Similar to the way that bi-lingual/dual immersion language students may temporarily fall behind their peers in 3rd and 4th grade, but rocket ahead later in high school, those interested in interdisciplinary work may seem to lag, but later outpace their lesser specializing peers.

What is the underlying mechanism for providing the acceleration boosts in these models? Are they really the same or is this effect just a coincidence?

Is there something about the dual stock and double experience or even diversity of thought that provides the acceleration? Is there anything in the pedagogy or productivity research space to explain it?

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6389

11 James W. Pennebaker, “Writing about Emotional Experiences as a Therapeutic Process,” Psychological Science 8, no. 3 (May 1997), 162–66

Did they mention any pedagogical effects in this work?

How does this relate to the ability to release thoughts from working memory because they're written down and we don't need to spend time and effort trying to remember them? What are the references for this work? I suspect I've got them linked around somewhere...

What other papers/work cover these intersections?

Hugh of St. Victor wrote Didascalicon, a text about what topics should be learned and why. In it, he outlined seven mechanical arts (or technologies) in analogy with the seven liberal arts (trivium and quadrivium) as ways to repair the weaknesses inherit in humanity.

These seven mechanical arts he defines are: - fabric making - armament - commerce - agriculture - hunting - medicine - theatrics

Hugh of St. Victor's description of the mechanical art of commerce here is fascinating. He says "reconciles nations, calms wars, strengthens peace, and turns the private good of individuals into a benefit for all" (doublcheck the original quotation, context, and source). This sounds eerily familiar to the common statement in the United States about trade and commerce.

Link this to the quote from Albie Duncan in The West Wing (season 5?) about trade.

Other places where this sentiment occurs?

Is Hugh of St. Victor the first in history to state this sentiment?

Active reading to the extreme!

What a clever innovation building on the ideas of the art of memory and Raymond Llull's combinatoric arts!

Does this hit all of the areas of Bloom's Taxonomy? I suspect that it does.

How could it be tied more directly into an active reading, annotating, and note taking practice?

Own your pedagogy. Send just like anything else out there...

This is an intriguing off-label use case for Hypothes.is which is within the realm of peer-review use cases.

Dan is essentially using the idea of annotation as engagement within a textbook as a means of proactively improving it. He's mentioned it before in Hypothes.is Social (and Private) Annotation.

Because one can actively see the gaps without readers necessarily being aware of their "review", this may be a far better method than asking for active reviews of materials.

Reviewers are probably not as likely to actively mark sections they don't find engaging. Has anyone done research on this space for better improving texts? Certainly annotation provides a means for helping to do this.

Dig into research on maintenance rehearsal versus elaborative rehearsal.

Theory: The external context of one's physical surroundings (pen, paper, textures, sounds, smells, etc.) combined with the internal context, the learner's psychological state, mood, etc., comprises a potentially closed system where each part props up the other for the best learning outcomes.

Do neurodiversity effects help/hinder this process? What if people are missing one or more of these bits of contextualization? What does the literature look like in this space? Research?

https://read.bookcreator.com/

A digital book creation platform geared toward elementary students and teachers.

Active learning is a pedagogical structure whereby a teacher presents a problem to a group of students and has them (usually in smaller groups) collectively work on the solutions together. By talking and arguing amongst themselves they actively learn together not only how to approach problems, but to come up with their own solutions. Teachers can then show the correct answer, discuss why it was right and explain how the alternate approaches may have gone wrong. Research indicates that this approach helps provide a deeper understanding of the materials presented this way, that students score higher on exams and are less likely to either fail or drop out of these courses.

Active learning sounds very similar to the sorts of approaches found in flipped classrooms. Is the overlap between the two approaches the same, or are there parts of the Venn diagrams of the two that differ, and, if so, how do they differ? Which portions are more beneficial?

Does this sort of active learning approach also help to guard against "group think" as the result of comparing solutions from various groups? How might this be applied to democracy? Would separate versions of committees that then convene to compare notes and come up with solutions improve the quality of solutions?

Learning has been shown to be linked to engagement with peers in social situations over guidance from faculty mentors.

Cross reference: David F. Feldon et al., “Postdocs’ Lab Engagement Predicts Trajectories of PhD Students’ Skill Development,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116 (October 2019): 20910–16

Are there areas where this is not the case? Are there areas where this is more the case than not?

Is it our evolution as social animals that has heightened this effect? How could this be shown? (Link this to prior note about social evolution.)

Is it the ability to scaffold out questions and answers and find their way by slowly building up experience with each other that facilitates this effect?

Could this effect be seen in annotating texts as well? If one's annotations become a conversation with the author, is there a learning benefit even when the author can't respond? By trying out writing about one's understanding of a text and seeing where the gaps are and then revisiting the text to fill them in, do we gain this same sort of peer engagement? How can we encourage students to ask questions to the author and/or themselves in the margins? How can we encourage them to further think about and explore these questions? Answer these questions over time?

A key part of the solution is not just writing the annotations down in the first place, but keeping them, reviewing over them, linking them together, revisiting them and slowly providing answers and building solutions for both themselves and, by writing them down, hopefully for others as well.

Experts have more practiced levels of visual perception of surroundings that provide them with information more quickly than novices who don't yet know what or where to focus their attention. Teaching with eye tracking technology might help to bridge the gap between novice and expert more quickly.

