Thursday, March 15, 2007

EPAC Online Chat on 'The Reflection Fad'. Just a reminder that EPAC Community of Practice on e-portfolios is holding an online chat this Friday (March 16), on the topic of 'The Reflection Fad'. Helen Chen, of Stanford's Centre for Innovations in Learning, will act as facilitator. The chat is scheduled for: 9 a.m. PDT/12 p.m. EDT/4 p.m. GMT. Contact Helen if you're not on the EPAC email list, and would like to receive instructions on how to participate. The impact of research on reflection and reflective practice in education, in recent years, is surely undeniable. The whole movement of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning has been strongly influenced by the work of figures such as Donald Schön and Jennifer Moon. Yet the very notion of reflection has come under attack from certain quarters: it has been accused of promoting pointless navel-gazing, and criticised for its alleged inability to provide hard evidence of educational benefits / outcomes. Should we be concerned? What do those of us who are actively engaged in promoting reflective practice think of the criticisms that have been made - do they hold any weight? How should we respond? How can we ensure that our engagement with this issue helps to promote, rather than prevent, dialogue between academics from different disciplinary cultures and backgrounds? The webchat will use a recent critical piece from the New York Times, "Upon Further Reflection, A Few Random Thoughts," as the basis for discussion. It's thought-provoking stuff. [EDUCAUSE CONNECT blogs] 12:08:14 PM      Google It!.

Wipe out a single memory. A single, specific memory has been wiped from the brains of rats, leaving other recollections intact, using a drug known to cause limited amnesia (U0126). Greg Quirk, a neurophysiologist from the Ponce School of Medicine in Puerto Rico, thinks t... [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News] 9:57:07 AM      Google It!.

Inkjet printers start cranking out microchips. Nanoident Technologies has opened a factory in Linz, Austria that produces organic semiconductors, which are chips made by spraying intricate patterns of specialized ink onto layers of foil and polymer. The factory costs a fraction of a traditiona... [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News] 9:56:16 AM      Google It!.

Personalized Medical Monitors. MIT researchers are developing algorithms to help doctors efficiently interpret EKG, EEG, and other ever-growing masses of medical data and quickly perceive patterns that might otherwise be buried.... [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News] 9:55:14 AM      Google It!.

Genetically Modified Maize Is Toxic [~] Greenpeace. gandracu writes "It appears that a variety of genetically modified maize produced by Monsanto is toxic for the liver and kidneys. What's worse, Monsanto knew about it and tried to conceal the facts in its own publications. Greenpeace fought in court to obtain the data and had it analyzed by a team of experts. MON863, the variety of GM maze in question, has been authorized for markets in the US, EU, Australia, Canada, China, Japan, Mexico, and the Philippines. Here are Greenpeace's brief on the study and their account of how the story was unearthed (both PDFs)."[Slashdot] 9:50:26 AM      Google It!.

Microsoft Agrees to Buy Maker of Voice-Recognition Software. The deal to buy Tellme Networks was said to be worth more than $800 million, making it Microsoft[base ']s biggest acquisition since 2002. By BLOOMBERG NEWS. [NYT > Technology] 12:11:50 AM      Google It!.