“TextFX is an AI experiment designed to help rappers, writers, and wordsmiths expand their process. It was created in collaboration with Lupe Fiasco, drawing inspiration from the lyrical and linguistic techniques he has developed throughout his career. TextFX consists of 10 tools, each is designed to explore creative possibilities with text and language.”
“The goal of the final product of the work, Data-Informed Decision Making: A Guide to Institutional Research in Independent Schools, is to show the possibilities and value institutional research offers and to provide tools for the intrepid institutional researchers who are looking to grow their own skills and to foster their community's Data Culture.”
“We really like this paper because the authors, Josh Cuevas and Bryan Dawson, compare learning styles and dual coding directly. On the surface the two are really similar. But, if you’ve been following our work for a while and/or engage with the literature, you know that the two are not the same and do not have the same learning outcomes… The experiment pits learning styles and dual coding against one another.”
“Innovation is easier with a relatively small team that has to make a decisive and clear concentrated bet and that doesn't tolerate any mediocre performers. That's it.”
“Strikingly, before about 1950 there were approximately zero articles, books, essays, treatises, odes, classes, encyclopedia entries, or anything of the sort dealing explicitly with the subject of “creativity.” …Despite the fact that many in the postwar American art world embraced self-expression and experimentation, it turns out the efforts to really get under the hood of something called creativity—which also encompassed ideas like “creative ability,” “the creative personality,” and “the creative process”—were primarily driven by a concern not for art per se but for inventiveness in science, technology, consumer products, and advertising.”
“I have been writing about economic diversity for almost two decades, since I discovered in 2004 how affluent the student body had become even at some public colleges, like the University of Michigan and the University of Virginia. And I have noticed a pattern. Although every university leader I interview claims to care about the issue, many of them fail to make it a priority. College admissions resembles a zero-sum game, and other campus constituencies have more influence than working-class and poor students.”
“Education has long been hailed as the path to upward mobility in America… But the income gains are far less than would be expected in a race-neutral labor market, a team of academic and nonprofit researchers found. A key reason, they conclude, is the persistence of occupational segregation.”
“If this season mirrors the last, we will have unusual patterns of respiratory viruses: RSV peaking in early November, Flu peaking in late November, Covid-19 peaking in late December. Nonetheless, expect illness. Last year, 1 in 4 students swabbed were positive for at least one virus in November. The severity of the threat depends on the virus and age bracket, as seen below in hospitalizations last year.”
“In theory, today’s sky-high college wage premium should mean a surge of young people onto college campuses, not the opposite. But as a measure of the true value of higher education, the college wage premium has one important limitation. It can tell you how much college graduates earn, but it doesn’t take into account how much they owe — or how much they spent on college in the first place.”
“Existing published research almost unanimously suggests that trigger warnings do not mitigate distress… In contrast to the claims of both advocates and critics, we found that trigger warnings did not seem to increase the avoidance of warned-of material… We found that trigger warnings reliably increased anticipatory anxiety about upcoming content, consistent with the concerns of critics… Last, we found that warnings had little to no effect on the comprehension of warned material.”
“Attitudes and approaches to the start of a lesson have progressed and tend to focus on recall and review. Barak Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction: Research Based Strategies That All Teachers Should Know (2012) have become well known and widely referenced in education. Among these principles, Rosenshine encourages teachers to “begin a lesson with a short review of previous learning.” Paul A. Kirschner has advised teachers, “before you start something new, review the old” (2017). Below are some examples of classroom tasks that can be used to promote a smooth and successful lesson starts. Each can be used to provide opportunities for regular retrieval practice:
“In recent years, Parsonnet’s team has found that the average body temperature in the U.S. has dropped from 98.6 F by about 0.05 F every decade since the 19th century, likely due to better health and living conditions that reduce inflammation. They found that today’s normal body temperature hovers closer to 97.9 F… The researchers analyzed 618,306 oral temperature measurements from adult outpatients seen at Stanford Health Care from 2008 to 2017. They also tracked the time of day it was taken, along with each patient’s age, sex, weight, height, body mass index, medications and health conditions… From the remaining data, they found that adults have normal temperatures ranging from 97.3 F to 98.2 F, with an overall average of 97.9 F.”
“As college classes start up this fall, instructors are handing out syllabi and pointing students to official platforms for turning in assignments and participating in class discussions. Meanwhile students are setting up unofficial online channels of their own, where they can ask questions of classmates, gripe about the professor and sometimes share homework and test answers.”
“Forget synonyms of words, find synonyms for paragraphs. I asked GPT-4 to Give me 20 vastly different variations on this [the paragraph above]. Make them as different as possible in style. label each style. Some of the more exciting examples of what it came up with:”
“If the last great tech wave—computers and the internet—was about broadcasting information, this new wave is all about doing. We are facing a step change in what’s possible for individual people to do, and at a previously unthinkable pace… These AIs will organize a retirement party and manage your diary, they will develop and execute business strategies, whilst designing new drugs to fight cancer.”
“Draftback does a few helpful things for Google Docs. Most importantly, it turns a document's revision history—which we normally have to click through piecemeal—into a video that can be played at controllable speeds. When we watch it, we can actually see a student's every keystroke on a document. Draftback also provides a detailed breakdown of the document's history that includes the overall number of revisions, the number of distinct writing sessions (which Draftback defines as moments when there wasn't more than a 10-minute gap between revisions), the time and duration of each of those writing sessions, and which user made them!”
Copyright
Every week I send out articles I encounter from around the web. Subject matter ranges from hard knowledge about teaching to research about creativity and cognitive science to stories from other industries that, by analogy, inform what we do as educators. This breadth helps us see our work in new ways.
Readers include teachers, school leaders, university overseers, conference organizers, think tank workers, startup founders, nonprofit leaders, and people who are simply interested in what’s happening in education. They say it helps them keep tabs on what matters most in the conversation surrounding schools, teaching, learning, and more.
– Peter Nilsson