Delicious LiveJournal Links for 7-15-2009
Jul. 15th, 2009 12:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewducker-
How to train yourself to think better
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A board game for all the family!
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Fallout 3 and Half Life 2, I think.
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Right. Crossing that one off the marriage plans
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Oooh, the fun.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-07-15 01:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-15 02:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-15 02:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-15 02:36 pm (UTC)Everything I will say is common sense, all the fundamental ideas are ideas you will have heard before.
FFS.
In my opinion, the single most important principle of effective learning is that it requires a strong sense of purpose and meaning.
What on earth does that even mean? It's nothing more then a "magic bullet". There is nothing there that will help anyone think...
Second principle is common sense - although I can't say for sure there might be psychology that suggests "long term visions" or planning could ultimatly be detrimental.
the third principle, namely, that the most effective way of changing your own behaviour is to change your social role, if necessary, by creating social roles for ourselves that reinforce behaviours we want.
Dodgy and not an option open to the vast majority of people. Standard self-help "reinvent" yourself guff.
Also what is extreme about this?
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Date: 2009-07-15 02:38 pm (UTC)I also say for FFS because the fact that this guy is a physicist seems to make people think he somehow knows much about other sciences...
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Date: 2009-07-15 02:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-15 03:46 pm (UTC)That and as a scientist, a physical scientist no less, he should be aware that there exists research in this area and indeed (unless his institution is remarkably poor or backwards) have easy access to it. There are few excuses for anyone in academia to produce a paper/conference report/talk about a subject in which they are not an expert and do so on the basis of personal opinion... It's bordering, if not actually, on an abuse of scientific authority.
I then go on to point out the facile nature of the points the guy is making. Just because something might condescend to our preconceptions we shouldn't switch off critical thinking - common sense and anecdote is just the initial alarm bell.
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Date: 2009-07-15 03:52 pm (UTC)This link might be interesting:- http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/deliberations/effective-learning/happen/ (although not perfect - describes a reasonably rigourous qualitative approach to constructing a model. (You can take this as meaning it describes how people think they learn effectively more then how they learn effectively...))
A reasonably good article of computer based learning (or whatever its called now):- http://www.staffs.ac.uk/COSE/cose10/posnan.html
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Date: 2009-07-15 03:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-15 03:52 pm (UTC)It's a blog post. And I 100% disagree with you. I am in favour of anyone, at any time, writing about anything they feel like, using their experience as a basis for it. That's what blogs are _for_.
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Date: 2009-07-15 03:54 pm (UTC)"About this essay
This essay is the text for a presentation delivered by the author at the “Tough Learning” conference held in Brisbane, Australia, September 7-10, 2003, organized by Learning Network Australia (www.lna.net.au). "
It's the text from a conference speech.
If it were a blog fair enough, anyone can blog about anything they like. This is however not a blog post.
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Date: 2009-07-15 03:56 pm (UTC)They're clearly looking for people to talk about their personal experience, or they wouldn't have invited a physicist.
Not that I'm not in favour of anyone also _talking_ about their personal experience at any point, so long as they make it clear what is and isn't backed up by research.
As he points out, at the top, that it's not scientific research, I'm totally in favour of it.
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Date: 2009-07-15 04:09 pm (UTC)Or, to use an actual example, a company to send along a representitive to say that Omega 3 fish oils aid concentration etc and that this would aid learning? (Durham Fish oil trials) In order to sell more fish oil?
Asides from that I just noticed this paragraph (which I missed last time round):
"Obviously, in limited time there is much that must be omitted on a subject as large as tough learning. There is one important omission I’d like to at least mention. The three principles I describe are focused largely on individual actions, and ignore the larger social context – the norms and institutions of the societies in which we live, and how those affect the applicability of the principles. This social context obviously has an enormous impact on tough learning, and deserves separate treatment."
Which does hedge the talk back into the realms of respectability somewhat... The three priciples are still however at too high a level of abstraction to be considered as anything other then platitudes but.
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Date: 2009-07-15 04:16 pm (UTC)Yes, provided that they were clear that they were talking purely about their own experience. I'd expect that anything that came out in the question and answer session to point out anything stupid they'd said, of course.
I _like_ the open and free exchange of ideas. Anyone who changes their life based on a single talk by someone who explicitly says they don't have any science behind their argument is going to be having more problems than we can solve here.
I'd much rather that physicists talked about how they learned, psychologists discussed strange rock formations they've seen, geologists mention the strange footprints they saw in the snow, and biologists mentioned the time they saw ball lightning.
Some of these things will be nonsense, some of them will be well known in other fields, and some of them will point out things that people had never thought of before. And that's great!
Companies hawking their products is a different matter, of course.
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Date: 2009-07-15 04:23 pm (UTC)I'm all for the open exchange of ideas. My initial ire was perhaps misguided as the hedging seems to make it reasonable. So the anger about how I believed him to be presenting his idea was wrong.
I mean the problem with the argument as I was arguing against it is peoples tendencies not to employ critical thinking and condescend to their own preconceptions. You can sleepwalk into a whole lot of bad doing that.
Also nothing I have said discounts any of the above or precludes the free and open exchange of ideas. To do so implies a false dichotomy. I can quite happily disagree with people using their position to imply the veracity of an argument from their position of authority. Because that is wrong. This doesn't not make me against the free and open exchange of ideas.
I may be mistaken in this case but if it were a genuine abuse of position... Say people using Watsons (it wasn't Crick come to think of it was it?) authority, as one of discoverers of the double helix, to back up their racist ideas and claim that those damned blacks are congenitally and genetically inferior to humans... Then the implication that I am against the free and open exchange of ideas doesn't hold.
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Date: 2009-07-15 08:22 pm (UTC)Very much my response. Although for someone talking well out of their home territory he's not absurdly wrong, I'd say. It's pretty much my field (I'm an academic in technology-enhanced learning) and you could pick his points out of the literature very easily (though probably a lot more helpfully). Social aspects of learning in particular are red-hot at the moment and have been for some time.
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Date: 2009-07-16 08:55 am (UTC)This phrase gave me the odd idea that "home territory" was an anatomical euphemism :-)
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Date: 2009-07-16 09:21 am (UTC)