Sorry for taking so long to respond. I did read and reread the SOPA law and issues and decided against it and am glad that they voted it down. However, I do feel that protection of copyright is extremely important anywhere and especially in the internet. Something does need to be done to protect intellectual property on the internet.

Thanks. I don’t want students to have the right answers (that’s easy enough to achieve), I want them to build up an experience by encountering difficulties and finding ways around them.

Now we know the problem we are facing. So what is the resolution? Why no one has been able to write a good article about “HOW” we should learn creatively?

Writing a recipe is against the principle to “break the rules”. But there is probably a way to develop our learning process and leaving all the possibilities opens. (I doubt that computers can help us on this).

(Sorry for my English).
Daniel, you are interesting as usual!

Thank you.

Thanks. Your comment is sound and could be addressed in one of several ways.

I assume that you are using the Java version? If so, can you submit this either as an issue on github:

https://github.com/lemire/javaewah

or on

http://code.google.com/p/javaewah/

If you are using the C++, please add this as an issue on

http://code.google.com/p/lemurbitmapindex/

Thank you very much for sharing your work on EWAH implementations. As far as I understand, bitmap indexes are expected to be and-ed or-ed, etc many times over. However, your implementation creates a new bitmap as the result of the operation. That would make it necessary to scan the indexes at least as many times as the number of logical predicates in a query. I was wondering whether this can be changed. Instead of returning a new bitmap you could return an EWAHIterator. And also accept and EWAHIterator as input. This would allow a single scan be done for the whole chain of logical operations. Could you please comment on this

Regards,
Kemal

Although I am a long retired physics prof I still follow the educational practices. You comments here are about the best I have seen. Thanks for sharing them. I am passing them on to my colleagues.

Don

http://sudburyschool.com/

Peter Gray has provided a series of 4 essays relating the ideas incorporated into the Sudbury Valley School Model to ancient (and more recent) hunter-gatherer learning regimes.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/200808/children-educate-themselves-iv-lessons-sudbury-valley

(The above link is to the fourth in the series on the importance of play in education- all four are well worth reading).

Peter Gray has some additional essays on the importance of play in the education of children on his blog. Good reading for those interested in the subject.

Two of my favorites are Dan Meyer: “I would so much rather my students understood the value of turning stupid ideas into reality than the entire sum of Algebra”
http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=4811
http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=5781

…and Shawn Cornally: “Students need to learn to self-assess, and this is only done by talking thoughtfully with someone who has more experience”
http://shawncornally.com/wordpress/?page_id=2200
(his TEDx talk is definitely worth watching!)

One thing US schools got right, in my
opinion, has been the relatively low time requirements. Under half the year in class, and then for ~7 hours. Learning in school moved at a glacial pace, but as a child I had plenty of time to explore my own interests.

Last year, there was a panel at the CHI conference on the topic of replication in the Human-Computer Interaction field.

See also: Graduate Student Perspectives on replication

You face a slightly different situation in university. The limitations you point out are real. Also, I would argue that class size is a huge limiting factor in university: how can professors possibly teach students effectively in classes of 100, 200, even 300? I suspect the answer is that they can’t and they actually aren’t supposed to—the system is designed to weed out or fail a percentage of the class.

I think there is a separation in philosophy between K–12 education and post-secondary education. The former is public and, for the most part, mandatory: we want all students to be as successful as possible. The latter, on the other hand, can be private, and students choose to attend it for their own reasons. So some people will argue that because a student has chosen to be in university, it is up to that student to learn and pay attention, regardless of how the professor teaches. I think this is an absurd argument, but I see it pretty often.

I suspect many professors, the same professors who grudgingly teach class only because it is a requirement of their employment and not because they enjoy educating young minds, see it this way. As the other Daniel points out in the first comment, the sharp line between university professors and K–12 teachers is that the former are not necessarily trained to teach. I am guessing this is an artifact of the way university evolved, with that “master–apprentice” relationship where a professor oversees a small group of intelligent, affluent students. That’s no longer the case, and if we are going to redesign post-secondary education, I think it’s worthwhile in looking at ways to redesign the process by which one goes from getting a doctorate to teaching a university class….

Thanks for for this valuable post. Most university teachers alas do not know how to teach effectively bc they have not been taught, and they do not leverage research results in pedagogy, cognition, learning, psychology, group dynamics, gender differences – this is a sad fact.

For the interested pedagogue who would like to draw upon best practices (from designing the course backwards with end goals in mind, to syllabus, handling of problem students, assignment rationale etc) I recommend:

1) McKeachie in his 11th edition (a classic) which focuses on techniques but has lots of references to empirical studies. http://www.amazon.com/McKeachies-Teaching-Tips-Strategies-University/dp/0618116494?tag=daniellemires-20

2) My favourite case study book is “What the best college teachers do” by Ken Bain: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/BAIBES.html – a longitudinal (15 years) exploration of exceptional college professors and what makes them ‘great’ (straight from the students’ mouth)

If people are interested, I incorporated lessons drawns in a first semester programming course (cs 151 at Colby College in 2004-2006, sadly not online anymore) and a science of networks course (CS249b at Wellesley College in 2008 at cs.wellesley.edu/~cs249b )

Have a great day
Daniel