S Spaeth's List: Inquiry Cycles

• Dispersed Principle
   Meaning/knowledge is dispersed in the sense that the learner shares it with others outside the domain/game, some of whom the learner may rarely or never see face-to-face.

  • Theron's request for help in recalling information that a Google search could not find and my process in finding that vaguely recalled information illustrates this principle.
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• And there are a hand full of teachers, such as Jim Minstrell, who have been able to do meaningful and important research, in his case on the learning of physics, while employed as full time secondary school teachers.

  • Just the next day, I read the next chapter in Gee and found the answer to Theron's question: Jim Minstrell.

  • I tried to recall Minstrell's name but could not initially and wrote to Theron saying that I'd store his request in working memory for a few days to see whether I could reconnect some old neural pathways.
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  • • This paper helped me confirm that the teacher Theron wanted to reference is Jim Minstrell.
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• Gee draws on Jim Minstrell's research in high school physics classrooms. Gee does not use inline citations but the Bibliographic Notes at the end of the chapter "Cultural Models" cites Minstrell's work. - S Spaeth on 2010-02-20
• They may bring, as well, a model that says: "Learning is a matter of memorizing information from teachers and books."
  "These models are not "wrong" -- indeed, a great many schools operate so as to reinfrce them daily. Nonetheless, if you have gotten this far in this book, you know that I believe they are in many situations unfortunate models of learning. Howeever, if students are to adopt different models of content learning in school, teachers need to know htat these unfortunate models of exist. Students need to think about them, why they have them, where they do and do not work, and why they might want to adopt new and different models in word and deed. Of course, the newer models I am advocating involve the sorts of active and critical learning I have been stressing throughout this book." p. 171 - S Spaeth on 2010-02-20
• Theron's request lead me to make a closer reading of this part of Gee's book than I might have without his request. - S Spaeth on 2010-02-20

• He began studying the learning and teaching of his own students and those of his teacher colleagues. The negative connotation of the term misconceptions and the realization that there were strengths as well as problematic thinking in his students’ understandings prompted Jim and colleagues to coin the term “facets of student thinking.”

• Yesterday, Theron indicated that he too wanted to brush up on his understanding of simulations for learning. He commented on my blog post: Institutional commitment to learning via real problems:

  Do you remember the name of the tool you used to play with ant movements, evolutionary change, and tragedy of the commons. I am looking for something students can use to investigate the spread of flu.

  Thanks, T

  • Here, something I wrote triggered Theron's interest in an idea. Compare this with Theron's asking about Minstrell enriching my reading of Gee's discussion of models of learning.
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• I'm assuming here

  • Seems to be talking with someone who sent him a snippet of data and said, Would it be possible to stream Phone sensor data to Plot..ly? 
• 416703813.677650

  • This column is absolute time in seconnds since an arbitrary date. The other alternative in the Sensor Data app is relative time with respect to the start of the program. Use relative time unless you need the additional information.
• I'm off here

  • Yes, it is a little off. The csvLines actually include an initial record of column headings, e. g., Timestamp, RotRate_X, ..., RotRate_Z. They are important because they cause errors in the subsequent code.
• # Generate a unique stream object for every token that you have # In this case, we'll plot 6 lines, and therefore use 6 tokens and 6 stream objects streams = [plotly.stream(tokeni) for tokeni in stream_tokens]

  • This line did not get transferred to the "your code might look like" In[]
• My code insertion here:

  • Does this indicate that he got the rest of the code from somewhere else? Where? Why no credit?
• streams

  • This call to streams fails
• float(splitLine[0])

  • This float() causes problems in the streaming when it encounters the column heading records. Need a test and adjustment to filter the data for these.

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