When teaching novices, experts utilize chunking, or breaking up an idea into smaller units. While this may help free up cognitive space from the expert's point of view it exhibits a lack of empathy for the novice who may need expert-sized chunks broken down into micro-sized chunks which are more appropriate to their beginner status.

While the benefits of chunking can be useful to both sets of participants, the sizes of the chunks need to be relative to one's prior experience to leverage their benefit.

link to https://hypothes.is/a/aVetvME-Eey28u-vkmJ1Hg

This same analogy also works in advanced mathematics courses where students are often learning dense and technical vocabulary and then moments later applying it directly to even more technical ideas and proofs.

How might this sort of solution from law school be applied to abstract mathematics?

By providing students solid examples of work that is expected of them they can more easily imitate the examples which frees up cognitive bandwidth so that they can focus their time and attention on creating their own content related to particular assignments.

Showing students examples of work and processes that they can imitate will fuel their imaginations and capabilities rather than stifle them.

American children aren't encouraged to as attentive imitators as their foreign counterparts and this can effect their learning processes.

Studies have shown that humans are highly selective about whom they choose to imitate. Children up to age seven show a propensity to imitate their parents over strangers and after that they primarily imitate people who have shown themselves to be knowledgeable and competent within an area of expertise.

This has applications to teaching with respect to math shaming. A teacher who says that math is personally hard for them is likely to be signaling to students that what they're teaching is not based on experience and expertise and thus demotivating the student from following and imitating their example.

courses on effective imitation.

If imitation is so effective, what would teaching imitation to students look like in a variety of settings including, academia, business, and other areas?

Is teaching by way of imitation the best method for the majority of students? Are there ways to test this versus other methods for broad effectiveness?

How can we better leverage imitation in teaching for application to the real world?

Training students to be able to imitate the symptoms of disease so that they may demonstrate them to others is an effective form of context shifting. It allows the students to shift from a written or spoken description of the disease to a physical interpretation of it for themselves which also entails more cognitive work than even seeing a particular patient with the problem and identifying it correctly. The need to mentally internalize the issue and then physically recreate it helps in the acquisition of the knowledge.

Role playing or putting oneself into the shoes of another is another good example of creating a mental shift in context.

Getting medical students to play out the symptoms of patients can help to diffuse their social discomfort in dealing with these patients.

If this practice were used on broader scales might it also help to normalize issues that patients face and dispel social stigma toward them?

Nineteenth-century physician Jean-Martin Charcot, known as the father of neurology, brought patients to his lectures at Universitaire Pitié-Salpêtrière in Paris to allow students to see forms of disease first hand.

When was the medical teaching practice of "rounds" instituted?

This is what’s known as a cognitive apprenticeship, a term coined by Allan Collins, now a professor emeritus of education at Northwestern University. In a 1991 article written with John Seely Brown and Ann Holum, Collins noted a

In a traditional apprenticeship, a learner watches and is able to imitate the master process and work. In a cognitive apprenticeship the process of thinking is generally invisible to both the apprentice and the teacher. The problem becomes how to make the thinking processes more tangible and visible to the learner.

Allan Collins, John Seely Brown, and Ann Holum identified four pedagogical methods in apprenticeships that can also be applied to cognitive apprenticeships: - modeling: demonstrating a task while focusing on describing and explaining the steps and general thinking about the problem out loud - scaffolding: structuring a task to encourage and allow the learner the ability to try it themself - fading: as the learner gains facility and confidence in the process, gradually removing the teacher's guidance - coaching: as necessary, the teacher provides tips and suggestions to the learner to prompt them through potential difficulties

A major point in Chloé Collins's text is that traditional annotations risk feeling like a chore, done to fulfill teachers' requirements. In Collins's experience, the collaborative dimension of social annotation helps make it into something learners do for themselves.

https://eductive.ca/en/resource/real-life-story/boosting-engagement-with-social-annotation/

In addition to using his card index for producing his published works, Barthes also used his note taking system for teaching as well. His final course on the topic of the Neutral, which he taught as a seminar at Collège de France, was contained in four bundles consisting of 800 cards which contained everything from notes, summaries, figures, and bibliographic entries.

Given this and the easy portability of index cards, should we instead of recommending notebooks, laptops, or systems like Cornell notes, recommend students take notes directly on their note cards and revise them from there? The physicality of the medium may also have other benefits in terms of touch, smell, use of colors on them, etc. for memory and easy regular use. They could also be used physically for spaced repetition relatively quickly.

Teachers using their index cards of notes physically in class or in discussions has the benefit of modeling the sort of note taking behaviors we might ask of our students. Imagine a classroom that has access to a teacher's public notes (electronic perhaps) which could be searched and cross linked by the students in real-time. This would also allow students to go beyond the immediate topic at hand, but see how that topic may dovetail with the teachers' other research work and interests. This also gives greater meaning to introductory coursework to allow students to see how it underpins other related and advanced intellectual endeavors and invites the student into those spaces as well. This sort of practice could bring to bear the full weight of the literacy space which we center in Western culture, for compare this with the primarily oral interactions that most teachers have with students. It's only in a small subset of suggested or required readings that students can use for leveraging the knowledge of their teachers while all the remainder of the interactions focus on conversation with the instructor and questions that they might put to them. With access to a teacher's card index, they would have so much more as they might also query that separately without making demands of time and attention to their professors. Even if answers aren't immediately forthcoming from the file, then there might at least be bibliographic entries that could be useful.

