Geometric puzzles can be a boost for dyslectic students. In the verbal environment of schools, students who are better at spatial tasks need to get positive feedback just as much as other students. The influence of feeling capable on self-esteem is important, especially for students with learning disabilities.
There's a gap between science and education and industries of the future can go close this gap. An example: a teacher may discover a boy who has difficulty to read. He uses all the tricks he knows (practical knowledge) on the child. It doesn't work. Then he decides to get help. The psychologist gets a turn. Doesn't help. They then turn on science and read articles on neurology on dyslexia. They visit a scientist who says interesting things, but cannot point out a specific treatment. There's a gap.
Yesterday I watched awakenings and recognized the frustration when the doctor has an enormous amount of knowledge, but no handles to work with it. In this realm, the entry of Piaget and Feuerstein has yet to come it seems, or it seems it has just started comming, leaving room for artists and inventors, game-designers and musicians to fill the gap.
At Yale renowned scholars are asking themselves what Shakespeare was thinking. Any attempt to understand history is based on knowledge of historical context and power of interpretation. I don't really think it's impossible to try to guess what Shakespeare thought. It's an educated guess.
For the readers from the wiskunde meisjes; mathematicians interested in Psychology:
Serendip is a site with forums for those interested in Psychology, Psychobiology, Psychofysiology and related.
In the Netherlands, and particularly in architecture, the gulden snede is very important because it's pleasant. The post in the blog that I link too is about this special relationship between aesthetics and maths.
I celebrate holiday in 2 regions. And this ressembles how this (geo)puzzle works. On the surface you see clutter for 2 weeks. What you see is the projection of clutter. Uhm. Looks like mom is going to need a vacation...
It's not Harry Potter who found the potion for a longer life, it's Marianne Geleijnse. Her article will come out soon in the European Journal of Epidiomology. Although she criticises her own research, I think she might be on to something. So this blog is right in encouraging us to eat avocado's & sweat potatoes, lentils & Barley. What would Ruth in six feet under think about this?
What can human kind learn from apes? Whatever your main belief or unbelief, apes are supposed to exist before human. There's no logical implication to the thought that what comes after in time is better than what was first. Apes were considered not to have emotions, nor language, nor thought. We're finding out this isn't true. In our inner ape, primatologist Frans de Waal writes his view on why we are and who we are. He is a speaker at the emotions conference at Tilburg University from Monday 22 up to Wednesday 24 October 2007, and I'm curious what he has to say about the possibility of empathy in other animals.
I ask myself what is the best way to evolve into a primatologist?
Maybe by reading this book:The Nature of Play, Pellegrini, A.D. & Smith, P.K. (eds.), New York: Guildford Press
contains a chapter from Dr. Carol Berman, "Object play in great apes: studies in nature and captivity".
Good news in this blogpost for readers and people who have taken up sudoku (or other puzzles) or even socker: even when your brain loses neurons to Alzheimer, you can do more when you continue to use your brain.
Would you like to save time e.g. to write more? One way is clever use of your time. Take a look at this timehacks list . Another smart way to save time is a printable grocery list, especially if someone else helps make it. Another way is to hack it the way J. Wynia does it. I would add I've been using old receits from the supermarket. Read them at the dentist. Also eating the same thing certain days of the week - a weekly routine - is a way to save time. I don't like to do everything the same, so I use different vegetables and spices in the weekly stew.
Have a list of things you would want to buy some time this year. When you're near a shop and you happen to see the item for a good price, you can buy it quicker, because the decision has already been taken to do so.
Today's puzzle is a visualisation exercise. It's something to do with your mind's eye.
Imagine you don't have materials, only what's in your environment. Now how would you make a cylinder, a cube and a tetrahedron that each one has a volume of 1 deciliter? You may use 4 imaginary tools. What steps are necessary?
How does your imagination work? Are you like Berkeley who thinks you can imagine concise shapes? or like Locke who says that one could visually imagine a triangle neither equilateral, nor isosceles, nor scalene but somehow all and none of these at once?
Do you solve this with words, with images, with ideas, with colour?
