Podcasts about learning catalytics

Gary King (@kinggary) is the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor and Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University . King focuses on innovations that span the range from statistical theory to practical application. His methods are used extensively in many fields of academia, government, consulting, and private industry. He is a founder, and inventor of the original technology for, Learning Catalytics, Crimson Hexagon, Perusall, and other firms. He is a founder, and inventor of the original technology for, Learning Catalytics, Crimson Hexagon, Perusall, and OpenScholar

It’s said that in the last two years, more data has been created than all the data that ever was created before that time. And that in two years hence, we’ll be able to say the same thing. Gary King, the head of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, isn’t certain those statements are exactly true, but certain they are true in essence. And he’s even more certain that the growth in the amount of data isn’t why big data is changing the world. As he tells interviewer Dave Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, roughly 650 million social media messages will go out today. So to someone trying to make statements about what those messages contain, he posited, would having 750 million messages make anything better? “Having bigger data,” King says, “only makes things more difficult.” Or to be blunter, “The data itself isn’t likely to be particularly useful; the question is whether you can make it useful.” Which leads to King’s real passion: the analysis of big data. It’s not the ‘big’ or the ‘data’ that really turns the screw; it’s the analysis. In this conversation, King, uses text analysis as an example of this big data analysis. He notes that some of the tools that text analysis uses are “mathematically similar” to another project he worked on, trying to determine health priorities in the third world by figuring out what’s killing people there. In both cases, the individual, whether someone with a disease or someone with a viral tweet, is less important than the trend. That, explains King, spotlights the difference between computer scientists’ goals and social scientists’ goals: “We only care about what everybody’s saying.” He then talks about work examining social media and censorship in China. While the work clearly falls into an area that King, a political scientist, would be interested in, the genesis was actually as a test case for the limitations of the text analysis program. But it nonetheless gave useful insight into both how the Chinse government censors material, and why. King is the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard. He’s been elected a fellow or eight honorary societies, including the National Academy of Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Political and Social Science. King also has an entrepreneurial bent – he mentions the company Crimson Hexagon that was spun out of the text analysis work during this interview – and has founded or invented technology for companies like Learning Catalytics and Perusall. And here’s some, if not ‘big’ data, at least ‘bigger’ data, to consider: This interview marks the 50th Social Science Bites podcast produced by SAGE Publishing. For a complete listing of past Social Science Bites podcasts, click HERE. You can follow Bites on Twitter @socialscibites and David Edmonds @DavidEdmonds100.

Discussions of teaching -- even some publications -- abound with anecdotal evidence. Our intuition often supplants a systematic, scientific approach to finding out what works and what doesn't work. Yet, research is increasingly demonstrating that our gut feelings about teaching are often wrong. In this talk, Dr. Mazur will discuss how he uses classroom data to make decisions about how he teaches and to change how his students learn. About Dr. Mazur Eric Mazur is the Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Harvard University and Area Dean of Applied Physics. An internationally recognized scientist and researcher, he leads a vigorous research program in optical physics and supervises one of the largest research groups in the Physics Department at Harvard University. In addition to his work in optical physics, Dr. Mazur is interested in education, science policy, outreach, and the public perception of science. He believes that better science education for all -- not just science majors -- is vital for continued scientific progress. To this end, Dr. Mazur devotes part of his research group's effort to education research and finding verifiable ways to improve science education. In 1990 he began developing Peer Instruction, a method for teaching large lecture classes interactively. Dr. Mazur's teaching method has developed a large following, both nationally and internationally, and has been adopted across many disciplines, all over the world. Professor Mazur is also a founder of Learning Catalytics, a cloud-based technology that enables instructors to engage students with authentic formative assessments in real time, and rich data analytics to drive student interactions. About Making Decisions with Data The Making Decisions with Data website is a collaboration of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) and The University of Texas at Austin designed to help educators use data to make decisions that improve teaching and learning. The website is designed for a range of educators, including teachers and administrators at the K-12 and post-secondary levels.

Discussions of teaching -- even some publications -- abound with anecdotal evidence. Our intuition often supplants a systematic, scientific approach to finding out what works and what doesn't work. Yet, research is increasingly demonstrating that our gut feelings about teaching are often wrong. In this talk, Dr. Mazur will discuss how he uses classroom data to make decisions about how he teaches and to change how his students learn. About Dr. Mazur Eric Mazur is the Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Harvard University and Area Dean of Applied Physics. An internationally recognized scientist and researcher, he leads a vigorous research program in optical physics and supervises one of the largest research groups in the Physics Department at Harvard University. In addition to his work in optical physics, Dr. Mazur is interested in education, science policy, outreach, and the public perception of science. He believes that better science education for all -- not just science majors -- is vital for continued scientific progress. To this end, Dr. Mazur devotes part of his research group's effort to education research and finding verifiable ways to improve science education. In 1990 he began developing Peer Instruction, a method for teaching large lecture classes interactively. Dr. Mazur's teaching method has developed a large following, both nationally and internationally, and has been adopted across many disciplines, all over the world. Professor Mazur is also a founder of Learning Catalytics, a cloud-based technology that enables instructors to engage students with authentic formative assessments in real time, and rich data analytics to drive student interactions. About Making Decisions with Data The Making Decisions with Data website is a collaboration of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) and The University of Texas at Austin designed to help educators use data to make decisions that improve teaching and learning. The website is designed for a range of educators, including teachers and administrators at the K-12 and post-secondary levels.

Workshop avec le prof. Eric MAZUR, Harvard University (UNIL - HESSO - SFDN) Most -- if not all -- of the important skills in our lives are acquired outside the traditional classroom setting. Yet we continue to teach using lectures where students passively take down information. Peer instruction is a research-based pedagogy that actively engages students in the classroom and has been shown to dramatically improve conceptual understanding, even in large classes. While successfully implementing peer instruction doesn't require any technology, using the right technology can improve student engagement, increase learning, and make it easier to implement peer instruction in your classroom. In this workshop you will learn how to use Learning Catalytics -- a web-based technology -- to bring peer instruction to your students.