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Bruce Landon's Weblog for Students
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Wednesday, December 14, 2005

No More Internet Anonymity. [Slashdot]
8:21:18 PM    comment

Why does 'Freesound' succeed when so many learning object repositories fail?.

http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/

Bryan Alexander posted a link to The Freesound Project and it was interesting to me for a whole slew of reasons.

It was interesting first off because I have been using the site myself for the last few months; I am getting more into making music with digital audio tools (yes, yes, I will post something, someday, give me time to build up my courage) and so turned to Freesound to find new samples for a drum machine. And it works; not perfectly maybe, but you can definitely find new samples fairly easily, and it has a number of other social affordances ('users who downloaded this also...' and folksonomies) that lead you to related stuff you might like.

I was interesting also on a personal level as it was built as part of the 2005 International Computer Music Conference. ICMC is dear to my heart because way back in 1995, I was responsible for building the first website to support a ICMC conference, when it was hosted in Banff (the only remnant of which I can now find is this reference, the 'WayBack machine' not even going back that far, so safe to say Internet ancient history!)

And finally it's also of interest as a 'repository' of shareable remixable content, and one that would have to be judged relatively successful at that, with around 10,000 'objects' and almost a million downloads. So what makes it tick, why does it succeed when so many of our various 'learning object repository' projects are failing so miserably? Let's consider (more)....  

[EdTechPost] -- The comparison is a little strained in that typically Learning Object Repositories are multidiciplinary rather that just single diciplinary sonic clips but it speaks to the notion of a "critical mass" -- when do a resource have enough "stuff" to make it worth checking out given the high price in time of opening the door to check it out.  Interestingly it seems very few LOR's understand the value of strategic promotional advertizing.  But even then there is no effective way to "see how an object works in practice" since pedagogical effectiveness is without a portable metric for evaluation.  So with small "collections" of alpha or maybe beta learning objects there is little incentive to play with the respoitory haystack searching for the needle.  Unlike the freesournd approach the learning object approach might be better addressed by intelligently tagging the users than overtagging the objects.  The appreciation of a learning object is much less developed in most of us than appreciating a sound clip so the value of a learning object is much more opaque.  The approach the U of Phoenix has taken is to focus their repository efforts specifically on the reusable objects for parts of the curriculum that are difficult for teaching/learning as opposed to the somewhat random approach adopted by repositories looking for any content.  I think there is considerable value in repositories developing a user base around more of a teaching problem focus because it would help with acquiring a critical mass of learning object solutions and might even evolve into supporting differential effectiveness measures of learning outcomes.  But even with only "it worked well for me in my class" type of supporting data there would be considerable value in a teaching problem focused learning object repository because it would more quickly reach "critical mass" of objects to make it worth the effort involved in searching. -- BL

7:03:19 PM    comment

Found: Protein responsible for shaping the nervous system.

A team of researchers led by The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), the University of Toronto (U of T) and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory have discovered a protein that is responsible for shaping the nervous system. This research was made possible with the support of a $1.5-million NeuroScience Canada Brain Repair ProgramTM team grant that enabled scientists from across Canada to work together and fast track their research.

[Science Blog -]
6:19:12 PM    comment

High IQ: Not as good for you as you thought.

IQ has been the subject of hundreds, if not thousands of research studies. Scholars have studied the link between IQ and race, gender, socioeconomic status, even music. Discussions about the relationship between IQ and race and the heritability of IQ (perhaps most notably Steven Jay Gould’s Mismeasure of Man) often rise to a fever pitch. Yet for all the interest in the study of IQ, there has been comparatively little research on other influences on performance in school.

Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman estimate that for every ten articles on intelligence and academic achievement, there has been fewer than one about self-discipline. Even so, the small body of research on self-discipline suggests that it has a significant impact on achievement. Walter Mischel and colleagues found in the 1980s that 4-year-olds’ ability to delay gratification (for example, to wait a few minutes for two cookies instead of taking one cookie right away) was predictive of academic achievement a decade later. Others have found links between personality and college GPA, and self-discipline and Phi Beta Kappa awards. Still, most research on self-discipline has achieved inconsistent results, possibly due to the difficulty of measuring self-discipline. Could a more robust measure of self-discipline demonstrate that it’s more relevant to academic performance than IQ?

To address this question, Duckworth and Seligman conducted a two-year study of eighth graders, combining several measures of self-discipline for a more reliable measure, and also assessing IQ, achievement test scores, grades, and several other measures of academic performance. Using this better measure of self-discipline, they found that self-discipline was a significantly better predictor of academic performance 7 months later than IQ.

How did they arrive at this result? They studied a group of 8th-graders at the beginning of the school year. They used five different measures of self-discipline: the Eysenck Junior Impulsiveness scale (a 23-question survey about impulsive behavior), the Brief Self-Control Scale (13 questions measuring thoughts, emotions, impulses, and performance), two questionnaires in which parents and teachers rated the student’s self-discipline, and a version of Mischel’s delay of gratification task. Students were given an envelope containing $1, and were told they could spend it immediately or bring it back in a week for a $2 reward. The students were also given an IQ test (OLSAT7, level G).

At the end of the school year, students were surveyed again and several measures of academic performance were taken. The data included final GPA, a spring achievement test, whether they had been admitted to the high school of their choice, and number of hours they spent on homework. All except two measures correlated more strongly to self-discipline than to IQ. Scores on spring achievement tests were correlated both to self-discipline and IQ, but there wasn’t a significant difference. Duckworth and Seligman suggest that this could be partially due to the fact that achievement tests are similar in format to IQ tests. The other area where there was no significant difference was in school absenses.

Most impressive was the whopping .67 correlation between self-discipline and final GPA, compared to a .32 correlation for IQ. This graph dramatically shows the difference between the two measures:

Both IQ and self-discipline are correlated with GPA, but self-discipline is a much more important contributor: those with low self-discipline have substantially lower grades than those with low IQs, and high-discipline students have much better grades than high-IQ students. Even after adjusting for the student’s grades during the first marking period of the year, students with higher self-discipline still had higher grades at the end of the year. The same could not be said for IQ. Further, the study found no correlation between IQ and self-discipline — these two traits varied independently.

This is not to say this experiment will end the debate on IQ and heredity. The study says nothing about whether self-discipline is heritable. Further, the impact of self-discipline might be different for different populations; this study covered only eighth graders in a relatively privileged school. Perhaps self-discipline has a smaller impact at other ages, or in more diverse populations (though the study group was quite ethnically diverse — 52% White, 31% Black, 12% Asian, and 4% Latino). Perhaps the most important question which remains is how best to teach children self-discipline — or whether it can be taught at all.

Duckworth, A.L., & Seligman, M.E.P. (2005). Self-discipline outdoes IQ in predicting academic performance of adolescents. Psychological Science, 16(12), 939-944.





[Cognitive Daily]
9:25:27 AM    comment

Linux Boots on Treo 650. [Slashdot]
9:15:49 AM    comment

Structured Blogging is official.

It's been announced, so now Structured Blogging 1.0(pre-X) is official!

Doing a Technorati search for structuredblogging.org seems to be the easiest way to see what people are saying at the moment. I'll try to respond to some of the comments here.

(But first, I should mention again the other developers working on the project - the people who wrote most of the code: Kimbro Staken [MCD libraries, WP plugin, Amazon/etc lookups], Chad Everett [MT plugin] and Shelley Powers [outputthis.org]. And of course Marc Senasac [UI design] and Marc Canter [microcontent mastermind].)

- - -

Rohit Khare of CommerceNet is happy SB now uses microformats. The plugin still does the XML-inside- thing, but it's no longer the only way of getting access to the structured data. It's up to developers to choose: some will prefer to read the XML chunk for the convenience, or to get as much depth as possible from a structured blog entry, while others will go for maximum reach by looking at the microformatted data.