Vygotsky wrote about the zone of proximal development. Scaffolds are then used to pull a child from his level to a higher level of thinking / reasonning / understanding.
An example of a scaffold would be what I did at the swimming pool the other day.
situation:
My son is 4 years old. He was the first in a row but went outside for a while and then returned. Then he complained that he was first to the boy who had taken his place in the line. "it's not fair, I was first." I told him that he can expect people to take his place when he goes away. Now the boy who was first left. My son quickly went back first in line. Now I asked him if he thinks that's fair. The other boys comes back and sees his place is taken and complains. I then say: "but before you thought it was fair to take the place of someone else." Then a discussion starts about that sometimes you're first, and sometimes you're second.
The scaffold in this case was that I made a connection to cars and place in a sequence. I said you can put a yellow car first, second or third, or a blue car, or a red one. You can look at how many different places you can put a car in a row.
Now I can use this scaffold in the future to talk about an honest system of giving every child a turn, I can use this to teach morality, I can use this to teach principles of combinatorics.
One day I realised I'm not nothing. I came after punk and after Lou Reed. I came after horrendous wars and after the moonwalk. I realise that I'm the product of all this and more. The generation before me told me I was nothing and nothingness was better. History was wrong and led to badness. Then bad was fashion, because nothing meant anything.
I'm so happy I found friends in books; voices from other worlds and other ages. The meaning I felt exists and I can share it through thought, which I consider to be elaborated feeling. It crosses barriers of dogma, countries and time as if it were light. I'm not nothing, I'm the result of rich history and lessons from the past. I can disagree with my friends and criticise them, but they make me think and give my life meaning. Light is everywhere, if you open your mind to it.
I wrote about the organisation of blogs in stratified layers. I'm curious if there's anyone else who elaborated the idea on the internet. Colin Fleming of Adobe dreamed to use "layer groups" for documents. Sogrady calls 'blogstratification' to organize his blogroll into cathegories (under 5). Abe on Abstract dynamics wrote about stratification in relation to linking of blogs.
Seb Paquet in Many 2 many refers to how an article on the internet, originally from Linton Freeman, became widely read because of bloggers linking to the article.
I've started working at my article about blogging, and now for some weeks I've played with feedstatistics and commenting.
The strangest decision that lies ahaid is if I'm going to write the article in English or in Dutch first. Blogging has a terminology that I prefer to use in English, because most of what I read about blogging is written in English. The Dutch words are less precise.
This site gives advise how to use statistics from your blog to understand what happens when you post, which pages attract readers and if these are your loyal readers or rather unique visitors. I bookmarked this site on del.icio.us , simply because there was an icon to do so.
The problem with my article is that it's a collection of interesting ideas, but it doesn't have structure. This reminds me of the picture of caffeinated spider... Maybe I should reduce my coffee drinking?
As allways, for every question I can imagine, google gives an answer. But is it what I'm after?
If you're a returning visitor, congratulations; very likely you're the 1000st returning visitor today, because the counter is on 999. This counter doesn't include my dear readers of feeds. I've found out that more readers read my feeds. If you prefer content, reading feeds makes a lot of sense: more text on the page. Exception: commenting. I'm trying to keep my posts a rapid intense read.
Readers come from Universities, Technical schools, are parents, students, academics, writers, puzzle lovers, multilinguals, multiculturals, teachers.
I write about twice a week. This is a place of clay, that I'm molding. It's fun, it's practise, it's trying out.
To play.
Find a box of toys e.g. of your children. Take some out without looking. On a piece of paper, write down the words that come up in your mind. Get as many strange words as possible.
Finished?
now we get to play with google. What is in the minds of other people in connection to the same words you wrote down?
Now relate each word to a character. What kind of character emerges? You may choose the writer of the post as a model. You may use google-image.
I've reacted on a post of a theater personnality and now I'm (we're) trying to find out if there's a need for a platform for education that draws the attention to the motivation of children at college. It fits what I've been writing and reading for a few years. I've got many ideas that are in a shapeless format and I'm going to peel them.