I recently had the experience of asking a colleague for some basic references about the history and culture of the ancient Near East. Knowing that he had some significant expertise in the space, it would have been easier to query his proverbial card index for the lived experience and references than to bother him with the burden of doing work to pull them up.

What sorts of digital systems could help to center these practices? Hypothes.is quickly comes to mind, though many teachers and even students will prefer to keep their notes private and not public where they're searchable.

Another potential pathway here are systems like FedWiki or anagora.org which provide shared and interlinked note spaces. Have any educators attempted to use these for coursework? The closest I've seen recently are public groups using shared Roam Research or Obsidian-based collections for book clubs.

Very salient!

Annotations or notes are definitely the first step towards having a collection of excerpts from one's reading. Where to put them can be a useful question though. Should they be in the margins for ease of creation or should they go into a notebook. Both of these methods may require later rewriting/revision or even moving into a more convenient permanent place. The idea "don't repeat yourself" (DRY) in programming can be useful to keep in mind, but the repetition of the ideas in writing and revision can help to quicken the memory as well as potentially surface additional ideas that hadn't occurred upon the notes' original capture.

Simply the word abridgement here leads me to wonder:

Was the continual abridgement of texts and excerpting small pieces for later use the partial cause of the loss of the arts of memory? Ars excerpendi ad infinitum? It's possible that this, with the growth of note taking practices, continual information overload, and other pressures for educational reform swamped the prior practices.

For evidence, take a look at William Engel's work following the arts of memory in England and Europe to see if we can track the slow demise by attrition of the descriptions and practices. What would such a study show? How might we assign values to the various pressures at play? Which was the most responsible?

Could it have also been the slow, inexorable death of many of these classical means of taking notes as well? How did we loose the practices of excerpting for creating new ideas? Where did the commonplace books go? Where did the zettelkasten disappear to?

One author, with a carefully honed practice and the extant context of their life writes some brief notes which get passed along to their students or which are put into a new book that misses a lot of their existing context with respect to the new readers. These readers then don't know about the attrition happening and slowly, but surely the knowledge goes missing amidst a wash of information overload. Over time the ideas and practices slowly erode and are replaced with newer techniques which may not have been well tested or stood the test of time. One day the world wakes up and the common practices are no longer of use.

This is potentially all the more likely because of the extremely basic ideas underpinning some of memory and note taking. They seem like such basic knowledge we're also prone to take them for granted and not teach them as thoroughly as we ought.

How does one juxtapose this with the idea of humanist scholars excerpting, copying, and using classical texts with a specific eye toward preventing the loss of these very classical texts?

Is this potentially the idea of having one's eye on a particular target and losing sight of other creeping effects?

It's also difficult to remember what it was like when we ourselves didn't know something and once that is lost, it can be harder and harder to teach newcomers.

Blogs

Blogging is a form of public note sharing that isn't dissimilar to seventeenth-century note sharing practices in group settings.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/California-math-wars-get-ugly-Accusations-of-17060072.php

clickbait mostly

While students apparently have ignored the instructions in the past resulting in breaches of academic integrity, teachers can prompt active learning even during exams by prompting students to write answers to questions on open book/open notes in their own words.

I love this graphic organiser created by FOSIL (Framework Of Skills for Inquiry Learning) which encourages students to write down what they have found and explain the relevance. Lots of free resources like this can be found on the FOSIL group website here https://t.co/3uhWQNOr14 pic.twitter.com/ijH98bcc5U

— Elizabeth Hutchinson FCLIP BEM (@Elizabethutch) October 27, 2021

https://fosil.org.uk/resources/

https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/note-taking/

Verbal cues can be a useful method of scaffolding for students when note taking. Examples of this behavior are statements like "this is important" or "be sure to capture this in your notes".

Guided notes (or skeletal notes with broad topic headings) are a useful pedagogical scaffolding technique to encourage students to take notes. Methods like this have been show to improve student outcomes at all levels as well as for those with disabilities.

Unfortunately, like most NYT content, this article is behind a paywall. I'm partly reading this as I plan to develop a set of open education resources myself and the problem of how to manage dead/unavailable links looks like a key stumbling block.

Creating links to one's own personal context can help one to both learn and retain new material.

More closely associating new ideas to one's own personal life helps to create and expand the context of the learning to what one already knows.

Within the context of Bloom's Taxonomy, doing this shows that one understands and is already applying and even doing a bit of creating, at least internally.

Should 'understanding' come before 'remembering' in Bloom's taxonomy? That seems more logical to me.