That said, the MCD system is fairly flexible, so if you want to make an forms-style application that generates a particular format of XML, you may be able to define an MCD file to do it for you... which you can then send off to other people using the SB plugin, who will make posts using the MCD, which you then aggregate. In that case microformats, or anyone else's standard, aren't relevant - you just want a convenient way to publish some XML which you or your company cares about. If it turns into something other people want to work with, then you can define a microformat for it, and change the MCD to support that.

- - -

Dan Farber @ ZDNet: Structured blogging initiative taking off.

Frank Gruber was there.

Both of these pieces mention the invalid XHTML / RSS we're generating. Oops! The XHTML is a known problem; Danny Ayers noticed it a week or so ago and I did some work to get the then-current code to generate XHTML that was valid XML, but the validator is a bit pickier and it complains loudly when you put any unknown elements in the document, even if they're inside tags. IMHO this is a problem with the validator (check this out: Line 78 column 190: there is no attribute "xmlns"!), but maybe I just don't know my XHTML well enough, so if anyone can enlighten me as to how to get the validator to not complain about what seems to me to be properly namespaced XML, please leave a comment here.

I see that we've slipped a little since that point and are now publishing XHTML that is invalid XML as well. I'll make sure that gets fixed.

I wasn't aware of the invalid RSS, but it looks like that will be pretty trivial to fix the real issues there - we'll just skip generating the element unless the file size and file type are properly filled out (in future: detected) and make all the URLs absolute. The warning about the is more troublesome, but we'll sort something out.

- - -

Thomas van der Wal: "it may be one of the brightest ideas of 2005". Wow!

- - -

Jeff Clavier describes the launch in some detail.

- - -

Ross Mayfield's personal take is this bottom-up approach won't degrade into Semantic Fuzz, but that not all users will want to spend the time to add all the metadata. Ross: PubSub has found so far that the users don't really care about the metadata, they just want to be able to publish reviews and events and have them look different from normal posts. The new SB plugin has an improved facility for looking up metadata on books, movies etc, which may be enough to get users to click on 'review' and 'movie' before writing a movie review... we'll see; I bet they'll be keeping a close eye on the new content being published!

- - -

Rod Boothby wants to get involved. Rod, what you want to do is download one of the plugins and take a look at the MCD files that define the structured data. You might be able to leverage one of the plugins to collect some of the data you want, and to put it into the XML format you want.

- - -

Bernard Moon from GoingOn mentions the announcement. The GoingOn Network will include structured publishing using the Structured Blogging system, I think. GoingOn sponsored the UI development... although I had to tone it down quite a bit to make it fit in to WP and MT :-)

- - -

Yiibu is in... we've been having a good conversation about how this all fits together with their concept of 'stacking' smaller bits of content together to create meaningful stuff.

- - -

Marc-Olivier Peyer à pointblog.com: "l'annonce qu'ils ont faite hier soir à San Francisco est d'une importance capitale pour l'avenir du blog".

- - -

Final note: v1.0pre9 has been built and sent off, so it should be up on the site when the New Yorkers get up in the morning :-)

Comment

[Second p0st]
9:07:42 AM    comment

Growth factor protects brain against damage from stroke.

A naturally occurring growth factor called neuregulin-1 protects brain cells from damage resulting from stroke, according to a new animal study. Stroke, the third leading cause of death in adults in the United States, occurs when blood flow to the brain is interrupted. Deprived of oxygen, brain cells die within minutes, causing inflammation and further damage to tissue surrounding the site where blood flow is obstructed.

[Science Blog -]
8:56:49 AM    comment

Google Adds Widgets to Homepage. [Slashdot] the move to browser centric from desktop centric --BL

8:55:10 AM    comment

EU Approves Data Retention. [Slashdot]
8:52:28 AM    comment

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