Excerpt from Education Research Is Still Too Dense. We Need More Teacher-Researcher Partnerships. — from edsurge.com by Kristin Simmers
Get to know reputable organizations that are linking research to practice, such as Deans for Impact, The Learning Scientists, Student Experience Research Network, and The Learning Agency Lab.
Learn How To Study Using… Dual Coding — from learningscientists.org by Megan Smith & Yana Weinstein
Excerpt:
This is the final post in a series of six posts designed to help students learn how to study effectively. You can find the other five here:
What is dual coding?
Dual coding is the process of combining verbal materials with visual materials. There are many ways to visually represent material, such as with infographics, timelines, cartoon strips, diagrams, and graphic organizers.
When you have the same information in two formats – words and visuals – it gives you two ways of remembering the information later on. Combining these visuals with words is an effective way to study.
Now, look at only the visuals and explain what they mean in your own words. Then, take the words from your class materials and draw your own visuals to go along with them!
From DSC:
As the authors comment, this is NOT about learning styles (as research doesn’t back up the hypothesis of learning styles):
When we discuss verbal and visual materials, it does sound like we could be referring to learning styles. However, it is important to remember that a great deal of research has shown that assessing your learning style and then matching your study to that “style” is not useful, and does not improve learning (2). (For more, read this piece.)
Education Research Is Still Too Dense. We Need More Teacher-Researcher Partnerships. — from edsurge.com by Kristin Simmers
Excerpts:
Many have spoken of the need for various “bridges” in educational research. Bridges linking theory to practice, lab to classroom, and perhaps the most problematic of all, transdisciplinary bridges allowing multiple fields of experts (education, psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience) to collaborate and communicate more effectively. With teachers. As in, the people who are actually tasked with actioning all of this advice!
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We can do better. By inviting researchers to sit down with actual teachers to discuss real issues in real schools and co-create real solutions that we can adapt to a variety of circumstances.
Get to know reputable organizations that are linking research to practice, such as Deans for Impact, The Learning Scientists, Student Experience Research Network and The Learning Agency Lab.
Reimagining the Future of Accessible Education with AI (Part I) — from blogs.microsoft.com by Heather Dowdy
Reimagining the Future of Accessible Education with AI (Part 2) — from blogs.microsoft.com by Heather Dowdy
[During Feb 2021], the Microsoft AI for Accessibility program [called] for project proposals that advance AI-powered innovations in education that will empower people with disabilities. Through a two-part series, we are highlighting projects we are supporting.
And an excerpt from Brad Smith’s (4/28/21) posting:
That’s why today we’re announcing the next phase of our accessibility journey, a new technology-led five-year commitment to create and open doors to bigger opportunities for people with disabilities. This new initiative will bring together every corner of Microsoft’s business with a focus on three priorities: Spurring the development of more accessible technology across our industry and the economy; using this technology to create opportunities for more people with disabilities to enter the workforce; and building a workplace that is more inclusive for people with disabilities.
This Researcher Says AI Is Neither Artificial nor Intelligent — from wired.com by Tom Simonite
Kate Crawford, who holds positions at USC and Microsoft, says in a new book that even experts working on the technology misunderstand AI.
Survey: Share Your Experience with the Judicial System During COVID-19 — from legaltechmonitor.com by Laura Bagby
Excerpt:
A team of researchers wants to know how COVID-19 has impacted your experience with the judicial system. The COVID-19 and the Courts?Survey will examine how the pandemic has affected access to justice and the operation of the courts for attorneys, judges, litigants, court staff, and other members of the community.
…
The researchers seek to learn which changes in court operations during the pandemic worked well and should be kept in place and which didn’t. The results of the study will help plan for future emergencies and provide a basis for thinking about more permanent reforms to how courts work.
Video Captions Benefit Everyone — from ncbi.nlm.nih.gov by Morton Ann Gernsbacher
Excerpts:
Video captions, also known as same-language subtitles, benefit everyone who watches videos (children, adolescents, college students, and adults). More than 100 empirical studies document that captioning a video improves comprehension of, attention to, and memory for the video. Captions are particularly beneficial for persons watching videos in their non-native language, for children and adults learning to read, and for persons who are D/deaf or hard of hearing. However, despite U.S. laws, which require captioning in most workplace and educational contexts, many video audiences and video creators are naïve about the legal mandate to caption, much less the empirical benefit of captions.
More than 100 empirical studies, listed in the appendix, document the benefits of captions.
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With so many studies documenting the benefits of captions, why does everyone not always turn on the captions every time they watch a video? Regrettably, the benefits of captions are not widely known. Some researchers are unaware of the wide-ranging benefits of captions because the empirical evidence is published across separate literatures (deaf education, second-language learning, adult literacy, and reading acquisition). Bringing together these separate literatures is the primary purpose of this article.
Five free keynotes on online learning for streaming into virtual conferences — from tonybates.ca by Tony Bates
These are the five keynotes:
From DSC:
Thanks Tony for sharing these keynotes and your expertise — which is drawn from so much research and experience. Thanks for giving it away — may your gift bless many. (And I thought you were going to retire…?!? Selfishly, I’m/we’re glad you didn’t!) 🙂
Join your colleagues to explore the latest online learning research at the QM Research Online Conference
During the FREE half-day virtual event, you will:
Each session will include a takeaway handout to help you engage with and apply the research-based strategies shared by the presenters.
2020 ties for hottest year on record, says NASA and NOAA — from bigthink.com by Kevin Dickinson
In a joint briefing at the 101st American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting, NASA and NOAA revealed 2020’s scorching climate data.
