Time-keeping Brain Neurons Discovered

The point is that time and space are the deep fundamentals and time training is one of the most important things an education system does.

Time-keeping Brain Neurons Discovered:

"An MIT team led by Institute Professor Ann Graybiel has found groups of neurons in the primate brain that code time with extreme precision. 'All you do is time stamp everything, and then recalling events is easy: you go back and look through your time stamps until you see which ones are correlated with the event,' she says."

Open Source PD for High School Science

version 4 updated 9.08.09 6:00 amEDT

Instead of paying teachers to listen to someone else, what if teachers were paid to listen to each other.

The Paper
It could be a postcard, a letter or an ad in the school newspaper. But whatever it is, it appears in the teacher's mailbox or is handed to the teacher by an AP.

The focus this week is Evolution and BioDiversity, There will be a PD session next Tuesday to brainstorm how we might be able to use what's in the video for our classes.

Reader's note 1 "brainstorm how we might be able to use" is at the heart of the "development" part of "professional development." A combination of face to face plus on line mentoring is the heart of the "professional" part of "professional development." (see argument at the end of the post)

A Taste for Insects 57:53 minutes. is from the University of California's UCTV.
On the web at http://bit.ly/VpbXS

Reader's note 2 "http://bit.ly/VpbXS" is an easy-ish to remember and type URL. But it is just one path. The other path is using 2D- QR code that is printed on the paper. It might look like the one below. Pointing a cellphone or a web cam will automatically take one to the A Taste for Insects video. That's the experience I'm trying to point to with "clickable print."

"How did the passion for collecting and collections of Darwin, Wallace and others of their period force them to understand and explain biodiversity? What is the legacy of this period of adventure and species discovery and how is it a vital part of current and future evolutionary research? Join Kipling Will, Associate Director of the Essig Museum of Entomology, UC Berkeley for this exploration. (#16071)

The video

The argument
Any time taken away from teachers thinking about and working with their students is wasted time. Teacher time is the scarce resource in school systems. Wasting it increases costs without increasing learning.

My direct experience is in the New York City school systems. I've seen how much money and time is wasted in that context.

With the explosion of great content on the internet this no longer has to be the case. With asynchronous communication on wikis and nings, expert moderated discussions are practical.

With the simple use of a piece of paper and the open source resources on the internet, we can have the same experience we want to give to our students.

Babies Use Their Own Names To Help Learn Language

"Bortfeld's research, which appears in the upcoming April issue of 'Psychological Science,' shows that babies use familiar words such as their names as a sort of 'anchor' into the speech stream. A baby as young as six months can learn to recognize an individual word that follows its own name, even after hearing both words as part of whole sentences, says Bortfeld who worked with colleagues from Brown University and the University of Delaware."

Recognition drives segmentation of the speech stream, and segmentation is a critical step in learning a language," Bortfeld explains. "We know from previous research that babies are recognizing their names in fluent speech by the age of six months, so we hypothesized that they should be able to use that recognition to segment the speech stream and recognize new words.

Much in the same way a person might have difficulty understanding a foreign language because it's hard to tell where one word starts and another begins, babies face a similar challenge in learning language. Bortfeld's research shows babies can begin to discern the beginnings and endings of words that follow their names, meaning their names form a foundation for learning language.

In what can be described as a "popping out" pattern, Bortfeld explains, one familiar word can allow a baby to pick out another word, and that newly familiar word may allow a baby to learn words that follow it.

read more at Science Daily

Familiar And Newly Learned Words Are Processed By The Same Neural Networks In The Brain

"In one of the experiments conducted in the NEURO programme, participants learned the name and/or purpose of 150 ancient tools. They had never heard these words before. The subjects' brain function was measured by means of magnetoencelography during the naming of the tools, both before and after the learning period.

The results show that the brain uses the same neural networks to process both familiar and newly learned words.
. . .
In other words, it seems that the processing of meanings in the brain differs essentially from the processing of names. On the other hand, the performance results indicated that new definitions were learned even faster than new names.

read at Familiar And Newly Learned Words Are Processed By The Same Neural Networks In The Brain: