MetaFilter posts tagged with Learning

Are you happy to see me or is that just a dictionary in your pocket?

Gyan — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 22:16:55 -0800

In search of the world’s hardest language

Expeditions to the Polar Regions

netbros — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:01:49 -0800

The Polar Discovery team has documented science in action from pole to pole during the historic 2007-2009 International Polar Year, and covered five scientific expeditions. The science projects explored a range of topics from climate change and glaciers, to Earth’s geology, biology, ocean chemistry, circulation, and technology at the icy ends of the earth. Through photo essays and other multimedia, they explain how scientists collected data and what they discovered about the rapidly changing polar regions. From the awesome folks at WHOI.

Learn.Genetics

netbros — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 16:35:03 -0800

grumblebee's post about cell size and scale the other day was quite fascinating. Pulling back to the home for that site, the Genetic Science Learning Center at the University of Utah delivers educational materials on genetics, bio-science and health topics ranging from stem cells to gene therapy, and from epigenetics to heredity. Explore the neurobiology of normal and addicted brains and the genetic contribution to this chronic disease.

Goodbye, "Leih Hou Ma," Hello "Ni Hao Ma!"

zarq — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:57:09 -0800

"Chinatown" communities across the United States (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco) are undergoing a shift in linguistic identity, as recent immigrants are more likely to natively speak Mandarin (the official spoken language of China, Hong Kong and Taiwan,) instead of Cantonese. Also see these anecdotal reports about similar changes in Vancouver and Oakland, CA. Good news for the tri-literate: signs like this may soon become commonplace. :) The Language Atlas of China The PopUp Chinese Podcast and Arch Chinese site provide basic Mandarin lessons. Also see: Mango, ZhongWen and LiveMocha

Orchids

netbros — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 10:24:46 -0800

How do you spread your genes around when you're stuck in one place? By tricking animals, including us, into falling in love. Orchids — Love and Lies Orchids are dizzying in their diversity. Over the past 80 million years, some 25,000 wild species have taken root on six continents, in nearly every kind of habitat. Representing a full fourth of the world's flowering plants, there are four times as many orchid species as mammals, and twice as many as birds. Perhaps the most clever deceit of all is offered by those orchids that hold out the promise of sex. And not exactly normal sex. Really weird sex, in fact. I went in search of one of the most ingenious and diabolical of orchids: the Ophrys. (Some botanists call it the "prostitute orchid.") I'd been eager to lay eyes on this orchid and meet its hapless pollinator ever since reading about its reproductive strategy, which involves what my field guide referred to as "sexual deception" and "pseudocopulation." The pollination strategy of the Ophrys is, like that of so many orchids, ingenious, intricate, wily, and seemingly improbable—so much so that proponents of intelligent design sometimes point to orchids as proof that the hand of a higher intelligence must be at work in nature. (And a rather sadistic intelligence at that.) Yet the peculiarities of orchid sex actually offer one of the great case studies of natural selection, as Charles Darwin himself understood. Darwin was fascinated by orchid pollination strategies, and though he was puzzled by the purpose of Ophrys's uncanny resemblance to bees (pseudocopulation wasn't observed until 1916), he taught us much of what we know about these plants in The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids are Fertilised by Insects, the volume he published immediately after The Origin of Species. Outcrossing, or mixing one's genes with distant mates, increases vigor and variation in one's offspring, maximizing fitness. The sexual frustration of a deluded bee turns out to be an essential part of the orchid's reproductive strategy. Determined not to make the same mistake again, the bee travels some distance and, if things work out for the orchid, ends up pseudocopulating (and leaving his package of pollen) with an orchid a ways off. That distant orchid is likely to look and smell ever so slightly different from the first, and some botanists believe these subtle variations from plant to plant are part of the orchid's strategy to prevent bees from learning not to fall for a flower. "Imperfect floral mimicry" [pdf] is the botanical term for this adaptation. There's a video on YouTube, a riveting snippet of interspecies porn, in which you can watch a wasp be utterly bamboozled, and then humiliated, by an Australian tongue orchid. The tongue orchid (Cryptostylis) lures its pollinator by deploying a scent closely resembling the pheromone of the female wasp. "Prurient apparitions," is how Victorian critic John Ruskin described these flowers. Prurient? Is it possible that humans can look at an orchid and, like the deluded orchid bees or male dupe wasps, see an apparition of female anatomy? (Georgia O'Keeffe certainly did.) Could it be that plant sex and animal sex have gotten their wires crossed in human brains just as they have among the bugs? That accident of evolution has proved another happy one for the orchid, for look how much we humans now do for these flowers: the prices paid, the risks to life and limb endured, the pains taken …

