DailyDirt: You Must Un-Learn What You Have Learned... Really?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

There is a lot of demand to improve the institutions of education in various ways. Creating an education system in the US seemingly costs a lot, and the results aren't as tangible (or as favorable) as everyone would like it to be. But in order to improve, perhaps we need a closer look at what actually needs to improve. Here are just a few links on how we learn.

• Using an EEG to study how people's brains react to making mistakes could help how to teach kids better or to identify why some kids are having a harder time. Giving an "A for effort" looks like it's a lot more effective than telling students they're smart. [url]
• The literacy program, Helping Early Literacy with Practice Strategies (HELPS), is freely available from a non-profit organization to help improve reading skills for elementary school students. If it doesn't actually work, at least it's cost effective.... [url]
• Psychologists are studying whether or not some students are visual learners or auditory learners. So far, there's no evidence to suggest that there are significantly different learning styles, but that mixing things up does keep student attention better. [url]
• To discover more interesting education-related content, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: brains, education, eeg, literacy, psychologists, teachers

Will A Psychologist Beat The Computer Science Geeks To The Netflix Prize?

from the moving-on-up dept

One of the key things that we expected would be useful when we created the Techdirt Insight Community, was the fact that our customers would be getting very different perspectives from the members of the community, based on an extremely diverse set of backgrounds, knowledge and experience. The idea was that while it's definitely useful to get the insight of someone who's gone through something similar (such as how to best position a product in a new market), sometimes you could gain a lot from someone who took a totally different view on it. It appears that same thing is happening in other areas as well. Wired has a fascinating story about how the various computer science/math geeks have had trouble advancing beyond a certain point in the Netflix challenge (the $1 million prize for improving Netflix's customer suggestion system by 10%), out of nowhere a management consultant with a psychology degree has been zooming up the charts using an entirely different method than the other leaders. The guy believes that all of the others have gotten into a bit of "groupthink," all using the same basic method -- while he's trying to apply some of his psychology background to the question in a way that he believes will work better in the long term. He hasn't yet passed the top teams, but he's been getting close. No matter how well he ends up doing in the end, it highlights, once again, the value of sometimes having someone from a totally different field take a look at the problem you're trying to solve.

Filed Under: computer scientists, diverse perspectives, netflix prize, psychologists
Companies: netflix, techdirt