The other day my colleague Nigel Robertson (from the uni’s centre for e-learning, "WCeL") sent through a link to this article: Ensuring student success – students are not to blame. The writer, Arshad Ahmad, begins by saying that [many] students may appear to be unqualified, unprepared and uninterested. But if you believe, as I do, […]
Continue readingYear: 2012
if meetings really lower iq…
… then there’s little hope for the world 🙂 I attend a lot of meetings; that’s the nature of my job. This morning the Dean came in & waved the front section of the NZ Herald under my nose. "Look," he said, "all those meetings are really bad for you." Scenting a way of getting […]
Continue readingvideos on creationism & evolution
A while back, I wrote about the way that the geology of the Grand Canyon has been misrepresented by ‘Young Earth’ creationists. Now here’s a good discussion of this from geologist Steve Newton: You may also remember the comments about evolution that were made by some of last year’s Miss USA contestants. A 2012 Darwin […]
Continue readingcute, creative caminalcules
This post was originally written for Talking Teaching, where it has the title "what is the caminalcule lab supposed to teach?" You can get some good ideas for posts from reading the search terms that bring people to your site 🙂 I was first introduced to the Caminalcules way back in the dim dark past […]
Continue readingin the rush to ‘e-learning’, are we losing sight of our goals?
One of the ‘big things’ in schools these days seems to be the increasing expansion of e-learning. I’ve written previously on one school’s decisionto require all its new students to have iPads, or similar tablet-style computers. At the time I worried about whether, in the rush to embrace new technology, the question of whether its […]
Continue readinganti-vaccination anti-science
At Respectful Insolence, Orac has a recent post discussing ‘anti-science’, and I thought of this when I finally got around to writing this piece (which Grant has kindly ‘left to me’, as it were!). Here’s how Orac defines the term ‘anti-science’: It’s an imperfect term for people who reject well-established science. To get a flavor […]
Continue readinghere be dragons
This post is also on Talking Teaching. Over on SciblogsNZ we had a bit of a discussion around the issue of science & belief systems. How far should scientists, & those who communicate about science, go in ‘pushing’ against strongly-held beliefs? (These could include creationism, but also beliefs about ‘alternative therapies’ such as homeopathy & […]
Continue readinghave universities degraded to teaching ‘only’ scientific knowledge?
The title for this post is taken from one of the search terms used by people visiting my ‘other’ blog (the one I share with Marcus & Fabiana), Talking Teaching. It caught my eye & I thought I’d use it as the basis of some musings (which are re-posted here). We’ll assume that this question […]
Continue readingchoosing for the future
This one’s really intended for students in year 11/12, & their teachers & parents – those of my readers who are in year 13 will already have worked out where they’d like to be & made their subject choices. In the weeks before the start of the A semester, my diary rapidly fills up with […]
Continue readingon your bike
I drive a car. I also ride a bike to work a couple of days a week (an 18km round trip each time). And this is not a post on the science of either, but a plea to some car drivers for a bit more consideration (& road space). Today I consider myself lucky to […]
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