Boy, TED is everywhere… I previously posted about their upcoming weekly radio show on NPR, and the first one aired today. Their show has its own feature page on NPR, which makes it easy to find. It’s nicely designed in titled segments, so you can only listen to the sections you want. Weirdly, though, it doesn’t list the guests, only the topics covered. The TED blog shared guests at the first show: In Episode 1, “Our Buggy Brain,” host Alison Stewart talks with Dan Ariely, Paul Bloom and Dan Gilbert about how our minds inform and sometimes deceive us. I do hope, though, that the NPR pages names the guests in the future. I’ll add this info to The Best Teacher Resources For “TED Talks” (& Similar Presentations).
 Source: pinaquote.com via Larry on Pinterest Most teachers understand the value of students feeling “ownership” of their learning, and I’ve written a lot about how inductive learning, student autonomy and choice contribute to that happening. Of course, many others have contributed much more to that understanding, including John Dewey and William Glasser. Dan Ariely has written about something similar that he calls The Ikea Effect. Today, Scott Keller wrote a post at the Harvard Business Review blog site that reinforces this perspective. He describes a study reported in a book by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman (I’ve previously written about his work). Keller’s post is worth reading in full, but I just wanted to quote from its beginning: In a famous experiment, researchers ran a lottery with a twist. Half the participants were randomly assigned a lottery number. The remaining half were given a blank piece of paper and a pen and asked to write down any number they would like as their lottery number. Just before drawing the winning number, the researchers offered to buy back the tickets. The question researchers wanted to answer is, “How much more do you have to pay someone who ‘wrote their own number’ versus someone who was handed a number randomly?” The rational answer would be that there is no difference (given that a lottery is pure chance and therefore every ticket number, chosen or assigned, should have the same value). A more savvy answer would be that you would have to pay less for the tickets where the participant chose the number, given the possibility of duplicate numbers in the population who wrote their own number. The real answer? No matter what location or demographic the experiment has taken place in, researchers have always found that they have to pay at least five times more to those who wrote their own number. This result reveals an inconvenient truth about human nature: When we choose for ourselves, we are far more committed to the outcome — by a factor of five to one. Something we should probably all keep in mind when we’re teaching…
When Google bought PostRank last year (see Bye Bye, PostRank? I Hope Not…) many of us feared they would be closing it down, and that concern is now real. PostRank just announced they were closing down on May 1st. No more sidebar widgets letting readers know what blogs posts were the most popular, and no more ranked listings of popular education blogs. PostRank, R.I.P.
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