Teaching beginners how to program is often hard. We love building programs, and seeing our loved ones struggle with this is painful. Showing them how to copy-paste a few example programs and change a few parameters is easy, but bridging from there to building substantial programs is a different game entirely. This talk is about how to teach programming successfully, through comprehensible design recipes, which anyone can follow, using languages and tools designed for beginners. This approach is probably different from how you learned how to program, or how you're used to teaching. It is more effective, however, as it teaches more material successfully to a broader spectrum of people. It is also more enjoyable.

The talk is based on many years of research by the Program by Design, DeinProgramm, and Bootstrap educational projects, as well as over 30 years of personal teaching experience in school, university and industrial contexts. A word of warning: The resulting approach is radically different from most teaching approaches used in universities and schools. In particular, it avoids teaching purely through examples and expecting students to develop the skills to arrive at the solutions on their own. Instead, it eaches explicit methodology that enables students to solve problems of surprising complexity on their own, whether they are 11 or 55, whether in a classroom, a training facility, or your home. Extensive documentation, material, and software to support this methodology is available for free.

"adaptive textbook" course ware

Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments A repository of scholarly materials for Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments (under contract with the Modern Language Association) General Editors Rebecca Frost Davis, St. via Pocket

This might be a better way to ask research questions stemming from a set of primary sources than 25 separate Omeka exhibits like last time.

Many students use laptops to take notes in classes, but does using them impact later test performance? In a high-profile investigation comparing note-taking writing on paper versus typing on a laptop keyboard, Mueller and Oppenheimer (Psychological Science, 25, 1159–1168, 2014) concluded that taking notes by longhand is superior. We conducted a direct replication of Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014) and extended their work by including groups who took notes using eWriters and who did not take notes. Some trends suggested longhand superiority; however, performance did not consistently differ between any groups (experiments 1 and 2), including a group who did not take notes (experiment 2). Group differences were further decreased after students studied their notes (experiment 2). A meta-analysis (combining direct replications) of test performance revealed small (nonsignificant) effects favoring longhand. Based on the present outcomes and other available evidence, concluding which method is superior for improving the functions of note-taking seems premature.

https://www.chronicle.com/article/Should-You-Allow-Laptops-in/245625

Who can be against students learning more effectively, by which I mean scoring higher on exams delivered in contrived studies, if we have the means to facilitate doing so? Whose side are you on: order or anarchy? Since previous generations of students were all raptly attentive and appropriately docile in our lecture halls, and Kids These Days™ aren’t, we should ask ourselves what’s changed, knowing full well the answer is the internet. If we remove this contagion, the disease of distracted students, staring zombie-like at their screens instead of staring zombie-like at the professor on the stage thirty rows away, will be cured. The only question is why should we stop there? The potential student-distractors in our classrooms are legion. If, in the service of better learning for all, we are going to eliminate distraction, let’s do it right.

teaching strategies

Computer people are fine human beings, but they do a lot of harm in the ways they "help" other people with their computer problems. Now that we're trying to get everyone online, I thought it might be helpful to write down everything I've been taught about helping people use computers.

And I kinda told them what to do… Meh. I was jumping way ahead to get to the formula. We weren’t savoring the thinking to get to the formula. Now we are.

That being said, I ran across something quite beautiful. A stunning proof of the Law of Cosines (at least for acute triangles) on the site trigonography.

This conference aims to explore the extent to which translation studies has already embraced the digital, showcase exciting and original research, expand our digital horizons by learning about the work of practitioners in other areas, and discuss possible pitfalls and shortcomings of digital approaches.
 
Proposals for individual papers or panels (3-4 speakers) are welcome on any aspect of the theme,