Gnomie Ben Wright writes:

Hello, Chris!

I have noticed on many of your YouTube videos that you love to bash your own teaching skills, often referring to how you have been kicked out of your family’s will over arguments about Outlook Express, etc. I come to you today with some tips on how I teach people. The main trend I see that annoys and baffles both students and teachers is superiority. Whenever I am teaching someone I act as their equal and not their superior. I listen to the problem, and wait for them to completely finish before I even begin to answer the question. A short pause after the question has been asked no matter how simplistic it may seem shows the student that you are really taking their query into consideration. After this, start out with a simple overview. Tell them of the things you are going to use to solve the problem and follow KISS (Keep it Simple, Stupid). For instance, I don’t bother telling “non-techies” about Launchy or even Windows+Run, instead I would recommend something that fits the needs of the individual and not a wider generalization as I find you often address to the community (e.g. ObjectDock freeware — check it out!). With your videos it is obviously the purpose to generalize as you are addressing a wide audience, but on an individual level it is best to try and address the need of the person you are trying to help.

Be calm and relaxed. You’re teaching the person because you want to; don’t act like it’s a chore or that you are a 1337 hackzor. Be enthusiastic and humble at the same time. Once you have told them how you think (try to phrase the answer as a personal opinion, don’t act as if you know exactly what they want) you can solve the problem, ask them if that’s okay, or if they have any problems. You will be surprised how much you can glean from facial expressions at this point and you will be able to tell if they are confused, or at least they will have the opportunity to tell you. (Of course on the other hand they may think it’s way over the top). Then simply guide them through it as you install the software so they can see from beginning to end. Okay, you don’t have to wait around while the progress bars go by, but if they say they will be back in a second simply get off the computer and stretch your legs or something, so you don’t go ahead without them.

If they look bored, start talking about something other than the task at hand, and slowly ease them back into the issue. This little trick works really well with people who are not that enthusiastic about computers in general. Don’t look at the screen for too long after each couple of steps — look at them (in the eyes). Make sure they understand. Once the program is all up and running, don’t run off. Ask them to try it out; if they don’t have time, don’t pressure them (but it’s always a good way to prevent questions later on).

And that is how you teach people from a social viewpoint. I think this is what you are missing from your teaching ability; that’s why you’re such a good teacher through a camera and not, as you say, in a social scenario. Take this into account when teaching ya paps, ya mum, or Ponzi!

Oh while you’re reading, whats the link to the forums for Lockergnome? (It’s here!)

Since the 1990s, online courses have provided an opportunity for busy adults to continue their education by completing courses in the comfort of their own homes. However, this may not be the best solution for everyone. A researcher at the University of Missouri has found some students may find success in these types of courses more easily than others.

Shawna L. Strickland, clinical assistant professor in the MU School of Health Professions, studied the demographics and personality types of distance learners.

“Correlations between learning styles and success in distance education have shown to be inconclusive,” Strickland said. “However, one common theme reappears: the successful traits of a distance learner are similar to the successful traits of an adult learner in traditional educational settings.”

With a mere 30 percent of distance learners actually completing their courses, learning more about the characteristics of these students would help educators structure online courses to be as beneficial as possible. Considering the lack of institutional support and isolation involved in the nature of online courses, success in these courses requires a person that is determined and responsible, Strickland said.

“The success of distance learning is dependent on communication among the learner, his or her peers and the instructor,” Strickland said. “To encourage success in distance learning, it is necessary to evaluate each individual’s needs on a case-by-case basis.”

One trait that aids in distance learning is related to personality type. Strickland found those with quiet, introverted personalities are more likely to feel comfortable with online learning courses. Shy individuals have a tendency to be uninvolved in the typical classroom setting. Online courses allow them to complete work on their own with a degree of anonymity.

“Distance learning allows the learner to overcome traditional barriers to learning such as location, disabilities, time constraints and familial obligations,” Strickland said. “However, not every learner will be successful in a distance learning environment.”

