MGS Peck Centre for Learning and Leadership
To win the presidency, a candidate needs 270 electoral college votes.
Check out the following Electoral College maps:
PRINCETON, NJ — A Gallup update based on more than 21,000 interviews conducted as part of Gallup Poll Daily tracking in October shows that registered voters’ religious intensity continues to be a powerful predictor of their presidential vote choice. John McCain wins overwhelmingly among non-Hispanic whites who attend church weekly, while Barack Obama dominates among whites who seldom or never attend church.
The Biosciences Research Division (BRD) is celebrating its First Birthday!
School of Thinking has an academic association with BRD and is delighted to congratulate Professor German Spangenberg and his world class team of scientists and support staff for all they have achieved this past year.
First Year BRD highlights have included:
• the successful commissioning of the Biosciences Research Centre at Bundoora
• revenue attraction
• development of IP patents and
• over 200 scientific publications.
VELS Thinking is part of the Victorian Educational Learning Standards (VELS) in the State of Victoria, Australia.
SOT supports the VELS Thinking approach to teaching thinking in Victorian schools which focuses on building skills in seven cognitive capacities: Reasoning, Processing, Inquiry, Creativity, Reflection, Evaluation, Metacognition.
Here are the VELS Thinking 7 links to wikipedia:
• Reasoning - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasoning
• Processing - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Processing
• Inquiry - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquiry
• Creativity - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creativity
• Reflection - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflection
• Evaluation - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaluation
• Metacognition - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metacognition.
Check out Metacognition first!
On Friday, Michael was invited by the Principal of Oakleigh Primary School, Cheryl Sanders, to conduct a training session on ‘teaching thinking skills’ for the teaching staff.
“I haven’t seen the staff so attentive for a long time. Ten minutes and you had them eating out of your hand or ‘hey this is not another boring presenter’!! Thank you for these resources they will be well used. I am glad that you are able to visit again and build on what you started. We will all look forward to meeting up again“, wrote the Principal at the end of the program.
Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson was recently awarded the first Visiting Fellowhip in Innovation Thinking by the Biosciences Research Division at La Trobe University.
Professor German Spangenberg, Executive Director, presented the academic award at a meeting of 60 top scientists from around Victoria at the John Scott Meeting House at La Trobe saying, “In the context of global competition and knowledge-based economies, innovation has become more and more mandatoy. Dr Hewitt-Gleeson will be conducting School of Thinking programs at BRD to help raise the innovation intelligence of our division”.
Michael is conducting a series of lectures for these scientists. The first two were:
• Darwinian Thinking and the cvs2bvs Brain Software,
and
• The GBB: Brain Software for going Beyond Critical Thinking.
To build on the previous blog, The Pale Blue Dot, today we have another mind-expanding example of perspective-shifting. This is a short documentary film written and directed by Ray Eames and her husband, Charles Eames in 1977.
This classic film depicts the relative scale of the Universe (as far as was known 20 years ago) in factors of ten and is called Powers of Ten:
••• Click here and watch the power of Powers of Ten …
NOTE: The film is a modern adaptation of the 1957 book Cosmic View by Kees Boeke and follow the form of the Boeke original, adding color and photography to the black and white drawings employed by Boeke in his seminal work. In 1998, Powers of Ten was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
Recession! Depression! Greed! Plague! Epidemic! War! Terror! Crusade! Victory! Glory! Triumph! …
If you’d like to take 3 minutes to watch something that helps you put everthing into perspective, let me prescribe a dose of Carl Sagan’s enlightened message … The Pale Blue Dot.
The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance
This is the first handbook where the world’s foremost ‘experts on expertise’ review our scientific knowledge on expertise and expert performance and how experts may differ from non-experts in terms of their development, training, reasoning, knowledge, social support, and innate talent.
General issues that cut across most domains are reviewed in chapters on various aspects of expertise such as general and practical intelligence, differences in brain activity, self-regulated learning, deliberate practice, aging, knowledge management, and creativity.
The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance
Edited by K. Anders Ericsson
Florida State University
Florida Institute of Human & Machine Cognition