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andrewducker ([personal profile] andrewducker) wrote2012-02-23 11:00 am
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Interesting Links for 23-02-2012

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[identity profile] camies.livejournal.com 2012-02-23 12:49 pm (UTC)(link)
I wanted to do French, Biology and Maths at 'A' level but had to stream to arts or sciences so ended up doing French and History (which I passed) and Geography (which I did badly in).

[identity profile] steer.livejournal.com 2012-02-23 01:51 pm (UTC)(link)
(Lectures are pointless)

Hmm... you over state the case here but it is not news that lectures are not the most effective way to get the point across. Unfortunately most of the more effective methods are very staff intensive. Given one person and a set amount of material to be got through, a standard lecture may be pretty much your only realistic choice.

All lecturers (pretty much) know that testing students on material, engaging with them and getting them to attempt to answer stuff as you go on helps... of course this all takes time and relies on the students actually participating (e.g. avoiding the "Anyone, anyone, Bueller?" sort of call for participation).

Ellefson ran a study in which a group of students were briefly pushed every day to revisit earlier material, while another group just plowed ahead with the new material.

Which is why a standard lecture course in the sciences also comes with worksheet questions, tutorials and so on.

There's also the question of "to whom are you teaching" -- if you take some of those methods, going back, revisiting material, recapping and so on, it really does help the bottom end but it loses the top end... that is, the less able students get a better deal the more able students a worse deal.

Teaching coding was an eyeopener for me as I interacted with the students regularly in the classroom so could see where they had and where they had not understood what was said.

[identity profile] drdoug.livejournal.com 2012-02-23 02:28 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh brave new world, that has such (pseudo)people in't!

That bot pricing thing was awesome. It's like we're living in a scifi novel ... about living in a scifi novel.

[identity profile] pozorvlak.livejournal.com 2012-02-23 06:04 pm (UTC)(link)
Perhaps relevantly, the author of that Telegraph piece has a degree in History and two A-levels in maths.

[identity profile] octopoid-horror.livejournal.com 2012-02-23 06:14 pm (UTC)(link)
That umbilical iphone charger is amazing.

DEATH TO THE DEMONESS ALLEGRA GELLER

[identity profile] iainjcoleman.livejournal.com 2012-02-24 01:39 am (UTC)(link)
One of my lecturers was Prof John Brown, the Astronomer Royal for Scotland. In our honours course we would have weekly two-hour lectures from him. These typically broke down as follows:

30 mins: waiting for professor to turn up
60 mins: listening to professor bitch about university politics
10 mins: general banter
20 mins: actual lecture

And yet I wouldn't have missed those lectures for anything.

What lectures teach you that books and notes don't is culture and style. I'm sure the formal content of Prof Brown's lectures on Bremsstrahlung radiation or modelling SS433 could have been delivered on paper, but the style of approaching problems in a particular way, the scientific and intellectual culture that forms the foundation of a way of approaching hard problems - these things are learned much better in person. And learning the astrophysical problem-solving style of the Astronomer Royal is more than worth the investment of time.

I'm not particularly wedded to the lecture per se, but I think that learning is about much more than just the transmission of information, and that contact time between students and senior researchers is incredibly valuable even if it seems terribly inefficient.
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