The study — “Understanding Successful Characteristics of Adult Learners” — was published in the most recent edition of Respiratory Care Education Annual.

United Nations University has launched the UNU OpenCourseWare Portal. Initially, the UNU OpenCourseWare Portal offers open access to about a dozen courses developed by three of UNU’s Research and Training Centres and Programmes (RTC/Ps) and the Tokyo-based UNU Media Studio.

The intent of the UNU OpenCourseWare Portal is to make the course materials used by UNU RTC/Ps available on the Web, free of charge, to any user anywhere in the world. The initiative is not meant to replace degree-granting higher education or for-credit courses, but rather to provide content that can be used by educators for curriculum development, by students to augment their current learning resources, and by individuals for independent self-study.

The long-term goal of the UNU OpenCourseWare Portal is to promote the development, use and distribution of training materials under Creative Commons licenses. The initiative is part of the Global OpenCourseWare Consortium, a collaboration of more than 100 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world with a common mission of advancing education and empowering people worldwide through OpenCourseWare.

Expressing his support for this initiative, UNU Rector Konrad Osterwalder said, “This signifies our commitment to broadening access to high-quality educational materials and will contribute to the United Nations University’s core mission, which seeks to further the generation and sharing of knowledge in order to strengthen individual and institutional capacities to resolve pressing global problems.”

Resources available in the initial phase of the UNU OpenCourseWare Portal include six courses on electronic governance, developed by the UNU International Institute for Software Technology (UNU-IIST, Macao); five Ph.D. training courses on the economics of technical change, innovation and development, developed by the UNU Maastricht Economic and Social Research and Training Centre on Innovation and Technology (UNU-MERIT, the Netherlands); and a course on integrated water resources management developed by the UNU International Network on Water and Health (UNU-INWEH, Canada). Several more UNU system units are currently preparing course materials for inclusion in the portal later this year.

Project coordinator Brendan Barrett of the UNU Media Studio notes that UNU is committed to sharing the expertise developed through this initiative by offering support and guidance to universities in the developing world that are seeking to open up their courses.

Philipp Schmidt, who is responsible for the project at UNU-MERIT and who recently participated in drafting the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, said, “So far, the OpenCourseWare movement has focused on distributing content from the developed to developing countries. Through our partnership with institutions like the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, we are trying to reverse this trend and make locally created content more accessible.”

In the Asia-Pacific, UNU is collaborating with several Japanese universities, including Keio University, Waseda University, the University of the Ryukyus and the Tokyo Institute of Technology, to jointly run open courses on such important topics as climate change, sustainable energy and disaster management. Many of these universities are members of the Japan OpenCoursWare Consortium. UNU is very pleased to take this opportunity to announce its intention to officially join JOCW in March 2008.

Imagine you are taking an introductory biology course. You’re studying for an exam and realize it would be helpful to revisit the professor’s explanation of RNA interference. Fortunately for you, a digital recording of the lecture is online, but the 10-minute explanation you want is buried in a 90-minute lecture you don’t have time to watch.

A new lecture search engine developed at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) could help with this dilemma. Created by a team of researchers and students led by MIT associate professor Regina Barzilay and principal research scientist James Glass, the web-based technology allows users to search hundreds of MIT lectures for key topics.

"Our goal is to develop a speech and language technology that will help educators provide structure to these video recordings, so it’s easier for students to access the material," said Glass, who is head of CSAIL’s Spoken Language Systems Group.

More than 200 MIT lectures are currently available on the site. So far, most of the users are international students who access the lectures through MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative, which makes curriculum materials for most MIT courses available to anyone with Internet access. Although the lecture-browsing system is still in the early development stages, a recent announcement in OCW’s newsletter has drawn increased traffic to the site.

Barzilay and Glass expect the system will be most useful for OCW users and for MIT students who want to review lecture material. MIT World, a web site that provides video of significant MIT events such as lectures by speakers from MIT and around the world, is also participating in the project.

