Blurts

I have kind of lost my enthusiasm for trying a large number of new apps and programs. I see this as a sign of maturity. After a significant amount of experimentation I have identified categories and made choices within categories. There is a cost in switching and there need to be significant benefits before a switch is worth the effort.

Here is a thought – if you do similar work to what I do, making an effort to identify categories I recognize may be as important as listing my “go to” apps. Here is an example – “storage and organization” of pdfs. Most folks probably have little need to purchase and learn systems for organizing a collection of pdfs, but I would bet most academics immediately recognize this challenge. I need to store and organize hundreds, maybe thousands, of pdfs. These are mostly journal articles I have downloaded as part of the research and writing process. I highlight and annotate these documents and then work from them in the writing that I do. You really need more than a file folder (virtual) into which you throw this stuff.

My original choice in this category was a product called YEP. This product allowed me to keep track of all of the pdfs on my computer. I actually preferred an older version that would copy a designated pdf into a YEP folder system rather than the newest approach which simply tracks all pdfs anywhere. From time to time I trash random pdfs I find floating around which I sometimes later regret. The only problem with this system was that it was specific to a given device. I had to decide where I would locate my resources – home, office, desktop, laptop.

I abandoned YEP to use Mendeley. The major advantage of Mendeley for me is cloud storage. Device-based versions of Mendeley synch through a common cloud account. This ends up being a great advantage I find outweighs other issues. I find that Mendeley has less than ideal highlighting/annotation tools. I also have issues with the pricing model. Simply put, there are not enough categories. I want more than free, but the jump to the lowest paid version is what I regard as substantial. I want more capacity, but not  the other capabilities that come with the upgrade are not of great value to me.

Anyway, this post was prompted because of an announcement that Elsevier (major journal publishing company) has made an offer to purchase Mendeley. A feature of Mendeley I do not use but which might make sense to a publishing company is the potential for a social connection. Think of it as a way to suggest “other scholars who read xxxxx also read yyyy”.

I do hope this is not another of those situations in which a service I use gets purchased and then is no longer available – I still have not forgiven Apple for purchasing and killing lala.

I came across a Time piece on best and worst study strategies (based on a summary developed by several educational psychologists). The one caution I would offer in considering this list is to carefully consider the role the strategy plays in learning.

For example, one of the worst study strategies according to the list is highlighting. Just to make my point in how recommendations such as this must be considered carefully, I would predict that few people ever highlight a newspaper, but many have highlighted a textbook. Is it that you do not care if you remember what you might discover in a newspaper? Perhaps, but it is also likely you do not highlight a newspaper because you intend to throw it away. Your textbook you probably intended to look at again before your examinations.

When I teach study strategies, I suggest to my students that certain activities may serve a mathemagenic function (generative) and also an external storage function. In other words, do you learn from the activity itself and/or does the record generated by the original activity serve a secondary function. Highlighting when you do not review is not particularly productive (I agree with the Time article). In fact, I propose to my students that highlighting may serve an anti-generative function if the content is never reviewed – we can damage learning by highlighting content we know is important but difficult to understand if we do so in place of struggling to understand. In other words, we replace an active cognitive behavior with a passive one.

Taking notes could work the same way (copying comments from a PowerPoint display) rather than thinking about what was said or attempting to paraphrase.

However, even a passive activity may serve a later need. We may highlight in order to make the review of 200 pages of text more efficient during the time frame immediately before an exam.  We may take notes without understanding providing ourselves a record to consider more carefully later.

So, it is important to carefully consider analyses as exemplified by the Times summary. It is possible to offer a good summary of research that misses the multiple roles a given behavior might serve. I think a better approach is to examine the situation as faced by the student. For example, if the instructor offers students the PowerPoint used to organize a presentation, then copying down the text into a notebook would be a waste of time. If the instructor does not, the passive act of recording information for later study might be useful.

Google wants to improve search skills and offers lesson plans, challenges, and instructional videos at this dedicated site.

Great piece from the Atlantic explaining the widening income and education gap.

Across the country, a Stanford University study found last year, the achievement gap between rich and poor students on standardized tests is 30 to 40 percent wider than it was a quarter-century ago. Because excellent students are more likely to grow rich, the authors argued, income inequality risks becoming more entrenched.

Ironically (because of some of the rhetoric in the past election), this article focuses on issues in Massachusetts.