Category: Curious David

Transitions Take Time (Revisited)

 

Taking a break from trying to keep up with ChatGPT as a learning tool and revisiting an archive of David-in-Carroll-Land blog pieces.

Rediscovering some things I wrote a few years ago as I continue my relearning of what WordPress can do. The text below was written at the end of October 2018. Oh, how naive I was!

This last year as a university professor poses interesting challenges to time management and prioritizing. I underestimated how much time (and disruption) would be caused by ALMOST having a Milwaukee World Series, mastering new MAC and PC operating systems, accepting the opportunity to become an APS Wikipedia Fellow (essentially taking a weekly course), teaching a class I hadn’t taught for two years on one weeks notice, creating a newly taught Wikipedia component in my course, migrating from David-in-Carroll-Land to Curious-David-Redux, and protecting time for family, fun, and friends. Despite the headlines, life is good. so much to learn.

Rediscovering Wikipedia: Harnessing Its Power

WF

Wikipedia

This semester I have begun to discover to what degree I have underestimated the value of Wikipedia and the degree to which it has matured since it first was created. I now better understand why it ranks so highly among learning tools on Jane Hart’s list of top tools for learning.  Belatedly I am beginning to respond to Mahzarin  Banaji’s 2011 call for action to harness the power of Wikipedia.

Jane Hart ranking of wikipediaWikipedia provides excellent resources (and online support) for incorporating Wikipedia assignments into courses.

  1. Discussions of plagiarism and how to avoid it
  2. Instructor resources
  3. Guides for Editing
  4. Suggestions for Creating Realistic Student Expectations

Maybe next semester I’ll turn my attention to Wikipedia’s history of Carroll. It needs some updating and i have 40 years of documented facts:)

 

 

 

Curious David Redux: Dog Memories

Robin the Newf owns the couch.
Robin the Newf owned the couch.

Patiently waiting for Saint Nick.
Patiently waiting for Saint Nick.

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Rudolph’s Backup

Bewitched
Bewitched

The Devil Made Me Do It!
The Devil Made Me Do It!

Harley Newf
Harley Newf

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FETCH

Rapping with the Pink Biped Who Feeds Me
Rapping with the Pink Biped Who Feeds Me

Reading Together
Reading Together

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Discussing where Newfoundland is…

Time's "Person" of the Year
Time’s “Person” of the Year

Identity Confusion
Identity Confusion

Canine Grading Assistant

Always Contemplative
Always Contemplative

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Newf Ball

Who SAYS I bat like a girl?
Who SAYS I bat like a girl?

Managing the North Lake Newf team

****Christmas 2014 104
Meeting Three-Year-Old Annie

Curious David Redux: Learning Resources Surround Me

Reflecting on the last 50 years of learning…

It has been an interesting number of learning years since when I studied Latin at Howland High School in Warren, Ohio.

SpanishI’ve outlived many of my best teachers but am continually blessed with opportunities to learn from and with those much younger than I. One can indeed, with patience and compassion, teach an old dog new tricks. I regularly learned valuable lessons from Robin the Newf even when she was ailing.

Robin the Newf Celebrates a New Year and Her 9th
Lesson: How to make good use of a couch.

Lesson: Couch 102

Surrounding myself with bright young student assistants has always proven for me a valuable source of learning.

S-TEAM 2013

I continue to learn much from observing, listening to, and playing with my grand-nieces and nephews. They so often make me smile, laugh, and give thanks.

Abby and Annie approach the North Lake mascot, Robin

 

****Christmas 2014
Annie (age 3) works up the courage to give Robin a kiss.

Greg Schneider, my business partner and his wife Jane, continually provide me with opportunities to grow, to learn,to think and to share my areas of expertise while benefiting from their wisdom, experiences, and business acumen. And I learn from Greg about fishing on North Lake during our annual celebration of our partnership!

Greg Schneider, Consulting Partner, Friend, and Mentor

Curious David in CarrollLand: Reflections on “Neurobics”

In preparing for a Fall semester research seminar, I am reading a number of books dealing with aging, brain fitness, and maintaining brain health. My preference is to read scholarly works based upon good science. I also tend to trust detailed thought pieces from say, The New York Times (e.g. this one) or this piece from The New Yorker “Mentally Fit: Workouts at the Brain Gym.”

How, though, could I resist the book Keep Your Brain Alive which claimed to have 500,000 copies in print and which promised me opportunities to discover the secrets of “neurobics?”