Bloom's Taxonomy mirrors the zettelkasten method

(Recall Bloom's Taxonomy: remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, create)

One needs to be able to generally understand an idea(s) to be able to write it down clearly in one's own words. Regular work within a zettelkasten helps to reinforce memory of ideas for understanding and retention. Applying the knowledge to other situations happens almost naturally with the combinatorial creativity that occurs within a zettelkasten. Analysis is heavily encouraged as one takes new information and links it to prior knowledge and ideas; this is also concurrent with the application of knowledge. Being able to compare and contrast two ideas on separate cards is also part of the analysis portions of Bloom's taxonomy which also leads into the evaluation phase. Finally, one of the most important reasons for keeping a zettelkasten is to use it to generate or create new ideas and thoughts and then write them down in articles, books, or other media in a clear and justified manner.

Personalizing ideas using existing memories is a method of brining new knowledge into one's own personal context and making them easier to remember.

link this to: - the pedagogical idea of context shifting as a means of learning - cards about reframing ideas into one's own words when taking notes

There is a solid group of cards around these areas of learning.

Random thought: Personal learning networks put one into a regular milieu of people who are talking and thinking about topics of interest to the learner. Regular discussions with these people helps one's associative memory by tying the ideas into this context of people with relation to the same topic. Humans are exceedingly good at knowing and responding to social relationships and within a personal learning network, these ties help to create context on an interpersonal level, but also provide scaffolding for the ideas and learning that one hopes to do. These features will tend to reinforce each other over time.

On the flip side of the coin there is anecdotal evidence of friends taking courses together because of their personal relationships rather than their interest in the particular topics.

Collective memory is our history.

Something interesting here tying collective memory to education. Dig into this and expand on it.

How much history is covered here?

Will mnemotechniques be covered here? Spaced repetition? Note taking methods in the commonplace book or zettelkasten traditions?

The phrase "ways of knowing" is fascinating and seems to have a particular meaning across multiple contexts.

I'd like to collect examples of its use and come up with a more concrete definition for Western audiences.

How close is it to the idea of ways (or methods) of learning and understanding? How is it bound up in the idea of pedagogy? How does it relate to orality and memory contrasted with literacy? Though it may not subsume the idea of scientific method, the use, evolution, and refinement of these methods over time may generally equate it with the scientific method.

Could such an oral package be considered a learning management system? How might we compare and contrast these for drawing potential equivalencies of these systems to put them on more equal footing from a variety of cultural perspectives? One is not necessarily better than another, but we should be able to better appreciate what each brings to the table of world knowledge.

While being able to view the history of a problem space from the perspective of a creation process is interesting, in reverse, it is also an interesting way to view a potential learning experience.

I can't help but think about the branching tree networks of knowledge in some math texts providing potential alternate paths through the text to allow learners to go from novice to expert in areas in which they're interested. We need more user interfaces like this.

We've been promised this for ages, but where is it? Shouldn't it be here by now if it were deliverable or actualizable?

What are the problems in solving this?

How might one automate the Markov monkey?

Math teacher Brendan Jeffreys from the Auburn school district in Auburn, WA created simple hand gestures to accompany or replace mathematical terms. Examples included making a Pac-Man shape with one's arms to describe an acute angle, spreading one's arms wide as if to hug someone to indicate an obtuse angle, or flexing your arm to show your muscles to indicate a right triangle. Other examples included a karate chop to indicate division or a motion imitating using a knife to butter bread to indicate finding the area of a shape.

Mathematics can often be more difficult compared to other subjects as students learning new concepts are forced not only to understand entirely new concepts, but simultaneously are required to know new vocabulary to describe those concepts. Utilizing gestures to help lighten the cognitive load of the new vocabulary to allow students to focus on the concepts and operations can be invaluable.

Children counting on their fingers is an example of offloading cognitive load by using proprioception.

Different cultures use different finger sequences (particularly for the number 3) for counting up.

Designed (or intentional) gestures can function to lighten the cognitive load of teaching by engaging multiple pathways simultaneously.

Manuela Macedonia's research indicates that online learners who enact specific gestures as they learn words learn better and have longer retention versus simply hearing words. Students who mimic these gestures also learn better than those who only see the gestures and don't use them themselves.

How might this sort of teacher/avatar gesturing be integrated into online methods? How would students be encouraged to follow along?

Could these be integrated into different background settings as well to take advantage of visual memory?

Anecdotally, I remember some Welsh phrases from having watched Aran Jones interact with his cat outside on video or his lip syncing in the empty spaces requiring student responses. Watching the teachers lips while learning can be highly helpful as well.

Manuela Macedonia and co-authors found that pairing new foreign words with gestures created activity in the motor cortex which helped to improve the associative memory for the words and the movements. Using images of the words did not create the same motor cortex involvement.

It's not clear which method of association is better, at least as written in The Extended Mind. Was one better than the other? Were they tested separately, together, and in a control group without either? Surely one would suspect that using both methods together would be most beneficial.

Example of the use of visual, auditory, and proprioceptive methods used in the pedagogy of anatomy.

Gesturing supplies a visual scaffolding which allows one to affix their budding understanding of new concepts into a more permanent structure.

—Woff-Michael Roth

Actively attempting to express oneself is one of the best methods of evolving one's understanding.

Link this to the ideas related to being forced to actively manufacture the answer to a question is one of the best ways to learn.

The gender-based disparity of spatial thinking skills between boys and girls may result from the fact that at an early age boys are more likely to play with spatially oriented toys and video games. Encouraging girls to do more spatial gesturing at an earlier age can dramatically close this spatial thinking gap.

