There's this outfit in the UK called Learning Without Frontiers: Learning, Innovation & Society. Learning Without Frontiers "is a global platform for disruptive thinkers, innovators and practitioners to share knowledge, ideas and experiences about new learning." They had a number of notable speakers: Ray Kurzwiel, Sir Ken Robinson, Noam Chomsky just to name a few. Chomsky spoke yesterday on technology. The following is an excerpt from a Wired article by Katie Scott. My thanks to DML central for alerting me to this article. "The MIT professor stated that technology can be compared to a hammer. "It doesn't care if you use it to build a house or crush someone's skull. The Web is valuable if you know what you're looking for, if you have a framework of understanding. But you always have to be willing to question whether your framework is the right one." He compared simply browsing the web for information to pointing a student at the library knowing they had no idea what they were looking for. "Exploring the internet can just be picking up random factoids that don't mean anything", he said. "The person who won the Nobel prize in biology isn't the person who read the most journals. It was the person who knew what to look for," he added." I want to be clear how this helped me articulate my hopes for the Teacher-training program I have been involved in these past six months. The JTEs (Japanese English Teachers) that came here to our International Programs at UC Irvine Extension might have expected to attend just a bunch of lectures. But that was not my goal. My goal was not to fill their heads with static knowledge- "reading the most journals" as Chomsky pointed out The goal was to help them know what to do when they went back to Japan...when they go back into the classroom.

http://www.unitedwayoc.org/blog/?p=1542

Roger

This tool is amazing. Students and teachers can type in any word and they get the phonetic transcription. So now they don't have to memorize the IPA system. http://www.phonetizer.com/

Roger

You may have heard this story about an elephant:

A king brings six men into a dark building. They cannot see anything. The king says to them, "I have bought this animal from the wild lands to the East. It is called an elephant." "What is an elephant?" the men ask. The king says, "Feel the elephant and describe it to me." The man who feels a leg says the elephant is like a pillar, the one who feels the tail says the elephant is like a rope, the one who feels the trunk says the elephant is like a tree branch, the one who feels the ear says the elephant is like a hand fan, the one who feels the belly says the elephant is like a wall, and the one who feels the tusk says the elephant is like a solid pipe. "You are all correct", says the king, "You are each feeling just a part of the elephant."

The story of the elephant reminds me of the different view of design that people of different backgrounds, education, and experience have. A visual designer approaches UX design from one point of view, the interaction designer from another, and the programmer from yet another. It can be helpful to understand and even experience the part of the elephant that others are experiencing.

I'm a psychologist by training and education. So the part of the elephant I experience applies what we know about people and how we apply that to UX design. I take research and knowledge about the brain, the visual system, memory, and motivation and extrapolate UX design principles from that.

This article is a snapshot of the psychologist's view of the elephant.

"The Psychologist’s View of UX Design"

In the article: Teaching is Mobility...and Mirth, Renshaw compared his own style of teaching with a respected colleague of his in light of student evaluations. He found that he shared three positive things in common with his colleague [numbers added by me]: 1. Strong awareness of their subject matter 2. The ability to adapt and explain things in different ways for different learners
3. A good sense of humour
This leads us to a wonderful notion that there is no 'ideal' personality attuned to teaching. I have often thought this true and have shared this idea in my introductory course of our TEFL teacher-training programs. Be yourself, I said. We won't try to force you into an 'ideal' personality type ideal for teaching. Each type has its own sets of strengths and challenges. There is one niggling detail that still bothers me though. The subjects taught by the two differently-styled teachers in the article are also quite different: Literacy and Numeracy. Is there a teaching 'style' better suited to each of these content areas? Can you guess which teacher-style taught Literacy?

The link to Renshaw's article is here below: http://jasonrenshaw.typepad.com/jason_renshaws_web_log/2011/11/teaching-is-mo...