Katz & Rubin’s (2014) Keep Your Brain Alive: 83 Neurobic Exercises to Help Prevent Memory Loss & Increase Mental Fitness was fun to read. The authors are witty, playful, and creative. Chapter 2 gives an accurate, very elementary explanation of “how the brain works.” The research they cite, however,  is “classic” and outdated. Their “Neurobics” concept (“experience novel and unexpected things and enlist the aid of all of your senses”) is common sensical but there is no body of research supporting the efficacy of the exercises. Save your money and get the gist of their ideas by visiting their web page here.

Curious David Redux: Experimenting with WordPress.Org

Still clowning around with transitioning to WordPress.org from WordPress.com. I am helped immensely by the physical presence and attendance to details of my student research assistants.

As I move closer to publishing some ebooks, I am going to experiment with different capabilities of WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org. Forgive any confusion I cause as I fumble a bit.

Books I hope yet to finish reading and writing reviews for this semester:

1. The Sharpbrains Guide to Brain Fitness (2013). Thanks to Alvaro Fernandez for helpfully responding to my drafted notes of the 2nd edition of his book.  I look forward to seeing the 3rd edition and to attending the 2018 virtual summit.

2. Happiness is a Choice: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old (2018)

3. The End of Old Age: Living a Longer, More Purposeful Life (2018)

4. Two Weeks to a Younger Brain. (2015)

5. Keep Your Brain alive: 83 Neurobic Exercises to Help Prevent Memory Loss & Increase Mental Fitness (2014)

6. Not Pink (2018). More can be found here about colleague Pegg Kasimatis’s new novel

Curious David Redux : Food for Thought

I am over 50 years of age though when with my students I forget and am closer to their age:) I am very impressed by recently released Global Council on Brain Health reports dealing with brain health for adults ages 50 and older. Among those I have so far read are those dealing with nutrition (found here), social engagement (found here), sleep (found here), physical activity (found here), and cognitively stimulating activities (found here).

That most recent detailed report draws upon the expertise of thirteen specialists from four continents and from gerontology, neuropsychology, neurology, neuroscience, psychology, public health and speech-language pathology who met and agreed upon ten best-science-based consensus statements summarizing the impact of cognitively stimulating activities on brain health. The report’s appendices list the participants, provide a glossary with carefully defined terms, share the discussion questions framing the deliberations, clearly explain differences, reveal disclosure statements of potential conflicts of interests, indicate sources of funding, and provide selected references. I find these reports understandable, well-written, full of practical and actionable advice, myth-busting and extremely important. Definitely enriching food for thought.

Curious David Redux: Dropping Off the Net

Once I have tearfully witnessed Commencement, I don my invisibility cloak.  From the perception of many persons used to finding me ubiquitous, I disappear from the Net. Summer is a time for being outdoors, for travel, for gardening, for playing with children, for taking advantage of our living on North Lake and for being mentored by Leo the Great Pyrenees.

Here are prior expressed summer ruminations when Robin the Newf mentored me.

Reading with the Newf

After last semester I pretty much dropped off the Net for a couple of months (due to an unreliable home networking situation) and spent time reading printed books, hard copies of magazine subscriptions and paper newspapers. I highly recommend it. I am convinced that online reading is a different experience. I look forward to reading Naomi Baron’s latest thoughts on this.

Here are books I found well worth my having read:

  1. Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things– praised by several of my favorite contemporary authors David Mitchell, Philip Pullman, and Yann Martel.
  2. John Scalzi’s Lock In: A Novel of the Near Future.
  3. David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks.
  4. Cory Doctorow’s Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age.
  5. Gabriella Coleman’s Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous
  6. Andy Weir’s The Martian

I presently am finishing Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings and am looking forward to reading Ann Morgan‘s The World Between Two Covers: Reading the Globe when it becomes available in the US in May 2015. Before then I plan to read Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven.

Tomorrow, after my classes, I’ll invite my students into my office to take any books I have read. It always pleases me to see them walk off excitedly with some pleasure reading.

What books do you recommend that I read? That I encourage my students to read?

Curious David Redux: Reflections on Aging

When I was a graduate student, I would religiously read every article in every journal to which I subscribed. Alas, I have fallen out of that good habit.  Perhaps I need to finish reading Charles Duhigg’s books like this one here.

One of my resolutions as I wind up (and wind down!) my teaching career has been to invest more time in reading the scholarly journals to which I subscribe and weaving the knowledge both into my teaching or my life. My research interests across the years have been wide-ranging (impression formation, subliminal perception, the Mozart effect, effects of color on behavior, internet learning tools) no doubt in part due to my Oberlin College liberal arts education. My current research interests now are focused on aging, maintaining brain health, brain fitness training, truth in advertising, and memory —- no doubt because I am older as is evidenced in the photos above!