"Let people live in your heart"

madamjujujive — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 17:21:59 -0800

Children Full of Life - grade 4 students in Kanazawa, Japan learn deep life lessons from their incredible teacher and from each other. I strongly recommend this as awesome, but one caveat: keep tissues handy. (5 parts, 40 minutes total, English)

Building A New Culture Of Teaching And Learning

peregrine81 — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 17:44:29 -0800

Dr. Tae describes the way the US system of education is failing and how to fix it.

Comics in the classroom

Brandon Blatcher — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:51:49 -0800

Comics in the Classroom: 100 Tips, Tools, and Resources for Teachers

How-to Videos and Wikis

netbros — Tue, 26 May 2009 07:25:24 -0800

Howcast shows engaging, useful how-to videos and wiki guides. A few examples include: How to Do Polyphasic Sleeping, How to Make a Fried Onion Blossom, or How to Do a Frontside 180 Ollie. Founded by veterans of Google and Youtube.

Daddy, Mommy, More Video

netbros — Mon, 25 May 2009 06:16:58 -0800

TotLol is a video website designed specifically for children. It is community moderated Youtube. The videos are submitted, screened and rated by parents. Some samples include: Bassett Hound Beat Box, Guitar Tips for Kids, and a Children's Book on India. Educational and fun.

Study Guides, Teacher Resources

netbros — Sun, 24 May 2009 04:02:58 -0800

Shmoop is study guides and teacher resources that help us understand how literature and history and poetry are relevant today. Take for example Shakespeare's Sonnet 130. Get a technical analysis of it's literary devices, explanations of the themes, and audio/video readings of the sonnet.

An American Art Form

netbros — Thu, 21 May 2009 17:06:00 -0800

NEA Jazz in the Schools takes a step-by-step journey through the history of jazz, integrating that story with the sweep of American social, economic, and political developments. This multi-media curriculum is designed to be as useful to high school history and social studies teachers as it is to music teachers. Start with the introductory video to get a feel for the place. The education outline contains five lessons. If you just want to listen, all the music samples are on one page. Perhaps you're more interested in individual artist biographies, or a jazz history timeline. These lessons are designed as units; five units serve as a week-long curriculum. NEW ORLEANS: MELTING POT OF SOUND — Jazz grew out of the African-American community at the turn of the 20th century, a time when blacks were being denied their most basic rights. The music has since become a part of every American’s birthright, a timeless symbol of American individualism and ingenuity, American democracy and inclusiveness. The birthplace of jazz is New Orleans, the most cosmopolitan city in the South. THE JAZZ AGE AND CHICAGO — In the 1920s, jazz spread rapidly all across America. The rise of jazz was part of a new, post–World War I optimism, a prevailing sense that something new was happening, that America was finally breaking from European culture and coming into its own. Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald called the new era the Jazz Age. FROM SWING TO BOP — With the decline in popularity of swing bands and the rise of singers as pop stars, many jazz musicians in the mid-1940s retreated to smaller groups of five or six instruments that were easier to organize, were cheaper to book in clubs, and provided more freedom for individual musicians to express themselves. NEW FRONTIER — The 1960s are virtually synonymous with social and political upheaval in America, and with a popular culture nourished by intrepid experimentation and a rejection of traditional symbols of authority. Of course, in the world of jazz, musicians had already been responding to—and carrying out—upheavals in American society for some time. AN AMERICAN STORY — Jazz is the purest expression of the American spirit—innovative, independent, and, ultimately, revolutionary. The history of jazz is inextricably linked with the political, geographic, and cultural history of America, and to understand the evolution of this music is to grasp the passion and genuine humanity at the heart of American democracy.

"Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will."

amyms — Fri, 01 May 2009 23:47:14 -0800

There are times when having a fully developed brain can almost seem like an impediment. Are babies more aware of the world around them than adults are? Can "thinking like a baby" lead us to be more in tune with our creativity and our ability to learn? Scientists have taken a new look inside the baby mind, which is "unfocused, random, and extremely good at what it does."

