[L’n’ T]

Today I found a couple of very interesting texts by Clay Shirky… The first one is Ontology is Overrated — Categories, Links, and Tags, the second The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview. I should comment on them, but I have not been able to digest them yet, so go and take a look for yourselves.

Whenever you do something in the classroom with a performance increase in mind, you should try to measure its effect. Measuring is hard. Measuring the effectiveness of teaching and learning is very hard. But please, don’t you ever take seriously anyone claiming that something is working because grades have improved.
Case in point:
Today’s high school students […]

Sometimes (most times, actually), when we complain about how everybody does things the wrong way, we forget there usually a reason for things to be the way they are.
So we all complain (well, at least I do) that the way maths are taught is basically memoristical, so students can just memorize some data and algorithms […]