Wallenberg Blog

From The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching listserv:

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. ­ For as long as anyone can remember, introductory physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was taught in a vast windowless amphitheater known by its number, 26-100. Squeezed into the rows of hard, folding wooden seats, as many as 300 freshmen anxiously took notes while the professor covered multiple blackboards with mathematical formulas and explained the principles of Newtonian mechanics and electromagnetism. But now, with physicists across the country pushing for universities to do a better job of teaching science, M.I.T. has made a striking change.

The traditional 50-minute lecture was geared more toward physics majors, said Eric Mazur, a physicist at Harvard who is a pioneer of the new approach, and whose work has influenced the change at M.I.T. “The people who wanted to understand,” Professor Mazur said, “had the discipline, the urge, to sit down afterwards and say, ‘Let me figure this out.’ ” But for the majority, he said, a different approach is needed. “Just as you can’t become a marathon runner by watching marathons on TV,” Professor Mazur said, “likewise for science, you have to go through the thought processes of doing science and not just watch your instructor do it.”

Another proponent of the new approach is Carl Wieman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who directs a science education initiative at the University of British Columbia. In an article in the education journal Change last year, Dr. Wieman noted that the human brain “can hold a maximum of about seven different items in its short-term working memory and can process no more than about four ideas at once.” The article is in The New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/13/us/13physics.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

In a recent lunch briefing to the community on the fourth floor of Wallenberg Hall, faculty, researchers, students, and staff gathered together to brainstorm around a taxonomy of spatial terms, and discuss how these concepts help us infer meaning from imagery and the environment.

In the Spatial History Lab, there’s a lot of talk about how maps and visualizations help us discover new things and teach old ones. But, these conversations are rarely accompanied by clear explanations of what spatial patterns are meaningful and why.

The Spatial History Lab developing a resource -- which will hopefully someday become a beautiful book – that offers an interdisciplinary audience the lexicon to describe how and what they see. This workshop provided some context for the various whiteboard activities created to generate spatial terms and “evidence” of them.

For more information about the Spatial History Lab, please visit: http://www.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/

This Year's Freshmen at 4-Year Colleges: A Statistical Profile

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i21/freshmen_trends.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Dr. Vilma Luoma-aho is a lecturer and researcher of Organizational Communication and PR at the Department of Communication, University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and Adjunct Professor at University of Vaasa, Finland. At H-Star at Stanford, she is a visiting scholar at the Innovation Journalism program at Wallenberg Hall. Her research project exploring the question "Can an innovation have a reputation?" drew an interested interdisciplinary group from the fourth floor community in Wallenberg Hall.

Dr. Luoma-aho's research project is guided by the following questions:

From George Siemens' eLearning Resources and News (2009.01.30):

I view technology as being imbued with ideology. Technology is not neutral. A learning management system reflects a certain view on the part of designers. Second Life does as well. Social bookmarking tools also. (see the trend?). Technology is frequently thought of as "whatever has happened in the last several decades" (or, as Alan Kay says "Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born"). Obviously, technology includes books, paper, pencils, even institutions. Which is why I found this discussion on the campus interesting:

First proposition: the campus, like the computer, is a technology, an instructional technology.

Second proposition: there are many students for whom the lecture hall and notetaking is a poor instructional technology, and who do not learn much in the conventional classroom Third proposition: the campus is a very expensive instructional technology.

http://innovateblog.wordpress.com/2009/01/23/the-campus-the-old-imperialism/
The Campus: The Old Imperialism?

An interesting perspective on classroom furniture...

Keeping Students on the Ball
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i21/21a00503.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

By STEVEN BUSHONG

John Kilbourne has seen the future of classroom seating, and it is round.

Last semester Mr. Kilbourne, a professor of movement science at Grand Valley State University, gave his students the option of sitting on what are ironically called "stability balls." What he found was that the bouncy seats increased students' enthusiasm and focus.