It's been shown that merely asking people to gesture more will increase their rates of gesturing. In educational settings this improves both teachers' instruction methods as well as the learning and retention by students.

Given the benefits of gesturing, teachers can improve their pedagogy simply by encouraging their students to move their hands while explaining things or working on problems.

Studies with elementary school children have shown that if they gesture while solving math problems led them to discover and understand new concepts and problem solving strategies.

link this with prior idea of handwriting out annotations/notes as well as drawing and sketchnoting ideas from lectures

Students reviewing over Cornell notes also be encouraged to use their hands while answering their written review questions.

gesture as they teach on video, it’s been found, speak more fluently and articulately, make fewer mistakes, and present information in a more logical and intelligible fashion.

Teachers who gesture as they teach have been found to make fewer mistakes, speak more fluently/articulately, and present their lessons in a more intelligible and logical manner.

Symbolic gestures, which are the most valuable for relaying abstract information, are some of the least seen in online digital pedagogy. Slightly more frequent are "beat" gestures that are used for emphatic emphasis, while in the majority of studied online instructional videos the lecturers hands aren't seen on the video at all.

Gestures can help viewers direct their attention to the most salient and important points in a conversation or a lecture. As a result, learning has been show to be improved in watching lectures with gestures.

Learning using gestures has been shown to be stronger in video presentations over in-person instruction.

Can gesturing during (second) language learning help dramatically improve the speed and facility of the second language acquisition by adult learners?

Evidence in language acquisition in children quoted previously in The Extended Mind would indicate yes.

link this related research

Could the pedagogy of using gestures to understand "strike and dip" in geology also be applied to using the right hand rule in better understanding electricity and magnetism? Would research on this idea show similar results as in geology? This could be an interesting way of testing this result in another area.

Penetrative thinking is the ability to abstractly consider and internally visualize or theorize about the inside of a three dimensional object based on what can be seen on its surface.

Penetrative thinking can be useful in areas like geology and anatomy.

Improvements in penetrative thinking can be exercised, encouraged, and improved by using gestures.

Geology is a solid example of an area in which gesture can be used in teaching the subject, by using the hands to indicate the movements of one mass against another.

Should active reading, thinking, and annotating also include making gestures as a means of providing more clear reasoning, and drawing better inferences from one's material?

Would gestural movements with a hand or physical writing be helpful in annotation over digital annotation using typing as an input? Is this related to the anecdotal evidence/research of handwriting being a better method of note taking over typing?

Could products like Hypothes.is or Diigo benefit from the use of digital pens on screens as a means of improving learning over using a mouse and a keyboard to highlight and annotate?

—Susan Goldin-Meadow

Can teachers encourage gesture as a means of helping their students learn? How might this be done?

gesture mismatch indicates reception to instruction

People can demonstrate a mismatch between what they gesture and what they say. This mismatch occurs both during development as well as in adulthood and can often be seen during problem solving. Susan Goldin-Meadow had research that indicates that learners who demonstrate this sort of gesture mismatch are more receptive to instruction.

Is there a way to encourage or force gesture mismatch as a means of improving pedagogy?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8WGozqgMuc

Short review of his book Small Teaching. It apparently presents some small implementable tidbits to make incremental change easier to implement.

https://insertlearning.com/

Referred to me by Mark Grabe.

https://learningaloud.com/blog/2020/08/08/designing-instruction-using-layering-services/

Mark Grabe categorizes some digital pedagogy tools in terms of how they function structurally.

1. two servers/independent content
2. one server, independent purchased content
3. one company offering both a layering capability and content
4. user can upload content

Stephen Krashen's Theory of Input indicates that language learning is most successful when learners are presented with interesting and comprehensible material in low-anxiety situations.

https://thinkzone.wlonk.com/Numbers/NumberSets.htm

A relatively clear explanation of the types of numbers and their properties.

I particularly like this diagram:

Ahrens goes through a variety of research on teaching and learning as they relate to active reading, escaping cognitive biases, creating understanding, progressive summarization, elaboration, revision, etc. as a means of showing and summarizing how these all dovetail nicely into a fruitful long term practice of using a slip box as a note taking method. This makes the zettelkasten not only a great conversation partner but an active teaching and learning partner as well. (Though he doesn't mention the first part in this chapter or make this last part explicit.)

The forms of thinking, writing, and elaboration that go into creating permanent notes for a slip box are natural means of facilitating actual, long-term learning.

This is a surprising effect for teaching and learning, and if true, how can it be best leveraged. Worth reading up on and testing this effect.

Indeed humans do seem built for categorizing and creating taxonomies and hierarchies, and perhaps allowing this talent to do some of the work may be the best way to learn not only in the short term, but over longer term evolutionary periods?

Some of the effort that teachers put into their educational resources in an attempt to make learning faster and more efficient is actually taking away the actual learning opportunities of the students to sort, arrange, and make meaningful connections between the knowledge and to their own prior knowledge bases.