Many MIT professors record their lectures and post them online, but it’s difficult to search them for specific topics. Because there is no way to easily scan audio, as you can with printed text, "you end up watching the whole thing, and it’s hard to keep focused," said Barzilay, the Douglas T. Ross Career Development Associate Professor of Software Development in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

On the prototype web site, users can search lectures for any term they want and then play the relevant sections.

The lecture transcripts are created by speech recognition software. One major challenge is that the lectures usually contain many technical terms that might not be in the computer program’s vocabulary, so the researchers use textbooks, lecture notes and abstracts to identify key terms and feed them into the computer.

"These lectures can have a very specialized vocabulary," said Glass. "For example, in an algebra class, the professor might talk about Eigenvalues."

When properly adapted to a speaker and topic, the lecture-based speech recognizer gets about four out of five words correct, however most of the errors occur in words that are not critical to the lecture topic, i.e., not the key vocabulary terms that people would use to search.

Once the transcript is complete, a language processing program divides the text into sections by topic. Chunks of text, about 100 words each, are compared with each other using a mathematical formula that calculates the number of overlapping words between the text blocks. Each word is weighted so that repetition of key terms has more weight than less important words, and chunks with the most similar words are grouped into sections.

In the future, Barzilay and Glass hope to add a lecture summarization feature to the language processing system. They also want to get users more involved in the project, by incorporating a Wikipedia-like function that would let users correct errors in lecture transcripts and allow them to add lecture notes.

The researchers presented their project at the Interspeech 2007 conference in Antwerp, Belgium, in August. The project was originally funded by Microsoft through the iCampus program and is now funded by the National Science Foundation.

A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on November 7, 2007 (download PDF).

[Anne Trafton of MIT]

Are math problems bugging your kids" Tell them to talk back - using their hands. Psychologists at the University of Chicago report that gesturing can help kids add new and correct problem-solving strategies to their mathematical repertoires. What’s more, when given later instruction, kids who are told to gesture are more likely to succeed on math problems. A report on these findings appears in the November issue of JEP: General, which is published by the American Psychological Association (APA).

Researchers at the University of Chicago conducted two studies with a total of 176 children in late third and early fourth grade. Broaders and her colleagues randomly assigned the students to different manipulations - told to gesture, told not to gesture, and not told anything either way (control). All participants had been found to make mistakes in solving math problems.

In the studies’ baseline phase, students had to solve six math problems (such as 6+3+7= __ + 7) on a chalkboard and explain to an experimenter how they solved each problem. The researchers coded the children’s videotaped efforts, analyzing gestures and utterances that conveyed problem-solving strategies.

Children told to move their hands when explaining how they’d solve a problem were four times as likely (as kids given no instructions) to manually express correct new ways to solve problems. Even though they didn’t, in the end, give the right answer, their gestures revealed an implicit knowledge of mathematical ideas. For example, to indicate the need for the sides to be equal, children might sweep the palm first under a problem’s left side and then under its right side. Although those children weren’t ready to turn that implicit knowledge into action (at that point they solved problems incorrectly), a second study showed that gesturing set them up to benefit from subsequent instruction.

In that study, the researchers assessed how gesture vs. no-gesture students performed after subsequent instruction in how to solve the math problems. At post-test, children who’d been told to gesture about math problems and then had a lesson solved 1.5 times more problems correctly as did the children who’d been told not to gesture - a significant advantage.

The authors conclude, "Telling children to gesture encourages them to convey previously unexpressed, implicit ideas, which in turn makes them receptive to instruction that leads to learning." Gesturing appears to help children to produce new problem-solving strategies, which in turn gets them ready to learn. The authors speculate that gesturing may help kids notice aspects of the math problems that may be more easily grasped through gestural representation.

