We interrupt this weekend of mirror neurons (I know, I'm slow getting the posts out -- the weekend may extend into the week) to bring you this public service announcement. Well, not so much an announcement as a begging for advice and discussion.
Since I started writing about cognitive science almost exclusively on this blog, I've been getting links from course websites, faculty pages, etc., and it has made me think about how I, and other bloggers, can better facilitate science education. As I've said before, I think one purpose of academic blogs should be to educate people who will never take a course in cognitive science (or biology, physics, philosophy, underwater basketweaving, or whatever), about what's going on in our disciplines. I also wonder if it might be possible for us to work more closely with educators and their students, at all levels. So, my question to you is, how do you think I and other bloggers could work with educators?
Also, if you're teaching a course on cognition/cognitive psychology/cognitive science, are there any ways in which you think I could make this blog more student friendly? Do you have any suggestions about the content or format of the blog? How can this and other blogs help, if at all? Feel free to let me know in comments or in email.
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Well, I am not the kind of teacher you are asking, since your content is way above the level of my students (I teach middle school), but I have been thinking a lot about how to use blogs in my teaching.
I think what would be most important to me is a good form of organization, which is getting better/easier with improved tagging. For me, at least, having students just read a blog that covers many different topics (as most do) is not as useful as it is for them to be able to find all of the posts on a given subject.
I teach an advanced Ed Psy course and I encourage my students to visit your blog and Cognitive Daily since they learn many of the topics posted here. They find it to be at a too high level for their understanding. I try to keep up reading the blogs and all your postings because it keeps me up to date. I just love it. So, even if my students are not systematically reading it I found it very useful. There are times when I want only the plain interesting information in a nutshell, and that is what I find on blogs. Then I give a small nutshell to my students. And that helps me in my teaching.
I would appreciate if you would have postings related to cognition in education/teaching/learning (my students are or will become teachers :-)).
Thanks for doing this!
I started reading your blog fairly recently. I'm a (sort-of) computer scientist with an interest in cognitive science, philosophy of mind and AI (no degrees in anything yet, I simply do some information studies/enterprise communication research).
I like whatever I've read so far. It's all good.
A word about my own personal interests. I am interested in embodied cognition and situated cognition and interested in applying those kinds of distributed architectures to build AI agents. But all that said, I'm just starting to read the philosophy literature, really. So I try to browse through anything I see on your blog.
Thanks!