Before everything, there was PLATO

WolfDaddy — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 18:29:57 -0800

Touch screen. Awesome graphics. Online community. No, I'm not talking about the latest handheld device to hit the market, I'm talking about Control Data's PLATO system. PLATO People. Preservation efforts. Empire.

He's a big boy now

Vamier — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 07:09:52 -0800

A bald, child-like creature dangles its legs from a chair as its shoulders rise and fall with rythmic breathing and its black eyes follow movements across the room. It's not human -- but it is paying attention. (via)

Life Through the Lens

netbros — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 11:00:11 -0800

Microscope Imaging Station opens a door to the wonder of the microscopic world and allows the layman to explore it. They seek to recreate some of the excitement and wonder that the earliest biological researchers found. Features include cells with potential as well as bad oogy. The microscopic Galleries are inhabited by zygotes and organelles.

GOALISSI-no

doobiedoo — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 12:41:10 -0800

"Ready, aim ... fail, why setting goals can backfire."

Teaching Art History

netbros — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 16:17:33 -0800

SmARThistory is an edited online art history resource to augment or replace traditional art history texts. For a given artwork, smARThistory brings together podcasts, video clips, images, links to other resources, and commentary, providing a rich context for the work. Indexed by timeline, artistic style, artist and theme.

The African-American Migration Experience

netbros — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 08:44:41 -0800

In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience is organized around thirteen defining migrations that have formed and transformed African America and the nation. From The New York Public Library, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture [prev], more than 16,500 pages of text, 8,300 illustrations, and 60+ maps. Until recently, people of African descent have not been counted as part of America's migratory tradition. The transatlantic slave trade has created an enduring image of black men and women as transported commodities, and is usually considered the most defining element in the construction of the African Diaspora, but it is centuries of additional movements that have given shape to the nation we know today. This is the story that has not been told.

World War II History Reference

netbros — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 07:03:07 -0800

"With Germany arming at breakneck speed, England lost in a pacifist dream, France corrupt and torn by dissension, America remote and indifferent... do you not tremble for your children?" ― Winston Churchill, 1935. The World War II Database connects people, events, photographs, and other elements of history in relational db form to tell the story of the 20th century's 2nd great war.

Online to Onstage

netbros — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 13:36:07 -0800

Guitar Noise is a free guitar lesson website with hundreds of articles, tips and reviews for students of this versatile instrument. Whether you are a beginner, a lefty, a bass player or a singer, Guitar Noise has lessons on nearly everything and anything to do with the guitar. There are many talented musicians out there. The artist profiles section includes interviews with dozens. The forums, blog and podcasts help you keep up with this thriving community.

Homework Helper

netbros — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 21:39:07 -0800

World of Science contains budding encyclopedias of astronomy, scientific biography, chemistry, and physics. This resource has been assembled over more than a decade by internet encyclopedist Eric Weisstein with assistance from the internet community. MeFi visited Weisstein's Mathworld a couple years ago.

An Interactive Map of the Night Sky

netbros — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 21:20:34 -0800

Star Viewer ― merging Google Earth (Sky) with Hubblecast videos to learn more about what you're seeing in the night sky. Alternatively, if you have Google Earth 4.3 or above you can watch these videos in Google Earth (Sky). Virtual Tourism has its own layer in the Sky section of Google Earth that includes most of the videos on this page. The layer can be found under the 'Education Center' folder. Hubblecast also now have a layer of videos in Google Earth. Alternatively you can download this kml of the videos. The checkboxes at the top of the page will turn on a number of layers. The 'Sat' checkbox will turn on the locations of satellites orbiting the Earth. The 'Hubble' checkbox will turn on the current position of Hubble. The 'Constellations' checkbox will turn on the constellations.

Freelance Advice and Jobs

netbros — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 07:19:41 -0800

FreelanceSwitch covers many of the topics freelancers need to know about with their daily articles and tips. They run a freelance job board and have regular podcasts so you can learn a little something while you work or commute. Check out the FreelanceSwitch forums for support and advice from other freelancers, or check out their resources section. FreelanceSwitch has been mentioned previously on AskMe.

Welcome to the Khan Academy

y10k — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 09:38:25 -0800

Sal Khan likes explaining things, and he's really good at it. Here he is on CNN giving an excellent explanation of the financial crisis. And here's a great explanation of Newton's Law of Gravitation. His YouTube channel has over 700 lectures and you leave understanding everything he talks about no matter the subject.