Excerpts:
Interleaving: How Mixed Practice Can Boost Learning— from effectiviology.com
Excerpt:
Interleaving is a learning technique that involves mixing together different topics or forms of practice, in order to facilitate learning. For example, if a student uses interleaving while preparing for an exam, they can mix up different types of questions, rather than study only one type of question at a time.
Interleaving, which is sometimes referred to as mixed practice or varied practice, is contrasted with blocked practice (sometimes referred to as specific practice), which involves focusing on only a single topic or form of practice at a time.
Also see:
Also see:
Excerpts:
Interleaving boosts learning by mixing up closely related topics, encouraging discrimination between similarities and differences. (Agarwal & Bain, p. 14)
It’s “re-arranging the order of retrieval opportunities during spacing without changing the content to be learned.” It’s mixing up concepts. (Agarwal & Bain, pgs. 106-107).
Consider this basic example of practice problems in any math course:
Problem Set 1: AAAA BBBB CCCC DDDD [i.e., blocked practice]
Problem Set 2: ABCD BCAD DBAC CBDA [i.e., interleaved practice]
Both have the same practice problems, but they’ve been re-arranged. If letters represented addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, the students need to be able to choose and retrieve the appropriate strategy — vs. plug-and-chug without thinking about which strategy to use.
Also see:
retrievalpractice.org/interleaving
The Observatory — from orrick.com with thanks to Gabe Teninbaum for mentioning this resource in his Lawtomatic Newsletter (Issue #112, 11/18/20)
The Observatory is an interactive platform that allows you to do a preliminary analysis of 600+ legal technologies in the market today (including some developed by Orrick):
- Gain insight into features of legal tools
- View leading categories of legal tech, from artificial intelligence to workflow automation
- Understand tech use-cases for litigation, transactional and general solutions
- Identify legal tech companies with diverse leadership
Excerpt from Gabe’s newsletter:
From DSC:
When reading the abstract of the article/research entitled, “Does Telemedicine Reduce Emergency Room Congestion? Evidence from New York State,” I wondered again:
Will the growth of telemedicine/telehealth influence the growth of telelegal?
I think it will.
We show that, on average, telemedicine availability in the ER significantly reduces average patients’ length of stay (LOS), which is partially driven by the flexible resource allocation. Specifically, the adoption of telemedicine leads to a larger reduction in ER LOS when there is a demand surge or supply shortage.
Also see:
From DSC…by the way, another title for this blog could have been:
WIN-WIN situations all around! The Theatre Departments out there could collaborate with other depts/disciplines to develop highly engaging, digitally-based learning experiences!
The future of drama and the theatre — as well as opera, symphonies, and more — will likely include a significant virtual/digital component to them. While it’s too early to say that theatre needs to completely reinvent itself and move “the stage” completely online, below is an idea that creates a variety of WIN-WIN situations for actors, actresses, stage designers, digital audio/video editors, fine artists, graphic designers, programmers, writers, journalists, web designers, and many others as well — including the relevant faculty members!
A new world of creative, engaging, active learning could open up if those involved with the Theatre Department could work collaboratively with students/faculty members from other disciplines. And in the end, the learning experiences and content developed would be highly engaging — and perhaps even profitable for the institutions themselves!
Though the integration of acting with online-based learning materials is not a new idea, this post encourages a far more significant interdisciplinary collaboration between the Theatre Department and other departments/disciplines.
Consider a “Dealing with Bias in Journalism” type of topic, per a class in the Digital Media and Journalism Major.
Colleges and universities could share content with each other and/or charge others for their products/content/learning experiences. In the future, I could easily see a marketplace for buying and selling such engaging content. This could create a needed new source of revenue — especially given that those large auditoriums and theaters are likely not bringing in as much revenue as they typically do.
Colleges and universities could also try to reach out to local acting groups to get them involved and continue to create feeders into the world of work.
Other tags/categories could include:
Also see:
What improv taught me about failure: As a teacher and academic — from scholarlyteacher.com by Katharine Hubbard
In improv, the only way to “fail” is to overthink and not have fun, which reframed what failure was on a grand scale and made me start looking at academia through the same lens. What I learned about failure through improv comes back to those same two core concepts: have fun and stop overthinking.
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Students are more engaged when the professor is having fun with the materials (Keller, Hoy, Goetz, & Frenzel, 2016), and teaching is more enjoyable when we are having fun ourselves.
Academia needs a reality check: Life is not back to normal — from sciencemag.org by June Gruber, Jay J. Van Bavel , William A. Cunningham, Leah H. Somerville, Neil A. Lewis, Jr.; with special thanks to Dr. Kate Byerwalter for this resource
Excerpts:
The problems don’t end there. Many academics are also grappling with ongoing racial injustices and associated protests, wildfires, and hurricanes. We continue to see widespread effects on mental health, with roughly one-third of Americans reporting symptoms of clinical depression or anxiety. June and her colleague recently described the escalating mental health crisis as the next biggest coronavirus challenge.
We have struggled with our own mental and physical well-being—as well as challenges associated with canceled vacations, lack of child care, the illnesses and death of people close to us, and the mental weight of difficult conversations about racial injustices. We’ve also been worrying about our trainees and the undergraduate students in our classes. The academic and non-academic job markets have cratered, and some of our colleagues and students have lost internships and job offers as organizations have been forced to cut expenses.
Expecting the same output as in previous years, even though many people have less time and more stress than ever, is not a sustainable or humane solution. The world is not normal—so the way we do science cannot be normal either.
