So, when you arrive to Oregon State, in the spirit of, well, school spirit, you’re told of all the things that OSU is known for. The marionberry, a cross between a raspberry and a blackberry and delicious, was cultivated here and the modern maraschino cherry developed here, too. Two-time nobelist, Linus Pauling graduated from OSU. [...]
October 22, 2010
Pedagogical excuses: bad penmanship
Finally an excuse for my bad black/whiteboardpersonship! Apparently, retention of information is improved if the way it is presented is difficult to read: … if something is hard to see or hear, it feels disfluent … We’d found that disfluency led people to think harder about things. Aside: the lead author, Connor Diemand-Yauman, either has [...]
July 7, 2010
The Watermelon Problem
Suppose you have gone bicycle camping and carried a small, but hefty, watermelon to enjoy by a fire1. Unfortunately, the watermelon is too big to eat in one sitting. And, unfortunately, since you don’t own any one-time-use plastic, you didn’t bring anything with which to protect a cut side. Cleverly, you think “Can I cut2 this [...]