Learning | Education Technologies

UC Berkeley Is Offering Data Science, Its Fastest-Growing Course Ever, for Free Online | Open Culture

Univerity of California, Berkeley logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s worth passing along a message from UC Berkeley. According to its news service, the “fastest-growing course in UC Berkeley’s history — Foundations of Data Science [aka Data 8X] — is being offered free online this spring for the first time through the campus’s online education hub, edX.” More than 1,000 students are now taking the course each semester at the university.

Designed for students who have not previously taken statistics or computer science courses, Foundations of Data Science will teach you in a three-course sequence “how to combine data with Python programming skills to ask questions and explore problems that you encounter in any field of study, in a future job, and even in everyday life.”

Source: UC Berkeley Is Offering Data Science, Its Fastest-Growing Course Ever, for Free Online | Open Culture

Cognitive bias cheat sheet

Systemic bias venn diagram. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve spent many years referencing Wikipedia’s list of cognitive biases whenever I have a hunch that a certain type of thinking is an official bias but I can’t recall the name or details. It’s been an invaluable reference for helping me identify the hidden flaws in my own thinking. Nothing else I’ve come across seems to be both as comprehensive and as succinct.

However, honestly, the Wikipedia page is a bit of a tangled mess. Despite trying to absorb the information of this page many times over the years, very little of it seems to stick. I often scan it and feel like I’m not able to find the bias I’m looking for, and then quickly forget what I’ve learned. I think this has to do with how the page has organically evolved over the years. Today, it groups 175 biases into vague categories (decision-making biases, social biases, memory errors, etc) that don’t really feel mutually exclusive to me, and then lists them alphabetically within categories. There are duplicates a-plenty, and many similar biases with different names, scattered willy-nilly.

I’ve taken some time over the last four weeks (I’m on paternity leave) to try to more deeply absorb and understand this list, and to try to come up with a simpler, clearer organizing structure to hang these biases off of. Reading deeply about various biases has given my brain something to chew on while I bounce little Louie to sleep.

Source: Cognitive bias cheat sheet

Assessing the Assessments: Development of a Tool To Evaluate Assessment Items According to Learning Outcomes | Simon B Bedford and Glennys O’Brien – Academia.edu

Assessing the Assessments: Development of a Tool To Evaluate Assessment Items According to Learning Outcomes

Source: Assessing the Assessments: Development of a Tool To Evaluate Assessment Items According to Learning Outcomes | Simon B Bedford and Glennys O’Brien – Academia.edu

Why girls are put off studying computer science

Despite the phenomenal rise in computing over the last 50 years, the birth of the internet, and our ever increasing reliance on technology, women are still not engaging with computer science at the same rate as men.

This has been outlined in a recent report from the University of Roehampton, which reveals that only 9% of girls schools offer computing at A-level, compared with 44% of boys schools, and 25% of mixed-sex sixth forms and colleges.

The report shows that in 2016 only a minority of schools (29%) entered pupils for GCSE computing – despite it being a foundation subject on the national curriculum. The figure is even lower at A-level, with only 24% of schools entering their students for the qualification.

Things don’t fair any better in further education either, with the Digest of Education statistics revealing the percentage of females who took an undergraduate degree in computer science in 1970-71 was 14%. This rose to 37% in 1983-84 but gradually declined to 18% in 2010-11.

Source: Why girls are put off studying computer science

Writing for an academic journal: 10 tips | Higher Education Network | The Guardian

The Journal of Academic Librarianship (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What seems like common sense isn’t common practice, says Rowena Murray who shares her top tips for getting published

Source: Writing for an academic journal: 10 tips | Higher Education Network | The Guardian

Windows Azure for Research on LinkedIn & Twitter – MSDN UK Team blog – Site Home – MSDN Blogs

English: Cloud Computing Image (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Announcing the Windows Azure for Research LinkedIn discussion group!

