Monthly Archives: June 2010

Your sense of touch shapes judgments

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Fascinating …

“The way people understand the world is through physical experiences. The first sense they develop is touch,” said study co-author Josh Ackerman, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology psychologist. As they grow up, those physical experiences shape how people conceptualize abstract, social experience, he said. “Later on, you can do what we did — trigger different physical experiences, and produce changes in people’s thoughts.”

Published June 24 in Science, the study is the latest addition to a booming field of embodied cognition, which over the last decade has scientifically eroded the notion that mind and body are distinctly separate.

Read the whole article here in Wired.

Recently found … 06/26/2010

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Recently found … 06/17/2010

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  • 21 Things for the 21st Century Educator

    The purpose of this resource is to provide ”Just in Time” training through an online interface for K-12 educators based on the National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers (NETS-T). These standards are the basic technology skills every educator should possess. In the process, educators will develop their own skills and discover what students need in order to meet the NETS for Students, as well as the new MMC Online Experience requirement.  Participants who fulfill all of the requirements have the opportunity to earn SBCEU’s. To learn more about the session, look under the tab “The 21 Things”. We hope you take advantage of this unique opportunity. 

    tags: professional development, technology, 21stcenturyskills, 21stcenturylearning

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Recently found … 06/08/2010

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  • Moon Zoo

    “The Moon is perhaps the most familiar object in the night sky, but it still has its mysteries. Following the excitement of the Apollo Moon landings in the 1960s and 1970s, a new flotilla of spacecraft is exploring the Earth’s nearest neighbour. The images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter which you’re invited to explore with Moon Zoo show the lunar surface in remarkable detail, including features as small as 50 cm (about one and a half feet) across.LRO is a remarkable spacecraft, the product of years of hard work by an enormous team of scientists and engineers who made the mission possible. It carries, amongst other instruments, an incredible camera, LROC. LROC is actually three cameras — two Narrow Angle Cameras which supply Moon Zoo images, and a Wide Angle Camera. Data from the first six months of the mission have been released by the LROC team through the Planetary Data System (PDS), and much more is coming…
    The aim of Moon Zoo is to provide detailed crater counts for as much of the Moon’s surface as possible. Unlike here on Earth where weather quickly erodes any signs of all but the most recent impacts, craters on the lunar surface stay almost until eternity. That means that the number of craters on a particular piece of the surface tells us how old it is. This technique is used all over the Solar System, but the Moon is particularly important because we have ground truth — samples brought back by the Apollo missions — which allow us to calibrate our estimates. Planetary scientists have always carried out this kind of analysis on large scales, but with your help and the fabulous LRO images then we should be able to uncover the finer details of the Moon’s history.
    Craters can tell us more than just the history of the lunar surface though. In particular, you’re asked in Moon Zoo to look for craters with boulders around the rim. Boulders are a sign that the impact was powerful enough that it excavated rock from beneath the regolith (the lunar ‘soil’) and so by keeping an eye out for these we can begin

    tags: crowdsourcing, astronomy, moon, nasa, science

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Effectiveness of Reading Comprehension Programs

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“To help close this research gap, Mathematica Policy Research conducted a study supported by the Institute of Education Sciences in the US Department of Education over the course of two school years evaluating the effectiveness of four supplemental reading comprehension programs in helping disadvantaged fifth graders improve their reading comprehension. The study used an experimental design, in which schools were randomly assigned to use an intervention or not …

The study found positive impacts for one of the four curricula. In particular, when teachers had one prior year of experience using the ReadAbout curriculum, students scored higher on a reading comprehension assessment. The score improvement is equivalent to moving from the 50th to the 59th percentile on a standardized test. The study found no improvement in reading comprehension scores for students using the other three curricula.”

Read the summary here.