A Heartfelt Note from a Humanities MOOC Professor
Amid the storm of controversy surrounding how MOOCs (massively open online courses, see a prior post here) will disrupt/enhance/destroy higher education, is a more basic question people ask is how suitable MOOCs are for teaching the humanities. It is true that most MOOCs have focused on science & technology subject areas, as many of the innovators are from the computer science department. Also, these subjects are fairly amenable to one-way […]
Summary: The Stuff of Thought, by Steven Pinker
In a Part I of this post, I summarized what I thought were the most interesting points in Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct. Now, I’d like to continue on to his, in some ways, more impressive book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (link on Amazon.com). Since they are both related to language, how might I characterize the relationship between these two books? Here’s what I […]
Nudge Idea: Reinforce foreign language vocabulary with (almost) no effort
Okay, in a previous post summarizing the book ‘Nudge’, I described the concept of nudges, in which you can reap large benefits from very small, seemingly effortless changes. In my last post I described an example idea to help conserve napkins, which relied on a nudge to (hopefully) create enough motivation for people to undertake a small effort. Now I would like to offer an example of what I think […]
Nudge Idea: Conserving paper napkins
In my last post, I described the power of nudges and categorized them into two types, those that reduce effort and those that increase motivation, in ways that take advantage of how our minds work. Here is an example of the second type of nudge. Goal: To reduce the use of paper napkins used at fast food restaurants and other food outlets in order to conserve natural resources and reinforce […]
The Power of Small ‘Nudges’ – Applied Psychology in Action
The field of psychology has advanced a great deal since it gained a rigorous footing after WWII, and is starting to yield practical dividends in our society and in everyday life (See my prior blog post on cognitive psychology). One very fruitful intersection has been psychology and economics, with the founding of behavioral economics, a hot new field. The interesting thing is that while many of the findings of behavioral […]
Summary: The Language Instinct, by Steven Pinker
There has been a revolution in the field of linguistics over the past 50 years, initiated by the work of Noam Chomsky. Prior to him, social scientists thought, consistent with the dominant Behaviorist perspective of the day (and also with common sense), that children picked up language from those around them through simple exposure, imitation, and reinforcement. Chomsky was the first to question this, and raised as counter-evidence the rather […]
What Vampires in Pop Culture Highlights About Us
In the U.S., there have been many books and movies about vampires over the past few decades, and it seems in popular culture there is a fascination with them, evidence Twilight, Underworld, True Blood, Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, even Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There is one aspect of the vampire mythology that I find very interesting and I think highlights a cultural difference between Western and Eastern (Asian) society. In […]
Summary: Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
The field of psychology has only had a solid experimental basis after WWII, with the advent of randomized controlled experimentation (which also led to the rise of modern medicine, by the way). In the past couple of decades, it has had a boost from brain imaging technologies, which can objectively indicate differences among experimental subjects. As part of the social sciences, psychology has been thought of as a “soft” science, […]
The Rise of the “New Atheists”
I recently discovered a fantastic resource, freely available, Talks at Google (http://www.youtube.com/user/AtGoogleTalks), which are recorded brown bags given at Google offices by famous authors, academics, political figures, etc.–which draws very distinguished presenters (usually on a book tour). Each talk is nearly an hour in length, and they conveniently summarize he main points of their book in that hour. It was while browsing these talks (after sorting them by popularity) that […]
To Notice and to Learn 