Via somebody on Twitter, Copyblogger has a post titled “7 Bad Writing Habits You Learned in School,” which is, as you might guess, dedicated to provocatively contrarian advice about how to write, boldly challenging the received wisdom of English faculty: What is good writing? Ask an English teacher, and they’ll tell you good writing is… Continue reading Rule 1 of Writing: Try Not to Sound Like a Doofus
Category: Education
Lectures Are a Small Part of Learning
FriendFeed and Twitter are a terrific source of articles about how New Media technologies are Changing Everything. The latest example is Sebastian Paquet’s The Fate of the Incompetent Teacher in the YouTube Era, in which he declares that the recorded lectures of Salman Khan are the beginning of the end for bad teachers: Even assuming,… Continue reading Lectures Are a Small Part of Learning
Communicating Science in the 21st Century
My panel on “Communicating Science in the 21st Century” was last night at the Quantum to Cosmos Festival at the Perimeter Institute. I haven’t watched the video yet– Canadian telecommunications technology hates me, and I’m lucky to get a wireless connection to stay up for more than ten minutes– but if the video feeds I’ve… Continue reading Communicating Science in the 21st Century
DonorsChoose: Win Hewlett-Packard’s Money
This year’s DonorsChoose challenge is doing pretty well, with the total standing at a bit over $2,200. Thanks to all who have donated thus far. There’s a new development in this year’s challenge, which is that Hewlett-Packard is going to donate $200,000 to DonorsChoose, which will be divided among Social Media Challenge blogs in proportion… Continue reading DonorsChoose: Win Hewlett-Packard’s Money
Academic Poll: How Much Should Students Write?
I’ve been buried in lab grading for a lot of this week, but I’m finally down to the last few stragglers. The experience has me thinking a bit about what we’re doing here, and talking to people in other departments, and it seems like a good question for my wise and worldly readers. At the… Continue reading Academic Poll: How Much Should Students Write?
What Our CV’s Say About Our Profession
As mentioned on Twitter, I spent much of yesterday reading and rating a huge number of grant proposals. As such, I’ve looked at a lot of CV’s and resumes, and the contrast is striking. People who work in industry tend to use a resume format that is mostly just a list of jobs and degrees,… Continue reading What Our CV’s Say About Our Profession
Can Kids These Days Write?
Via Michael Nielsen on Twitter, a Wired article and a research group website for the Stanford Study of Writing. As the Wired piece reports, the group has done a large study of student writing, and finds that modern college students write more and are better writers than students in the past. This is a little… Continue reading Can Kids These Days Write?
A Brief History of Timekeeping
I gave a guest lecture this morning in a colleague’s sophomore seminar class about time. She’s having them look at time from a variety of perspectives, and they just finished reading Longitude, so she asked me to talk about the physics of clocks and the measurement of time. I’ve long considered using “A Brief History… Continue reading A Brief History of Timekeeping
Adventures in OA
The abbreviation here has a double meaning– both “Open Access” and “Operator Algebra.” In my Quantum Optics class yesterday, I was talking about how to describe “coherent states” in the photon number state formalism. Coherent states are the best quantum description of a classical light field– something like a laser, which behaves very much as… Continue reading Adventures in OA
Notes Toward a Master’s Thesis in Sociology of Higher Education
Somebody should look to see if there’s a correlation between the weather on the days of campus visits and the number of prospective students who apply/ enroll at a given school.