In mathematics, rather than showing a handful of methods for solving a problem, the teacher might help students to explore those problem solving spaces first and then assist them into creating these algorithms. I can't help but think about Inventional Geometry by William George Spencer that is structured this way. The teacher has created a broader super-structure of problems, but leaves it largely to the student to do the majority of the work.

because, of course, you've got to read the digital version of this book!

https://learningaloud.com/blog/2022/01/30/smart-notes-in-padlet/

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1322591673239572482.html

originally from: https://twitter.com/andy_matuschak/status/1322591673239572482

—Viet Thanh Nguyen

https://eleanorkonik.com/the-difficulties-of-teaching-notetaking/

A fascinating take on why we don't teach study skills and note taking the way they had traditionally been done in the past. What we're teaching and teaching toward has changed dramatically.

How can we dramatically increase the complexity of our teaching both knowledge and skills so that students need solid note taking skills earlier in their education.

Pedagogical cultrues:

• cultures taught orally
• cultures taught to remember
• cultures taught to learn by rote
• cultures taught to forget

Is there a (linear) progression? How do they differ? How are they they same? Is there a 1-1 process that allows them to be equivalence classes?

Two Iron Laws of College Reading https://crookedtimber.org/2021/12/22/two-iron-laws-of-college-reading/

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/20/whats-so-great-about-great-books-courses-roosevelt-montas-rescuing-socrates

[Mingquan] Wang has compiled a list of resources to assist teachers with [Chinese] radicals, and hopes that the work of Li and Huang, along with other curriculum developers, teachers, and specialists will further map radicals so that specialized courses can become more widespread, and students can be inducted into the fascinating world of radicals earlier in their studies.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Heather Clydesdale </span> in Radicals Reveal the Order of Chinese Characters | Asia Society (<time class='dt-published'>11/22/2021 08:37:23</time>)</cite></small>

I'd love to have similar sources in Japanese.

https://asiasociety.org/china-learning-initiatives/radicals-reveal-order-chinese-characters

Article about the importance of radicals in Chinese (and by extension Japanese) with hopes that pedagogy will change to make the teaching and remembering of kanji easier.

This has been roughly my experience with Japanese, but I've yet to see an incredibly good method for doing this in a structured way.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/schools-face-parents-who-want-ban-critical-race-theory-don-ncna1284185

Too many people on the far right as well as some on the conservative religious spectrum feel it's their right to dictate what is taught in schools and are attempting to legislate against it. Sadly that isn't how this all works....

digital pedagogy or digi-pedagogical innovations.

I've seen/heard several articles about Narendra Modi and the BJP rewriting history in India over the past several years.

Examples include:

• https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/india-modi-culture/ 2018-03-06
• https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/06/01/indias-new-textbooks-are-promoting-the-prime-ministers-favorite-policies-critics-allege/ 2018-06-01
• https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/11/16/bjp-has-been-effective-in-transmitting-its-version-of-indian-history-to-next-generation-of-learners-pub-80373 2019-11-16

Methods for attacking a research problem about history used here:

• Web research
• Journal database research
• Zotero reference manager stub
• Research Rabbit (AI search)
• Reach out on various social media channels

Not mentioned, but perhaps useful:

• Standard library search (WorldCat)
• Internet Archive search (scanned historical textbooks)
• Off-label and dark web services (Library Genesis, Pirate Bay, etc.)
• Open access and OER sources (this will probably find newer perspectives and newer texts which sometimes have philosophical outlines of what they're trying to change for the future versus the pedagogies of the past)
• Current curricula and recommended textbooks at major universities on particular books and potential comparisons to those of the past (perhaps via Internet Archive).

https://hypothesis.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_vl5JoW1-RXKlENMtSny7pg

Jeremias Drexel is certainly a writer who complains about the work of the ars memoria, particularly for long term memory and supplants it with writing/note taking.

On Erasmus’s preference for “study, order and care” over places and images, see Erasmus,De ratione studii(1512), quoted in Yates,The Art of Memory,p. 127

What other pedagogues were hostile to memory?

This is another point in the decline of memory traditions from the 1500s onward.

What effect did cheaper books and paper have on this decline?

Keep in mind that Erasmus had written a treatise on commonplacing which was also a point in the history of note taking though Blair doesn't acknowledge his contributions in her list here. Also Agricola and Melanchthon

The first manuals of advice about how to take notes began in the early modern period during the fifteenth century.

I love this outline/syllabus for creating a commonplace book (as a potential replacement for a term paper).

I'd be curious to see those who are using Hypothes.is as a communal reading tool in coursework utilize this outline (or similar ones) in combination with their annotation practices.

Curating one's annotations and placing them into a commonplace book or zettelkasten would be a fantastic rhetorical exercise to extend the value of one's notes and ideas.

She's a bit over-prescriptive here in terms of the form a commonplace book should contain. In particular, she seems to be holding to the form up to the 17th Century. Personally in a classroom exercise, I wouldn't include this particular limitation.

An example of a teacher using index cards as a "low stakes" commonplace. The added benefit is that they can be passed around and shared as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhgwIhB58PA

Learning styles have been debunked.

