Welcome

Welcome to Our Blog!

Hello Everyone,
This blog is designed to support the work we do in the 606 course. Every so often I will direct you here for additional information on course content, assignments and resources. Please post your own comments in response and/or provide feedback via email. I will be checking the blog often throughout our session, and I encourage you to do the same.

Please make sure that you can log in, read the entries, and post a response (to the "Socratic Method" post) ASAP. Once you have posted a comment, please remember to bookmark the blog and check back to see if anyone has answered your comment(s). If no one else does, it is quite likely that I will!

I have included examples of resources below. I encourage you to look in the traditional places (such as education journals) and in nontraditional places (surprise us!) to make connections you think will enrich our understanding. Please remember to include a proper bibliographic citation, and a brief description of the resource itself as well as its value to you and your colleagues.

I enjoyed meeting you all last night and I look forward to a productive session.

Have a great day,
David


SAMPLE RESOURCES


April 21, 2008 8:03 AM
Gregg said...
Although I do not have as much time for them now, i have always been interested in video games. In the past video games have been criticized for hurting children and the companies have responded with games targeted toward health benefits. There was a recent trend toward fitness games (i love DDR), but there is also a huge trend right now in games designed to elevate brain function. I could not find proof that these games work, but some evidence does seem convincing. A couple of university studies are cited in this article where one professor suggests certain video game for delaying the onset of Alzheimer's.

http://seniorjournal.com/NEWS/Alzheimers/2007/7-06-21-BestComputer.htm



April 22, 2008 11:51 AM
Monica said...
I found a useful website called “Brain Connection.” This site allows you to choose a topic—bilingual ed., child dev., education, learning, etc.—and it gives an article encompassing that particular topic. I chose the topic “stress in the classroom” because I think we covered this topic a bit in our last lecture. What Dr. E. Simon Hanson, a scientist, explains is how there are receptors in the brain that detect stress related hormones, like cortisol, when a person is placed in a stressful situation. The hippocampus, where memory forms, is where the receptors are located. This is why we remember where stressful situations take place so that we may avoid them in the future. This was our ancestors’ earlier survival strategy. In the classroom, a similar thing takes place, but it is difficult for us to gage how stressful a situation might be to an individual. However, Dr. Hanson does say that it’s the amount of control the individual feels they have in the “stressful” situation—talking in front of the class, reading out loud, answering a question, etc.--that will determine the amount of stress the individual will endure. As teachers, we should try to keep a healthy balance between having the opportunity to not respond and over respond in the challenges our students face in the classroom and out of the classroom.

http://www.brainconnection.com/topics/?main=fa/stress-interference3


April 22, 2008 3:32 PM
jessy said...
This week I read an article from Newsweek about the importance of teaching the arts and humanities to college students. The article pointed out how teaching the humanities to students helped to cultivate students’ “inner eyes” which help bring students into contact with issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and cross-cultural experience. The arts also have been helpful to instruct students in both freedom and community. When people put on a play or dance piece with one another, they must learn to cooperate and creat a community – A very good model for a good democracy in the political processes. However, studying the humanities should not just be limited to college courses, but it should be included in all of educatiion. The humanities can be used to understand the past and as a result created the present. The study of humanities is also necessary in bringing about realizations about different interpretiations of life and history. Most importantly the study of humanities in the early years helps children put things in the big picture. Children are inundated with disturbing news and facts about other cultures, wouldn’t it be nice if they were taught how to take a step back and look at issues from all sides? Yes, humanities should be taught in education.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/46439/page/1

April 22, 2008 4:33 PM
jeff said...
Teaching Tolerance: Learning can’t happen unless students feel safe.
Teachers see and hear intolerance on a daily basis. The goal, according to Rick Sparks (president of the McFarland Teachers Association), is to have students learn tolerance instead of hate. This is possible by teaching tolerance in the face of hate. According to Eric Heins, “Teachers must create a safe space in the classroom with an environment of tolerance, respect and acceptance, in order for learning to happen”. At Rancho Cucamonga High School student performers bring these issues to life by acting out common misunderstandings and intolerance scenarios. Teachers are also encouraged to act and look within themselves first in order to reflect positive social views. Heins also comments about the implications of merely teaching “tolerance”. He insists that we should be striving for teaching “acceptance” instead.
http://www.cta.org/media/publications/
educator/archives/2002/200202_feat_01.htm

April 22, 2008 5:56 PM
MikeG said...
I was reading an article on msnbc and it stated that playstation came out with a new game that offers a new way to test intelligence. I knew that some video games or at least video gaming does work for some good of the brain, but this game actually gives you a PQ score and compares your score to others online. The game is to awaken all the other individual functioning units of the brain, according to one professor of psychology. Whatever it means, I'm not sure if I want my scores to be compared to others online anyways. The game is a 3D maze textris type of arcade. It hasnt sold much, but I wouldnt mind trying it. However, wouldn't lack of playstation skills affect your scores...anyhow, there is video on this on the web page I found...http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11118684/
have fun!

April 22, 2008 8:39 PM
Brenda said...
Over the weekend, I had a rare opportunity to enjoy a movie. It had been years since I'd watched Dolores Claiborne and the issue of the daughter repressing the memories of her father's sexual abuse made me wonder if there are many cases like this. I remembered all of the court cases in the early nineties where people claimed they'd been sexually abused, but had somehow repressed these horrific experiences; Later, they admitted therapeutic practices had influenced their claims.
I found an article in Harvard Magazine which addresses this very issue. The researchers involved put “repressed memory” to the test of time. They reasoned that if dissociative amnesia (memory repression) were an innate capability of the brain— like depression, hallucinations, anxiety, and dementia—it would appear in written works throughout history. To date, they have found examples of this phenomena in some nineteenth-century works: best known were A Tale of Two Cities (1859), by Charles Dickens, in which Dr. Manette forgets that he is a physician after his incarceration in the Bastille, and Captains Courageous (1896), by Rudyard Kipling, in which “Penn,” a former minister, loses his memory after his family perishes in a flood and recalls that trauma only after being involved in a collision at sea. But the survey turned up no examples from pre-modern sources
( http://harvardmagazine.com/2008/01/repressed-memory.html).

The researchers concluded that the absence of any real mention of repressed memory instances in literature indicates it is not a neurological function of the brain, rather a "cultural-bound" syndrome rooted in the nineteenth century.

http://harvardmagazine.com/2008/01/repressed-memory.html

April 23, 2008 3:39 PM
laura said...
http://www.brainconnection.com/topics/?main=sci-news/grammar-music
"Speech Insights Sound Off in the Brain"
From Science News, Vol. 155, No. 5, January 30, 1999, p.68 © 1999 Science News

Researchers have homed in on the specific neural activity of the brain that supports the importance of intonation beyond what has previously been known. A recent study now shows that intonation goes beyond indicating that an utterance is a question, or an exclamation, for example. By monitoring brain-wave response, the study showed that intonation is essential to understanding the underlying grammar of speech, and is therefore more important to overall understanding of speech than previously believed