SimBiotic Articles and Blog

If you've been following our blog, you've seen me make several posts about e-textbooks. One reason I've been following new developments closely is because we have been working on our own replacement for an ecology text. It's extremely gratifying, after a huge amount of work from a lot of people, to start going public with our SimUText Active Learning System and the SimBio Interactive Ecology Chapters which SimUText hosts.

In an earlier post, I wrote about a classic paper from the education literature called The Dr. Fox Lecture: A Paradigm of Educational Seduction. The authors coached an actor to spout nonsense with authority and charm, introduced him as an expert, and let him regale an audience of mental health professionals on a topic he knew nothing about. The listeners gave "Dr." Fox high ratings on a post-lecture evaluation, from which the authors concluded that even sophisticated learners can be tricked into mistaking form for substance.

Most universities have separate biology classes for non-majors, which are often taken by students who need to fulfill a "science" requirement to complete their degree. Are non-majors really different from biology majors? Several previous studies seem to say no

I'm reading two different documents now which are both, in a way, about testing, but at opposite levels of thinking. The first is the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Technology Literacy Framework, aimed at higher order thinking skills. The second, a brilliant new book called Teach Like a Champion, focuses on teaching literacy and math skills to underprivileged students. Though both worth discussing in their own right, at the moment some contrasts between them have got me thinking.