Robots and Retention

Even the most conscientious student sometimes drifts off in class. Some literally fall asleep, but more often, their thoughts just carry them away from the classroom. Good teachers learn to observe the signs that indicate a student is zoning out and know how to get them to focus by recapturing their attention. But is it possible to get a student to stay focused when a teacher cannot respond in a personalized way? That is becoming a very practical concern when classroom sizes expand and as online courses remove the teacher from the classroom altogether.

A study proved robots can be programmed to regain students attention. Children who had the robot intervention performed better in answering question on what they heard than children in the control group.  I wrote about it for EducationalIT.

Of related interest: http://mashable.com/2012/07/15/human-robot/ and  http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/11/health/uncanny-valley-robots/index.html 

following the 9 yard trail

Today, when I looked up something else, I happened across several theories for the origin of the phrase "the whole 9 yards." If you would like to see them in a nutshell, check out the source for this graph http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/the-whole-whole-nine-yards-enchilida.html. It did leave out the suggestion that it was linked with wedding veils, as one of the writers quoted in  http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/504/whats-the-origin-of-the-whole-nine-yards/ declares. It also leaves out the idea that "A mediaeval test requiring the victim to walk nine paces over hot coals" which is mentioned in http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/the-whole-nine-yards.html However, that is rejected on the site because the presenter doesn't buy that a phrase from so long ago would only show up in print for the first time in 1962.

Major video fail

My blog on the video that spurred a storm of negative reviews, the trending hashtag #sciencegirlthing and a viral status that the EU Commission would have been happier without is posted here.  There is additional information, like the fact that the video cost 102,000 Euros to produce, and more links in the comments.

Punctuation, pronouns, and pet peeves

 From This Embarrasses You and I*Grammar Gaffes Invade the Office in an Age of Informal Email, Texting and Twitter"
"People get passionate about grammar," says Mr. Appleman, author of a book on business writing. They sure do, which is why this Wall Street Journal piece has garnered around 600 comments in just a few days. People chime in with their views on the LinkedIn groups I shared it on, as well
. 

Some of us mess up by accident when typos creep in or due to ignorance of the rules of grammar. One of the things that makes me cringe is seeing constructions like "whomsoever wrote this." In a way it's worse than using "who" where "whom" is warranted because the latter is accepted by some as a less formal, conversational style. The person who inserts the m where it is not needed, on the other hand, is trying to appear well-educated enough to know of the word "whom" while showing ignorance of the fact that it is not to be used as a subject pronoun. 

But the most common irritant is the misuse of apostrophes -- sprinkled over the letter s when just he plural form is needed and not the possessive -- or left in "it's" when the writer clearly means the possessive form rather than the contraction of "it is." 

If the school can't get to the museum

you can now bring the museum to the school with the Google Art Project.  Even if the school does have access to some art museums, the project gives them an expanded view with examples of art from around the globe, but no works by Picasso  -- see more on that in the comments.

Analytics and the job search

My latest post on analytics , How Analytics Can Help You Find That Dream Job, looks at a job site that uses algorithms to come up with compatible matches between employer and employee.

Technology and education blogs

I wrote about Coursera's innovation in the online education and the possibilities of automated readers for writing assessment