24/10/2009 • 06:51 0
Open access to knowledge is something I firmly believe in. The open access week perhaps provides a good oportunity to us all to learn more about the movement and its aims.
There are more and more individuals as well as universities opening access to knowledge. An open society can provide a better future to us all.
A few useful links:
Open access week
Wikipedia: Open access publishing
SPARC Europe
Science Commons
CC Learn
Directory of Open Access Journals
05/08/2009 • 07:32 0
Science Daily is among PC Magazine’s top 100 websites of 2009 and I’ve found out that there are a number of articles on learning and language acquisition in it.
Research has shown that 8-year olds learn differently than 12-year olds. At the age of eight, children learn from positive feedback and do not react to negative feedback – it seems they cannot process it and use it to learn from their mistakes. Learning from mistakes is believed to be a complex process. However, it is also know that it is the basal ganglia that reacts to positive feedback and that its activity does not change with age. Obviously positive feedback is important to us all. And as an even more recent research shows, positive feedback makes it more likely that the thing we learn next will be successful too.
Of course this has implications for teaching and parenting as well. And another useful bit: children learn better if they can explain what they’ve learnt to their parents even when parents don’t know a thing about the subject discussed. Mere listening does the trick because it is the act of explaining that helps the child and the fact that they are listened to. Good to know.
Filed under: Education
22/06/2009 • 21:52 0
The scenario is the same as in so many other countries. High university officials set their goals boldly: they want a young university (it was founded in 2003) to become a world-class research university in a few years time. The goal is to get the university on the Shangai list of 500 best universities. In five years.
It sounded so surrealistic that I just couldn’t take them seriously. If you just consider the assessment criteria used by the University of Shangai, it is patently obvious that this is not a realistic goal. But it’s obvious to me and not to them. So, let’s start by taking a closer look at the rating methodology of the Shangai list.
Quality of education is determined by the number of Nobel Prize winners and field medals. You can accuse me of being blind but I really don’t see anybody coming close to getting a nomination.
The quality of faculty is determined again by the number of Nobel prize winners and by the number of researchers that are the most highly cited within 21 subject categories of Thomson ISI. As I said, we can forget the Nobel Prizes winners (unless the university imports one). As regards becoming one of the most cited researcher in a field, well, if it takes more than a year to publish excellent papers in academic journals with a high impact factor, becoming highly cited in the field takes much much longer. I doubt it can be done in 5 years.
As regards research output, the story is the same. It takes funds, which the university does not have, time, good researchers and a lot of effort before research output meets the high standards of the Shangai University list. My colleagues expect our university’s research output will be excellent in five years from now although the university is less than 10 years of age and has been focusing all these years on troublesome and competitive relationships between university colleges, on infrastructure and education. Not that these things have been sorted out! Oh yes, I’ve forgot to say, the university has been chronically financially undersourced. Consequently, per capita academic performance of the university obviously reflects these meager conditions.
However, this is not where the story ends. The university officials have decided they would achieve higher productivity of faculty by putting a price tag on time spent out of class. So they are putting together a long list of various chores teachers can/should do (each with a different tag on it expressed in “physical hours”, e.g. if you publish a research article in a journal with a high impact factor, you get a huge number of hours done, if you do a page of translation, you get 3 hours, etc.). How this new system is going to be implemented, nobody knows yet. However, they want our blessings for the list!
While exploring Alec Couros’ Computers in the classroom website, I came across this TED talk: Barry Schwartz on our loss of wisdom. He put it so nicely.
Filed under: Education
