mauvaise foi

Junct Rebellion

Junct Rebellion. Nothing further at this time.

Zombie-Based Learning

Awesome Kickstater funded project just hit the $5K goal:

Learning Geography skills through a Zombie Apocalypse narrative.

This project is to design a full middle school geography curriculum taught in the context of a Zombie Apocalypse. This project is part text book, part teaching plans, part role playing simulation – all innovative, creative, and engaging learning. With the book and learning materials that are created from this project, teachers and students will be able to learn real world geographic concepts by learning and applying their knowledge to survive in a world overrun by zombies.

The purpose for this project is simple. To create lessons that engage learners and build memorable experiences for their learning to take place, while empowering teachers to tap into student engagement.

Why Zombie-Based Learning is Awesome

What we’re doing here, is teaching how to be a geographer by learning skills needed to survive a zombie apocalypse. Imagine being in a classroom where instead of reading about maps, you’re designing them to show the spread of a zombie outbreak. Instead of reading about the distribution of resources on Earth in a textbook, you are researching available resources to plan your post-outbreak settlement. I’m not just talking about learning where places are or memorizing capitals of states or countries, I’m talking about learning the deeper concepts of geography that geographers actually use. And all in an exciting scenario.”

brain death

Analysis of a field test of new instruments for measuring electrodermal activity reveals flatlining student brain activity during lectures and classes on par with watching TV.

Via Lisa Wade @ Sociological Images and Joi Ito, & Boing Boing.

Students brains flatlining during classes

on doctoral education

What the new managerialist pressures on supervision amount to is an attempt to standardise and downgrade the PhD. The immediate effects are to de-skill the supervisors, institute fake accountability, and make the students’ work more hasty and formulaic, in the name of faster ‘completions’, more control and greater output. It is much more difficult for someone to take the time and do the deep thinking and make mistakes, and work out new directions, and bring off a genuinely innovative project, under the current PhD regimen. I think this is, to be blunt, stupid policy, whose long-term effect is to undermine the quality of intellectual life in Australia. It is so stupid, its effect so predictable, that one wonders if this consequence is intended. Other attacks on universities suggest our government and corporate elite want a tamer, more predictable and more controllable intelligentsia.

Raewyn Connell, writing in the current issue of Australian Universities’ Review.

Resurrect ye zombies

Nearly that time of year again and while this blog post, by Katy Meyers, was written for students preparing for the apocalype of the new semester it is still cogent advice for academics as well.