DavidKHardman

Review of Academically adrift: Limited learning on college campuses , by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. 2011, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Whatever subject or subjects students elect to study at university, it is generally expected that education at this level will foster an ability to think critically . Critical thinking covers a range of abilities, such as the evaluation of evidence in relation to theories, assessment of the internal coherence of arguments, the... Read Full Story

1.31 am, 21st April 2010 This afternoon, looking out of the window of my house, I noticed that the sun was strong in the sky but that there were also some clear white clouds visible against the blue background.  As a keen amateur photographer I made a mental note that a strong sunset was likely and set off to a location that provides a good view across the London skyline. That location is close to Greenwich Park and Blackheath Common, a patch off grassland just beyond Wellington Grove and... Read Full Story

The following message was sent today from the Coordinating Committee of UCU at London Metropolitan University to all members: The Board of Governors finally announced resignations at their meeting yesterday. The Chair of the Governors has resigned with effect by end of March. The other lay governors specifically associated with the Audit Sub-Committee (effectively we understand virtually all the lay governors) will resign in the summer. We assume an entirely new Audit Committee will be in... Read Full Story

A bulletin from the Psychonomics Society 50th annual meeting in Boston, MA. The Psychonomics Society conference is pretty big and covers many topics relating to human and animal cognition. Almost every year something fairly novel catches my eye. This year, it was a talk by Michael Schober and Michelle Levine (presented by the former), concerning the relationship between onstage coordination and improvisational quality in jazz musicians. Now, this brief account is necessarily sketchy as I didn... Read Full Story

Jane Hart, a social learning consultant, compiles an annual list of popular learning technologies , as voted for by other learning professionals. The top 100 tools for 2008 can be found here . My own top 10 for 2009 (below) is slightly embarrassing because of the emphasis on Google products.  I have in fact made some use of the Zoho suite of applications, but there is a terrific level of convenience in having iGoogle set up as my web page, with the other Google products embedded within, many... Read Full Story

This posting is for the benefit of the students taking my class  "Judgment and Decision Making". I set the exercise of measuring your utility function for a certain range of monetary values, using two different methods: The Certainty Equivalence Method and the Probability Equivalence Method. Of key interest is whether the two functions look the same when plotted graphically. I did this exercise myself and the results are shown above. When you do this, I'd like you to insert the graphs into... Read Full Story

Review: The greatest show on earth: The evidence for evolution , by Richard Dawkins. London: Bantam Press. 2009. In The God delusion Richard Dawkins stated that he was not writing with the intent of converting committed theists but, rather, with the aim of influencing those who were undecided between belief and atheism. After reading The greatest show on earth , I imagine that Dawkins is likewise trying to convince the undecided rather than the hard-core creationists. On the opening page he... Read Full Story

On 9th September, Derren Brown appeared to predict the results of the UK National Lottery on Channel 4 television. Two days later, he purported to explain this in terms of the "wisdom of crowds". He referred to a study reported by Francis Galton in 1907, in which many people attempted to guess the weight of an ox at a country fair. Although many different estimates were made, the average of these was staggeringly close to the true weight. Brown claimed to have averaged the guesses of a panel... Read Full Story

The online petition (link below) for an official apology over the treatment of Alan Turing has produced the following response from Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Cutting and pasting from the original email led to a few formatting errors, which I've tried to fix, but some may remain. Understandably, the message focuses on Turing's codebreaking work during the second world war, but many of us also celebrate his contributions to cognitive science. DH... Read Full Story

Large classrooms now often have not one, but two, screens onto which slide shows are presented. The idea (presumably) is that people on the left hand side of the room will find it easier to look at the left hand screen and those on the right will look at the right hand screen. But before implementing this design, did anyone do any research into how audience and speakers will actually behave? Whilst at a conference yesterday, I noticed that the speaker spent the whole time standing to the left... Read Full Story