“I actually believe that we need domain specific online learning environments that cater to the pedagogies appropriate to different disciplines.” Mark Smithers

As compared with the LMS as all about management and and not much about learning.

Skin cancer in five minutes. Well actually, less than that.

Skin cancer in five minutes from jonathan rees on Vimeo.

“Scandals, however, raised questions about whether to trust U.S. researchers. In 1964, news broke that 22 patients at the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in Brooklyn had been injected with cancer cells without their knowledge”

NEJM. Worth a read.

‘When people say ludicrous things like “we don’t need to remember things any more because we have Google!” you can assume they haven’t tried to learn anything outside their domain for a long time.’

Yes, facts matter and memory is our intellectual ballast. Here.

No, not ‘up North’, but a neat way to check whether people have been sloppy or dishonest.  The following from the Economist

The GRIM test, short for granularity-related inconsistency of means, is a simple way of checking whether the results of small studies of the sort beloved of psychologists (those with fewer than 100 participants) could be correct, even in principle.

Full PeerJ reprint here.

 

Quotes from the THE on the topic of QAA and Oxford.

‘Oxford students have long been known to be among the hardest working in the UK, with analysis conducted by Times Higher Education in 2013 suggesting that undergraduates on many courses at the institution were dedicating more than 40 hours a week to their studies, on average, double what their peers at other universities might do.’

‘Oxford students taking courses in historical and philosophical studies spent an average of 41 hours a week studying, compared with 19.3 at Northumbria University, while in biological sciences, Oxford students’ average workload of 40.3 hours compared with 20.2 hours at the University of Portsmouth.’

This is a problem apparently for Oxford.

The next article in headed: “Dozens of QAA jobs ‘at risk’”

You could not make this stuff up.

“There is a naive view that giving more education to young people will help them get employed. This is a myth” 

Here.

Another (very) short video

Why is ‘brown’ melanin ‘blue’? from jonathan rees on Vimeo.

(Very) short video!

Why does psoriasis sometimes look white? from jonathan rees on Vimeo.

A short video on epidermal biology with an emphasis on barrier function and irritant dermatitis.

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The biology of the skin barrier: the eczema connection from jonathan rees on Vimeo.