O'Really?

Learning can be an emotional process and we often don’t realise when we are actually learning. When you’re listening to an expert explain something well, it’s easy to mistake the speaker’s smooth delivery for your own understanding. You might feel like you’re learning, but actual learning is often hard work and feels uncomfortable. Join us to discuss actual learning vs. feeling of learning via a paper by Louis Deslauriers, Logan S. McCarty, Kelly Miller, Kristina Callaghan, and Greg Kestin at Harvard University here is the abstract:

We compared students’ self-reported perception of learning with their actual learning under controlled conditions in large-enrollment introductory college physics courses taught using 1) active instruction (following best practices in the discipline) and 2) passive instruction (lectures by experienced and highly rated instructors). Both groups received identical class content and handouts, students were randomly assigned, and the instructor made no effort to persuade students of the benefit of either method. Students in active classrooms learned more (as would be expected based on prior research), but their perception of learning, while positive, was lower than that of their peers in passive environments. This suggests that attempts to evaluate instruction based on students’ perceptions of learning could inadvertently promote inferior (passive) pedagogical methods. For instance, a superstar lecturer could create such a positive feeling of learning that students would choose those lectures over active learning. Most importantly, these results suggest that when students experience the increased cognitive effort associated with active learning, they initially take that effort to signify poorer learning. That disconnect may have a detrimental effect on students’ motivation, engagement, and ability to self-regulate their own learning. Although students can, on their own, discover the increased value of being actively engaged during a semester-long course, their learning may be impaired during the initial part of the course. We discuss strategies that instructors can use, early in the semester, to improve students’ response to being actively engaged in the classroom..

see [1]

Thanks to Uli Sattler and Andrea Schalk for highlighting the paper. All welcome. As usual we’ll be meeting on zoom, details are in the slack channel sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us.

References

1. Logan S. McCarty; Kelly Miller; Kristina Callaghan; Greg Kestin (2019) “Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America: 201821936. DOI:10.1073/PNAS.1821936116 PMC: 6765278 PMID: 31484770
2. Jill Barshay (2022) College students often don’t know when they’re learning: Harvard experiment reveals the psychological grip of lectures, The Hechinger Report

Wikipedia is mirror that reflects the world around it. Sometimes the reflections are accurate, other times they get distorted. [1] Either way, we can look at the data in Wikipedia to see which reflections are being looked at the most using powerful analytics tools that are part of the platform.

Two weeks ago, as part of Physiology Friday, I gave a talk examining how biographies of scientists are viewed in Wikipedia, using the crude measure of PageViews.

Melissa Highton from the University of Edinburgh also gave a talk about the Edinburgh Seven, changing the way stories are told and their Wikipedian in Residence scheme.

Our convenor, Andy Mabbett (normally found on a Brompton) gave a talk introducing Wikimedia since our reason for being there was to recruit and train new editors of Wikipedia.

Thanks to the Physiological Society for having us and Anisha Tailor for putting the program together.

References

1. Samoilenko, Anna; Yasseri, Taha (2014). “The distorted mirror of Wikipedia: a quantitative analysis of Wikipedia coverage of academics”. EPJ Data Science. Springer Publishing. 3 (1). arXiv:1310.8508 doi:10.1140/epjds20

2015 has been a busy year in the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester (@csmcr). Here is a brief summary of some key activities during 2015 that will be of interest to employers and alumni, with a quick look ahead at what is coming in 2016 including:

1. Industrial mentoring in software engineering
2. Industrial experience
3. Competitions & hackathons
4. Guest lectures
5. Careers fairs
6. Research
7. Alumni
8. Keeping in touch

Find out more in our December 2015 newsletter.

Hackathons have continued to gain popularity during 2015 here in the UK, with lots of help from Major League Hacking (mlh.io). There are so many events to choose from, it isn’t always obvious which are the best (and why). The Economist published an interesting piece arguing that Hackathons have entered the corporate mainstream and are no longer just for techies. (Hat tip, thanks Antonio Marino) Which sounds about right.

IMHO, generally hackathons are a good thing, especially for students, but there are some thorny issues around Intellectual Property and unpaid labour that many people brush under the carpet. So if you’re organising or attending a hackathon in 2016, make sure you are clear about who owns the IP.