Learning styles: V.A.R.K. model originated by Neil Flemiing stands for:

• visual
• auditory
• reading/writing
• kinesthetic

References:

Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological science in the public interest, 9(3), 105-119. — https://ve42.co/Pashler2008

Willingham, D. T., Hughes, E. M., & Dobolyi, D. G. (2015). The scientific status of learning styles theories. Teaching of Psychology, 42(3), 266-271. — https://ve42.co/Willingham

Massa, L. J., & Mayer, R. E. (2006). Testing the ATI hypothesis: Should multimedia instruction accommodate verbalizer-visualizer cognitive style?. Learning and Individual Differences, 16(4), 321-335. — https://ve42.co/Massa2006

Riener, C., & Willingham, D. (2010). The myth of learning styles. Change: The magazine of higher learning, 42(5), 32-35.— https://ve42.co/Riener2010

Husmann, P. R., & O'Loughlin, V. D. (2019). Another nail in the coffin for learning styles? Disparities among undergraduate anatomy students’ study strategies, class performance, and reported VARK learning styles. Anatomical sciences education, 12(1), 6-19. — https://ve42.co/Husmann2019

Snider, V. E., & Roehl, R. (2007). Teachers’ beliefs about pedagogy and related issues. Psychology in the Schools, 44, 873–886. doi:10.1002/pits.20272 — https://ve42.co/Snider2007

Fleming, N., & Baume, D. (2006). Learning Styles Again: VARKing up the right tree!. Educational developments, 7(4), 4. — https://ve42.co/Fleming2006

Rogowsky, B. A., Calhoun, B. M., & Tallal, P. (2015). Matching learning style to instructional method: Effects on comprehension. Journal of educational psychology, 107(1), 64. — https://ve42.co/Rogowskyetal

Coffield, Frank; Moseley, David; Hall, Elaine; Ecclestone, Kathryn (2004). — https://ve42.co/Coffield2004

Furey, W. (2020). THE STUBBORN MYTH OF LEARNING STYLES. Education Next, 20(3), 8-13. — https://ve42.co/Furey2020

Dunn, R., Beaudry, J. S., & Klavas, A. (2002). Survey of research on learning styles. California Journal of Science Education II (2). — https://ve42.co/Dunn2002

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Annie Murphy Paul</span> in Opinion | How to Think Outside Your Brain - The New York Times (<time class='dt-published'>09/13/2021 19:58:53</time>)</cite></small>

Physical interactivity with a problem may help improve results.

Moving ideas from our heads into the real world, whether written or potentially using other modalities, can provide a detachment gain, by which we're able to extend those ideas by drawing, sketching, or otherwise using them.

How might we use the idea of detachment gain to better effect in our pedagogy? I've heard anecdotal evidence of the benefit of modality shifts in many spaces including creating sketchnotes.

While some sketchnotes don't make sense to those who weren't present for the original talk, perhaps they're incredibly useful methods for those who are doing the modality shifts from hearing/seeing into writing/drawing.

The idea of learning by doing may have even more profound effects based on the idea of grounding. Experience in the physical world may dramatically inform experiences with the theoretical world.

Critical Pedagogy (CP):

• Sees society as divided into a hierarchy based on power relations.
• Education is used as a tool by the dominant to uphold the hierarchy.
• Education can also be used by the oppressed to rid themselves of false consciousness.
• CP does not think any education is neutral. All education is shaped by power, politics, history, and culture.
• CP can empower the powerless to change the power structures.

https://via.hypothes.is/https://finiteeyes.net/pedagogy/extending-the-mind/

A well written review of Annie Murphy Paul's The Extended Mind. Matthew Cheney has distilled a lot out of the book from his notes with particular application to improving pedagogy.

I definitely want to read this with relation to not only using it to improve teaching, but with respect to mnemotechniques and the methods oral and indigenous societies may have either had things right or wrong and what Western culture may have lost as a result. I'm also particularly interested in it for its applications to the use of commonplace books and zettelkasten as methods of extending the mind and tools for thought.

But let's also be aware of the all-too-prevalent math shaming that occurs when we say "math is difficult". That definitely isn't productive.

Research shows that high-resolution monitors make thinking easier. This also seems true of classrooms which use large posters and maps as teaching aids at lower grades.

Why don't we use these methods as we grow older?

When used in mnemonic traditions, one can use vast spaces to create memory palaces that become thinking vistas within the brain. How can we better leverage these effects while still maintaining the effectiveness of focused journeys?

Perhaps we need more songlines in our instructional design?

This is also a plea for a more humanistic approach to technology in general.

I'm reminded of Lynne Kelly's use of Indigenous Australian memory techniques which do both of these things at the same time: https://www.lynnekelly.com.au/?p=4794

I wonder how much of our genetic programming is based on centuries of evolution with humans moving around their landscapes and attaching their memories to them?

Within Lynne Kelly's thesis about stone circles, henges, etc. most of the locations have roads and entryways into them which require movement much less the idea of dancing and singing attached to memory performance as well.

I wonder how this may be leveraged with those who are using Hypothes.is for conversations in the margins in classrooms?

cc: @remikalir, @jeremydean, @nateangell

Could teachers specifically sow contention into their conversations? Cross reference the idea of a devil's advocate.

I love the aphorism:

“People should fight as if they are right, and listen as if they are wrong.” — Robert Sutton, Stanford Buisness School professor's formula for productive conflict

Any relationship to the idea of rubberduck debugging?

On the importance of imitation...

I'm reminded of Benjamin Franklin imitating what he thought were good writers to make his own writing more robust.

See: https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20203/20203-h/20203-h.htm

Maybe the aphorism: "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," should really be "Imitation is the sincerest form of learning."