The findings extend previous research that body movement not only helps people to express things they may not be able to verbally articulate, but actually to think better. At the same time, gesturing offers a potentially powerful new way to augment the teaching of math. Strategies for math problems have focused on externalizing working memory, such as writing things down in certain ways. However, children often find it hard to recall and use those strategies. Gesturing may be more accessible, and help break through the roadblock.

Tags: math, education, mathematics

Tom Zurinskas of truespel writes:

Hi Chris,

Love your work and the way you do it. Here’s an idea that can be the next killer application. I’ve been working on it for 20 years.

The key to all invention and global intelligence is The Written Word. That means reading and writing are key to everything. Yet reading instruction in the USA is not doing so good. Kids are reading at 30% proficiency (70% are less than proficient). Teachers need help. The problem is the lack of a simple phonetic code to teach reading phonetically. This is proven.

Nobody in USA schools today teach reading using dictionary key phonetics s to show letter/sound relationships. Too user unfriendly. Nobody teaching reading uses the academic phonetic systems. In print media they actually bypass academic notation and use what I call "sight-spelling phonetics" that look like this "fun-NET-ticks." This is my name for it. Even the Voice of American uses it. This bypasses academia. Academia does not even have a name for this notation. This is The Big Gap in llliteracy that needs filling. And literacy, after food, shelter, and fun, is the most important thing in the world.

English is the de facto standard language of world. 95% of all scientific journals are in English. Initial phonetic notation started before the rise of English. Truespel recognizes this problem, and establishes a true English friendly, keyboard friendly phonetic notation. It can be learned by English literates in 15 minutes. It enables necessary "phonemic awareness" by establishing letter/sound correspondence in common with traditional spelling. Transition from truespel to traditional spelling is not a problem as demonstrated by IBM’s Writing to Read system in the ’80s. That method, before its time, absolutely proved that phonetics first is the way to go. In fact, the UK is switching this fall to "synthetic phonics" first for k-1, the same approach as truespel phonetics first for instruction.

Why is truespel capable of being a Killer Ap?

1. Throw out your dictionaries, with nonstandardized notation and get one with truespel phonetics.
2. Throw out your translation guides and get a truespel guide that uses English based phonetics.
3. Throw out your k-3 reading instruction manuals. Kids need letter/sound training first.
4. Throw out all current college phonetics instructions materials not using truespel
5. For computers you can actually type in a word as you hear it phonetically to find it.
6. For computers the database can be used for phonetic analysis as I’ve been doing in my books.
7. For computers, text to speech is enhanced (it is being applied actually to a chip right now).

Hope my life’s work, truespel, interests you and others. Truespel is free for everyone at truespel.com. The converter there changes URLs to truespel (It’s everywhere via interguru.com). The text converter there changes whole passages pasted into it to truespel. Teachers can use foreword and backward conversion creating their own lessons.

Truespel is the only "pronunciation guide spelling/writing system" for English ever created. I’m glad to work with anyone interested in using it.

Especially, if we can help the kids learn to read or learn English.

Tags: truespel, phoenetics, english

ResearchChannel, the consortium of world-class universities and research institutions that provides audiences with the latest research developments and scientific thinking on a broad range of vital, contemporary subjects, announced today that it has entered into a relationship with Google Video, the first video marketplace where users can watch, share, buy or rent a wide range of video content. This relationship will make ResearchChannel’s entire online video collection available on Google Video.

“Our relationship with Google Video helps us reach the public, sharing research developments, scientific advancements and technological innovations that could profoundly affect lives and society as a whole,” said ResearchChannel executive director Amy Philipson.

ResearchChannel also announced that Philip Inghelbrecht, Partner Development Manager for Google Video, will be a keynote speaker at the organization’s upcoming Annual Meeting in Chicago.

“We are pleased Philip Inghelbrecht will be joining us at this year’s meeting. We look forward to his address,” Philipson said.

Inghelbrecht speaks Monday, Dec. 4,, at 10:30 a.m. at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place, Room CC10D.

