Science

False Dichotomies (Presentation Slides, German)

2019-10-04 | Reading time: 1 minute

Slides (in German) about false dichotomies (a rhetorical fallacy), expanded to cover false moral dichotomies (going back to Haidt and referring Boghossian's and Lindsay's book «How to have impossible conversations»).
[show the article]

The Right Kind of Wrong. Or: Using bad practice just because it’s industry standard.

2019-07-30 | Reading time: 1 minute

What do you do when something is "industry standard", but clearly inferior. Yet, you get into trouble when you do it better, because people don't recognize it as better?
[show the article]

The best predictor for future behavior is past behavior. — Or: What I wouldn’t give for a good Learning Analytics System

2019-07-30 | Reading time: 3 minutes

It's impressive what you can do with the information about students performance way before they take their final exam. If there just were a good learning analytics system to ... you know, actually use the information. Of course, that would require that student performance was actually something most universities did care about.
[show the article]

Grading Paper Exams with an iPad

2019-07-28 | Reading time: 1 minute

Turns out you can grade paper exams pretty well with an iPad.
[show the article]

Stupid Software: Excel

2019-07-16 | Reading time: 1 minute

Apparently Excel likes my students, it changes the scope of formulas without warning, resulting in very different results.
[show the article]

Regulating citizens to the mean (with an SD of 0)

2019-06-05 | Reading time: 5 minutes

There are currently a few ... interesting developments that cast a deep shadow on future creativity. At least, that how it appears to me. It’s not that the situation is a problem now, but there is a trend, and I don’t like where it leads.
[show the article]

Necrophilic Teaching

2019-06-05 | Reading time: 1 minute

Teaching dead bodies.
[show the article]

Great Introduction to R (esp when you come from SPSS or the like)

2019-02-05 | Reading time: Less than a minute

The audio is terrible but Hadley Wickham's presentation gives a very good introduction into R — and why it's better than using a GUI based software like SPSS or Excel.
[show the article]

Recommendation: The Rubin Report (esp. Dr. Everett Piper Interview)

2019-02-05 | Reading time: 1 minute

Can't say I'm a fan of religious institutions, but Dr. Everett Pipers Interview on "The Rubin Report" is worth watching.
[show the article]

Good academic advisors

2018-12-10 | Reading time: 1 minute

A comment on good academic advisors (leadership) ... and not so good advisors.
[show the article]

1 2 3 … 39 »

A comment for those seeking to use this site for personal gain: Given the increase in requests, let me be clear. I write on this blog because I want to. It’s my hobby, my playground. Sometimes people point me to interesting products/services and I write about them. But any request regarding ads or sponsored placements ends up the trash without a reply. And if you think something would be of interest, differentiate yourself from the spammers by referring to a posting — in an intelligent way. (I get enough auto-generated mails to identify them immediately.)

ORGANIZING CREATIVITY

How to generate, capture, and collect ideas to realize creative projects.