We're also dramatically missing thousands of years of indigenous experience as well.

references for this?

This feels related to some of the potential power of sketchnotes.

I'd like the reference to this particular research though.

Reference for this?

Reference for this?

Students want to discover, learn new things, and solve puzzles, but they don't want to invest too much effort into the process.

How does this fit into or relate to the idea of flow?

What relationship does it have to addictive behaviors like scrolling social media which are low effort, but provide new discovery?

Research shows that the level of interpersonal interaction is the best predictor for how well an online course does.

Reference for this??

https://fs.blog/2021/07/mathematicians-lament/

What if we taught art and music the way we do mathematics? All theory and drudgery without any excitement or exploration?

What textbooks out there take math from the perspective of exploration?

• Inventional geometry does

Certainly Gauss, Euler, and other "greats" explored mathematics this way? Why shouldn't we?

This same problem of teaching math is also one we ignore when it comes to things like note taking, commonplacing, and even memory, but even there we don't even delve into the theory at all.

How can we better reframe mathematics education?

I can see creating an analogy that equates math with art and music. Perhaps something like Arthur Eddington's quote:

Suppose that we were asked to arrange the following in two categories–

distance, mass, electric force, entropy, beauty, melody.

I think there are the strongest grounds for placing entropy alongside beauty and melody and not with the first three. —Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, OM, FRS (1882-1944), a British astronomer, physicist, and mathematician in The Nature of the Physical World, 1927

Paul Lockhart in Lockhart's Lament

---Paul Lockhart

This is the primary problem with mathematics education!

https://www.academia.edu/35101285/Creating_a_Commonplace_Book_CPB_

An interesting looking assignment for creating a commonplace book.

Annotations for the .pdf document available here: https://hyp.is/B7BXuArgEeyJB5PFTw2x2A/docdrop.org/download_annotation_doc/Creating-a-Commonplace-Book---Kennedy-Colleen-E_-0r3r1.pdf

I'd start with the basics of 0-9 of the Major System and then introduce the method of loci. Once they've got those two basics down reasonably I'd expand their Major system up to 99 at a minimum.

The tougher part then is expanding your pedagogy to build these tools into the curriculum so that you're actively using them with your content.

You might appreciate the experience from Lynne Kelly here: https://www.lynnekelly.com.au/?p=4794. Her excellent book Memory Craft also has some interesting examples and stories for children including the use of what she calls rapscallions for use in multiplication tables, languages, and other educational applications. Her book also has a wealth of other methods and potential applications depending on the subjects you're teaching.

I'd love to hear your experiences as you progress with your class.

The Attack on "Critical Race Theory": What's Going on?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P35YrabkpGk

Lately, a lot of people have been very upset about “critical race theory.” Back in September 2020, the former president directed federal agencies to cut funding for training programs that refer to “white privilege” or “critical race theory, declaring such programs “un-American propaganda” and “a sickness that cannot be allowed to continue.” In the last few months, at least eight states have passed legislation banning the teaching of CRT in schools and some 20 more have similar bills in the pipeline or plans to introduce them. What’s going on?

Join us for a conversation that situates the current battle about “critical race theory” in the context of a much longer war over the relationship between our racial present and racial past, and the role of culture, institutions, laws, policies and “systems” in shaping both. As members of families and communities, as adults in the lives of the children who will have to live with the consequences of these struggles, how do we understand what's at stake and how we can usefully weigh in?

Hosts: Melissa Giraud & Andrew Grant-Thomas

Guests: Shee Covarrubias, Kerry-Ann Escayg,

Some core ideas of critical race theory:

• racial realism
  • racism is normal
• interest convergence
  • racial equity only occurs when white self interest is being considered (Brown v. Board of Education as an example to portray US in a better light with respect to the Cold War)
• Whiteness as property
  • Cheryl Harris' work
  • White people have privilege in the law
  • myth of meritocracy
• Intersectionality

People would rather be spoon fed rather than do the work themselves. Sadly this is being encouraged in the media.

Short summary of CRT: How laws have been written to institutionalize racism.

Culturally Responsive Teaching (also has the initials CRT).

KAE tries to use an anti-racist critical pedagogy in her teaching.

SC: Story about a book Something Happened in Our Town (book).

• Law enforcement got upset and the school district
• Response video of threat, intimidation, emotional blackmail by local sheriff's department.
• Intent versus impact - the superintendent may not have had a bad intent when providing an apology, but the impact was painful

It's not really a battle about or against CRT, it's an attempt to further whitewash American history. (synopsis of SC)

What are you afraid of?

Howdy Max!!!

A cool tool born of need after VWBPE 2013.

Mary Anne Clark's Genome Island serves up a master class in virtual world pedagogy, along with the genetics course content.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25305-2005Mar10.html

Reading back into the "good old days" of the early blogosphere in academia.

The distinctions between being informed and enlightened.

Learning might be defined as the pathway from being informed as a preliminary base on the way to full enlightenment. Pedagogy is the teacher's plan for how to take this path.

How would these definitions and distinctions fit into Bloom's taxonomy?

Note that properly annotating and taking notes into a commonplace book can be a serious (necessary?) step one might take on the way towards enlightenment.