ResearchChannel programming includes interviews, lecture series and special demonstrations through which viewers learn about research discoveries and developments directly from the thought-leaders at the forefronts of their fields. Over 600 programs from ResearchChannel are now available on Google Video and nearly 3,000 will be available by early 2007. Programs now available at no charge can be found here. Samples of programs now available on Google Video include:

• Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Human Genomics: A New Guide for Medicine
• University of Washington’s Palestine, Iraq and U.S. Policy
• Stanford Medical Center’s Depression, Delirium & Dementia: What Should We Be Doing
• Pennsylvania State University’s A Conversation with Salman Rushdie

Tags: researchchannel, google video, philip inghelbrecht, salman rushdie, human genomics

For most people, Veterans’ Day means a day off from work or school. But for more than 26 million veterans - two million who have disabilities - November 11 is a day for reflection and often for those with disabilities, a day of concern about what the future holds.

Kent State University, in partnership with the Louis Stokes Cleveland Department of Veteran Affairs Medical Center, has created a program that offers veterans the opportunity to take control of their future by obtaining entirely online degrees suited to their educational, physical, and mental needs.

Created by Dr. Joseph Drew, Kent State professor of political science, the program uses special software and adaptive equipment to allow veterans who are paraplegic or quadriplegic complete their coursework successfully, with the added convenience of working from their homes or the hospital. This helps these veterans with disabilities overcome multiple challenges they face in attaining a college education and future career.

Tags: veteran, disabled veteran, kent state university, veteran education, paraplegic, quadriplegic

Groundbreaking recommendations calling on government, educators, and business’ to develop comprehensive strategies to use video games to strengthen U.S. education and workforce training will be released at a press briefing today, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) and Entertainment Software Association (ESA) announced.

The action plan identifies steps that the federal government, industry and education community can take to develop a comprehensive strategy to take advantage of the features of video games to address the increasing demand for high quality education and training, and commercialize educational games to help students and workers attain globally competitive skills in demand by employers.

“Many recent reports warning about declining U.S. competitiveness point to an urgent need to improve workforce skills and our system of education,” said Henry Kelly, FAS President. “Video games are engaging and can teach higher order skills, and they are especially attractive to today’s young digital natives who have grown up with digital technology. This plan outlines concrete actions we can take to put powerful tools for teaching and learning in the hands of educators and students at a time when the need for education improvement is great.”

America’s position in the world is increasingly dependent on its standing in the technological field. Summit participants agreed that features of video and computer games can make learning more effective and accessible by teaching players higher-order learning skills such as strategic thinking, interpretative analysis, problem solving, plan formulation and execution, and adaptation to rapid change - all skills very much in demand from present day employers.

“These findings communicate what we in the video game industry have known for years - that video games can make a significant contribution to educating our kids, enriching learning, and to preparing the workforce required for the high tech digital economy of today and tomorrow,” said Doug Lowenstein, president of the ESA, the trade group representing U.S. computer and video games. “Video games are more than just great entertainment, they’re having a positive impact on kids and adults alike in fields from education to health care, from the military to the workplace. We are grateful to the Federation of American Scientists for conducting this important study and look forward to working with them to implement the recommendations.”

The US spends about $700 billion on elementary through post-secondary education, and billions more on workforce training. Yet little is spent on R&D to improve the productivity and effectiveness of learning, and despite the potential of educational games, the digital technology has not been adopted by mainstream education or training industries. FAS calls for government research dollars to stimulate the experiments and developments needed to make breakthroughs in educational games and simulations, and to support meaningful evaluations of their efficacy.

The action plan is based on deliberations from the National Summit on Educational Games held on 25 October 2005 in Washington, D.C. The Summit brought together more than 100 experts to examine how to harness the power of video games for learning. Participants included executives from the video gaming industry and educational software publishers, researchers and experts on technology and pedagogy, game developers, representatives of user communities such as teachers and the U.S. military, R&D funders, and government policy makers. The Summit was sponsored by FAS, ESA, and the National Science Foundation. The report is believed to be the first time that U.S. business, education and government policy leaders have endorsed a comprehensive plan to address the future of American education and training.

