But, before long, it must also address the question of why it is. As early as the 1990s sociologists were asking …
We will be joining this year’s OER conference coming from Galway, Ireland where the focus is on Recentering Open: Critical and global perspectives. We hope to facilitate critical discussion of Open including asking difficult questions about open education: Why open? Open for whom? Whose interests ...
I want to attend! God bless Virtually Connecting!
The Call for Proposals for the 25th anniversary ETUG conference is now open until April 5, 2019.
Share your knowledge, projects and ideas with the BC post-secondary education technology community at TRU in Kamloops, BC on June 20 & 21st. Program Theme & Topics Our overarching confe...
Manage your research library right in your browser
- Save time with a smart, intuitive interface
- Access your PDFs from anywhere
- Format citations within Google Docs
… and much more
I know I’ve run across this tool in the past, sometime just after it launched. I remember thinking it was interesting, but it was missing some things for me. Perhaps it’s worth another look to see how it has evolved and what it entails now?
In some sense it does a lot of what I’ve been using Calibre for and is not too dissimilar to Zotero and Mendeley, though obviously all with some slightly different offerings.
hat tip: Kimberly Hirsh for reminding me about it.
With Xodo, you can edit, annotate, sign, and share PDFs on desktop, mobile, and web. Xodo makes working with PDFs quick and easy, so you can get things done.
I’ve used Adobe and Nitro in the past, I wonder how this compares?
Sometimes the notes are ferocious...
hat tip: AnnotatED session at OLC Innovate
OLC Innovate, 2 April 2019
Explore any URL featuring Hypothesis annotation. CROWDLAAERS provides learning analytics about active participants, temporal activity (active days), collaborative discourse (threads), and also Hypothesis tags. Groups of individual annotations may be sorted by date, contributor, annotation, tags, and level (or the position of an annotation reply in a thread). Select any annotation to read the full content within CROWDLAAERS or in context of the source document. Or explore how CROWDLAAERS has been applied to curated sets of online texts by selecting from Projects.
Pollen is a publishing system that helps authors make functional and beautiful digital books.
All-in-one voice and text chat for gamers that's free, secure, and works on both your desktop and phone. Stop paying for TeamSpeak servers and hassling with Skype.
Commons In A Box (CBOX) takes the complexity out of creating an online space, or digital commons, for your community. Our free open-source software provides an infrastructure that encourages discussion, collaboration, and sharing. Members of a CBOX community can create groups and media-rich websites, participate in discussion forums, edit documents together, share files, send messages, and make friendship connections. Built using the WordPress publishing platform, with BuddyPress for social networking, CBOX comes in two packages that can be customized to meet the needs of your community.
Employ cognitive theory in the classroom every day
Research into how we learn has opened the door for utilizing cognitive theory to facilitate better student learning. But that's easier said than done. Many books about cognitive theory introduce radical but impractical theories, failing to make the connection to the classroom. In Small Teaching, James Lang presents a strategy for improving student learning with a series of modest but powerful changes that make a big difference—many of which can be put into practice in a single class period. These strategies are designed to bridge the chasm between primary research and the classroom environment in a way that can be implemented by any faculty in any discipline, and even integrated into pre-existing teaching techniques. Learn, for example:
- How does one become good at retrieving knowledge from memory?
- How does making predictions now help us learn in the future?
- How do instructors instill fixed or growth mindsets in their students?
Each chapter introduces a basic concept in cognitive theory, explains when and how it should be employed, and provides firm examples of how the intervention has been or could be used in a variety of disciplines. Small teaching techniques include brief classroom or online learning activities, one-time interventions, and small modifications in course design or communication with students.
hat tip: Robert Talbert
The colloquialism “a picture is worth a thousand words” has reverberated through the decades, yet there is very little basic cognitive research assessing the merit of drawing as a mnemonic strategy. In our recent research, we explored whether drawing to-be-learned information enhanced memory and found it to be a reliable, replicable means of boosting performance. Specifically, we have shown this technique can be applied to enhance learning of individual words and pictures as well as textbook definitions. In delineating the mechanism of action, we have shown that gains are greater from drawing than other known mnemonic techniques, such as semantic elaboration, visualization, writing, and even tracing to-be-remembered information. We propose that drawing improves memory by promoting the integration of elaborative, pictorial, and motor codes, facilitating creation of a context-rich representation. Importantly, the simplicity of this strategy means it can be used by people with cognitive impairments to enhance memory, with preliminary findings suggesting measurable gains in performance in both normally aging individuals and patients with dementia.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721418755385
A set of historic murders, known as the “Jack the Ripper murders,” started in London in August 1888. The killer's identity has remained a mystery to date. Here, we describe the investigation of, to our knowledge, the only remaining physical evidence linked to these murders, recovered from one of the victims at the scene of the crime. We applied novel, minimally destructive techniques for sample recovery from forensically relevant stains on the evidence and separated single cells linked to the suspect, followed by phenotypic analysis. The mtDNA profiles of both the victim and the suspect matched the corresponding reference samples, fortifying the link of the evidence to the crime scene. Genomic DNA from single cells recovered from the evidence was amplified, and the phenotypic information acquired matched the only witness statement regarded as reliable. To our knowledge, this is the most advanced study to date regarding this case. https://doi.org/10.1111/1556-4029.14038
Self-organization can be broadly defined as the ability of a system to display ordered spatio-temporal patterns solely as the result of the interactions among the system components. Processes of this kind characterize both living and artificial systems, making self-organization a concept that is at the basis of several disciplines, from physics to biology to engineering. Placed at the frontiers between disciplines, Artificial Life (ALife) has heavily borrowed concepts and tools from the study of self-organization, providing mechanistic interpretations of life-like phenomena as well as useful constructivist approaches to artificial system design. Despite its broad usage within ALife, the concept of self-organization has been often excessively stretched or misinterpreted, calling for a clarification that could help with tracing the borders between what can and cannot be considered self-organization. In this review, we discuss the fundamental aspects of self-organization and list the main usages within three primary ALife domains, namely "soft" (mathematical/computational modeling), "hard" (physical robots), and "wet" (chemical/biological systems) ALife. Finally, we discuss the usefulness of self-organization within ALife studies, point to perspectives for future research, and list open questions.