As I prepare for a research-oriented semester (two sections of Statistics and Experimental Design) and a Research Seminar, an article in the December 2013 issue of Psychological Science intrigued me because of the simplicity of the experimental design and of the data analyses and because of the importance of the results (if replicable). In an article (found here) entitled “Aging 5 Years in 5 Minutes: The Effect of Taking a Memory Test on Older Adults’ Subjective Age” Hughes et al. experimentally demonstrated that older (but not younger) adults felt subjectively older after taking (or even after expecting to take) a standard neurological screening test which dealt with memory! Tremendous implications here for future research on the effects of context on self-perceptions of aging.

I’m doing a lot of reading in preparation for my Fall 2018 courses. Among the books I am carefully reading are:

  1. The Sharpbrains Guide to Brain Fitness (2013). I found the virtual conference that I attended last year of tremendous value (more about it can be found here or in some of my earlier blogs). I look forward to reading the 3rd revised edition when it becomes available. Author Alvaro Fernandez informs me that it might be available in three to four months.
  2. Happiness is a Choice: You Make (2018): Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old by John Leland.
  3. The End of Old Age: Living a Longer More Purposeful Life (2018) by Marc E. Agronin. An interview with the author can be found here.
  4. Two Weeks to a Younger Brain (2016) by Gary Small.
  5. Everything written by Carroll alumna Dr. Michelle Braun who kindly met with my research students for an hour last year to share her insights about brain health. Much of her good work can be found here.

What other books should I carefully examine?

 

A Student's Guide to Paper.li: Arianna's Experience

DSCN9015We are currently examining different content curation services as to their strengths, weaknesses, ease of use, and usefulness to students. A very good guide to content curation developed by others can be found here:
Paper.li is a content curation service that quickly creates a newspaper-like publication for you. To start you simply create an account through Facebook, Twitter, or email. I would recommend investing in a “Pro account” because it allows you more options, such as advertisement-free newspapers. To begin creating your newspaper you can search keywords and Paper.li will automatically retrieve articles, videos, and photos from Twitter, Google+, and RSS feeds that are related to the topic you have selected. You can also find your own content. To do this you simply go to settings and drag the blue “Paper.li” button to your “favorites bar”. When you find an article you like you click on the Paper.li bookmarklet and select which newspaper to add the article to.
Once Paper.li has completed its retrieval for you, you can edit the layout and the title. You can delete any content you dislike or find irrelevant and you can add pictures and colors to the background to help liven up your newspaper. Upon the completion of your adjustments, you can select whether or not Paper.li should automatically publish each newspaper you create or whether you would like to save them as drafts until you feel the paper is sufficiently developed. You can also choose how often the Paper.li retrieves updates. You could update your paper each day, or less frequently. This allows for your subscribers to be reading the most up to date material on your topic.
Once you have decided your newspaper is complete and ready for publication, you can share it across several social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and you can email it to individuals. These same options are also available for each article within your newspaper. This feature allows you to promote your newspaper further and increases the likelihood of gaining subscribers. Subscribers are those who are allowed access to your newspapers. You also have the ability to control who can and cannot be a subscriber to your newspapers. Therefore, if you have a newspaper that is strictly for the workplace, you can customize that paper so only select individuals can view it.
One limitation of Paper.li is that each newspaper you create must be upgraded to Pro. Another limitation is that Paper.li occasionally does not find any content to publish. Therefore, some days your newspaper will be full of articles, videos, and images, and other days it will be a blank slate. A third problem I found occurred when creating my own newspaper. On Thursday I manually added all of my own content to a newspaper. Monday the paper had updated and but had only had two videos in it— supplying next to no news to subscribers. It seems as though we are not the only ones who struggle to actualize the potential of Paper.li as 2015 is the first time in six years that the site did not make Jane Hart’s Top 100 tools for learning.
Despite the flaws I’ve noted (which may be due to my inexperience with the tool)  one very nice feature of Paper.li is that they have a video tutorials for just about every question a person could have. These videos exhibit step-by-step instructions on how to complete a tasks. Another beneficial aspect of Paper.li is the timely manner in which their customer service responds to assist your needs. Paper.li has considerable potential as a curating tool. However, it needs some major improvements.
Contact us if you’d like to see one off our early productions.
We welcome any feedback or learning from your experiences with Paper.li.