The group will serve as an opportunity to connect and engage with researchers and domain experts to drive awareness of Microsoft Research and Windows Azure for Research. We’d like for you to be part of the community and discussions.

What is the Windows Azure for Research initiative?

This is a program designed to help the research community use cloud computing to handle the challenges of data-intensive science. The culmination of more than three years of experimentation with using Windows Azure for scientific research, the Windows Azure for Research Initiative will help scientists accelerate the speed and dissemination of scientific discoveries.

via Windows Azure for Research on LinkedIn & Twitter – MSDN UK Team blog – Site Home – MSDN Blogs.

Azure Research Engagements – Microsoft Research

The Windows Azure for Research project facilitates and accelerates scholarly and scientific research by enabling researchers to use the power of Windows Azure to perform big data computations in the cloud.

Windows Azure Research Award Program

Microsoft Research is soliciting proposals for the use of Windows Azure in research. We welcome research proposals from any branch of scholarly activity. To qualify, applicants must be affiliated with an academic institution or non-profit research laboratory. In addition to individual investigator projects, we are interested in projects that will support access to services and data of value to a collaboration or community. Winning proposals will be awarded large allocations of Windows Azure storage and compute resources for a period of one year.

We will periodically announce additional special-opportunity RFPs on specific cloud research topics. These topics will include community research data services, streaming instrument data to the cloud, machine learning in the cloud, large-scale image analysis, environmental science, astronomy, genomics, and urban science.

Your proposal should not exceed three pages in length. It should include resource requirement estimates (number of core, storage requirements, and so forth) for your project.

via Azure Research Engagements – Microsoft Research.

Research Besmirched—When Practitioners Just Don’t Believe! Why Research is the Best Source of Information, Even When It has Limitations and Flaws! @WillWorkLearn

This article from Will Thalhimer, particularly in relation to the limitations of lab-based rather than practical reserach, is excellent. It encapsulates exactly why my own research is based on my actual work and not some contrived set of lab-based circumstances. It is let down only by its fondness for exclamation marks…

It also reminds me of my mantra, “Despite what they would have you believe, no one knows anything.”

In the learning field, research insights can help practitioners (trainers, teachers, instructional designers, elearning developers) build more effective learning interventions. Unfortunately, some practitioners look at the flaws and limitations in the research and reject research entirely. This article, by noted research-translator, Will Thalheimer, PhD, provides insights into balancing research limitations and benefits—by examining the workplace learning field.

Source: Research Besmirched—When Practitioners Just Don’t Believe! Why Research is the Best Source of Information, Even When It has Limitations and Flaws! | npj Science of Learning Community

The Best Citation & Bibliography Tools to Write a Better Research Paper

If you write essays in high school, college, or anywhere, you know how important putting together a bibliography can be. The bibliography is an essential part of your work. It shows the sources you’re quoting and allows you to avoid the dreaded accusation of plagiarism.

But citing sources can be mind-numbingly tedious, and it can be hard to format a citation correctly. Luckily, there are many online resources that take the guesswork out of the Works Cited page!

Here are a few online tools, and most of them free. We hope they will help you cite your sources correctly and put together your bibliography no matter how complex.

Source: The Best Citation & Bibliography Tools to Write a Better Research Paper

Node Hero – Getting Started With Node.js Tutorial | @RisingStack

If you’re interested in Node.js this is a helpful tutorial in its use from Rising Stack.

This is the first post of an upcoming Node.js tutorial series called Node Hero – in these chapters, you can learn how to get started with Node.js and deliver software products using it.

Update: as a sequel to Node Hero, we have started a new series called Node.js at Scale. Check it out if you are interested in more in-depth articles!

We are going to start with the basics – no prior Node.js knowledge is needed. The goal of this series is to get you started with Node.js and make sure you understand how to write an application using it, so don’t hesitate to ask us if anything is unclear!

Source: Node Hero – Getting Started With Node.js Tutorial | @RisingStack