In my post "Re: 'Effective' teaching methods," of 17 November 2004
[Hake (2004a)], I quoted John Denker (2004):
". . . on average there's only about 5 years between 'miracles'. . .
[in teaching methods]. . . . I wonder if the people involved have
learned anything from the impermanence of their ideas?"
And then wrote [bracketed by lines "HHHHHHH. . . .":
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
EVIDENTLY NOT! In fact Crouch & Mazur (2001) at Harvard and Dori &
Belcher (2004) at MIT, not blest with the prescience of Gottlieb and
Denker, are wasting their times going along with yet another of those
cyclic short-lived fads (Interactive Engagement) that bedevil physics
education.
One might excuse Harvard and MIT as being Massachusetts ultra-liberal
wackos, but there are yet others lacking the Gottlieb/Denker wisdom,
such as [see Hake (2002) for the references]: Redish et al. (1997);
Saul (1998); Francis et al. (1998); Redish & Steinberg (1999); Redish
(1999); Beichner et al. (1999); Cummings et al. (1999); Novak et al.
(1999); Beichner et al. (2000); Bernhard (2000); Johnson (2001);
Meltzer (2002a,b,c); Meltzer & Manivannan (2002); Savinainen & Scott
(2002a,b); Steinberg and Donnelly (2002); Fagen et al. (2002); and
Van Domelen & Van Heuvelen (2002).
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
In response Boris Korsunsky (2004) wrote:
"And I am just curious, what could possibly be wrong with using
technology to get real-time student feedback during a college lecture
(Mazur and others)? How can this "bedevil" education? And what in the
world does it have to do with being "ultra-liberal wackos"? If you
try something new in class, then "the terrorists win" - is that the
idea? OK, maybe, I misunderstood the original posting..."
Boris's response demonstrates a problem in internet communication -
it's not easy to convey sarcasm, even by prose which may appear to
the author to be
totally outrageous.
I probably should have sprinkled ASCII faces ;-> into the text
between the lines "HHHHHHHHHHH. . ."
BTW, Boris's first sentence was:
"I'll take the liberty to respond since this message (partially
quoted below) did not carry the usual admonition not to."
Misunderstanding is rampant. My usual admonition reads:
"If you respond to this long (xx kB) post, please don't hit the reply
button unless you prune the original message normally contained in
your reply down to a few lines, otherwise you may inflict this entire
post yet again on suffering list subscribers."
This is NOT an admonition against responding! Instead it is an
admonition not to respond in such a way that the entire post is
needlessly repeated in the response.
This is consistent with suggestion #5 of my universally ignored
"Thirteen Posting Suggestions" [Hake (2004c)].
"Quote or repeat only the relevant sections of the post to which you
are responding and not the complete post (as may occur when you hit
the "reply" button - THE FINGER-JERK HIT-REPLY-BUTTON SYNDROME IS THE
BANE OF DISCUSSION LISTS. It litters the list with superfluous
already posted once ">", twice ">>", thrice ">>>", etc., etc.
material. Why can't list members take the few extra seconds to copy
and paste addresses in the 'To' and 'cc' slots?"