Education can play a fundamental role in reducing poverty, but high-quality and up-to-date textbooks are often too expensive for most people in developing countries.

To make education more accessible, a professor in the University of Georgia Terry College of Business is spearheading an effort to produce free online textbooks using a modified version of the Wiki software that powers the Web site Wikipedia.
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The University of Leicester is spearheading research on how student learning can be enhanced by downloading audio onto personal MP3 players - known as “podcasting.” The University has also examined the use of rap in student podcasts.

The research seeks to develop a model for optimizing student learning - taking the focus away from content delivery.

At a workshop on June 2 at the University of Leicester, experts in the field from across the United Kingdom are investigating how the latest technologies can ensure that student learning is continuous, providing an alternative to constantly bringing them to campus.
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In an online survey of public attitudes conducted recently and released today by Harris Interactive, 8 out of 10 (82%) adults polled said they believe that “if tax dollars pay for scientific research, people should have free access to the results of the research on the Internet.”

In addition, six out of 10 (62%) adults believe that if these research results are easily available (for free and online), it will help speed up finding potential cures for diseases.

These findings from the Harris Poll, one of the longest running independent opinion polls in the United States, underscore broad agreement among diverse sectors of the American public on the benefits of free access to research. The original survey findings are available here.

“This expression of support from the American public demonstrates that the demand for public access has reached a critical juncture,” said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, an ATA founding member). “As scientists work to counter the Avian flu, develop energy alternatives, and grapple with climate change, public access to taxpayer-funded research is more important than ever. The public recognizes its stake in open sharing of research, and the Harris data gives voice to their stand.”

“The poll results show that research must be a collaborative, informed process between investigators and the public to be successful and increase trust,” said Robert Reinhard, community advisor to NIH’s AIDS vaccine trials. “Time and again the lesson is that improved knowledge in the community furthers the public health agenda.”

In another strong signal of broad support for public access, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) recently introduced the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 (S.2695). The bill requires federal agencies that fund over $100 million in annual external research to make electronic manuscripts of peer-reviewed journal articles stemming from their research publicly available via the Internet. ATA supports this measure and provides information and materials related to the legislation here.

The TorrentFreak writes:

More and more ISPs are limiting (throttling) BitTorrent traffic on their networks. By throttling BitTorrent traffic, the speed of BitTorrent downloads decreases, and high speed downloads are out of the question.

The list of ISPs that limit BitTorrent traffic - or plan to do so - is growing every day, and according to the BBC, the ‘bandwidth war’ has begun.

Are you not sure if your traffic is being throttled? Check the list of bad ISPs.

But there is a solution. Encrypting your torrents will prevent throttling ISPs from shaping your traffic. I will explain how to enable encryption in Azureus, µtorrent, and Bitcomet, the three most popular torrent clients.

Does your teenager have countless pinups of Alan Greenspan covering his or her bedroom walls and ceilings? Jeannine Aversa of the Associated Press (via The Seattle Post-Intelligencer) writes:

Don’t worry, Hilary Duff and Jesse McCartney. There could be less competition for your status as celebrity heartthrobs.

Instead of the big screen, a generation of middle schoolers could be setting their sights on the Federal Reserve board room.

Huh?

The central bank on Monday launched a Web page geared just for youngsters from 11 years of age to 14. Could there be an Alan Greenspan wannabe among them?

A cartoon of a smart-looking eagle - with really big talons - is tour guide of sorts for the site, which offers a dose of Fed history…

A recent study at UCLA found a fifty percent decline in computer science majors over the past four years. In an effort to spark a renewed interest in the computer programming field, Carnegie Mellon University has dreamed up an interesting idea. Daniel Lovering of the AP (via BusinessWeek) writes:

Carnegie Mellon University plans to incorporate characters and animation from the popular video game “The Sims” in its free educational software that strives to make computer programming more appealing to students.

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