February 25, 2013

It is my experience that the more deeply I learn about a domain, the more questions I have. Similarly, when I know very little about something, I have lots of questions as well (although these are usually much different questions than the questions I have as I gain expertise). In the middle somewhere, the number of questions I have drops off as I mistakenly believe that I understand the domain better than I actually do.
Being able to ask questions about a domain is one of the ways one learns about it. So this diagram implies that a challenge in becoming an expert in a domain of knowledge is that eventually you know too much, and you run out of questions to ask, making learning more in that domain more challenging.
How can we encourage people to continue to ask questions as their expertise grows?
write comment More articles
February 22, 2013
I'm currently working on math enrichment activities with some 3rd and 4th grade students. Aside from using some standard resources for enrichment, I'm finding that I can find challenging problems ...
write commentFebruary 21, 2013
This afternoon my wife and I participated in my son's student-led conference. In this conference, my son led us through a sample of various classroom activities he's done over the course of the ...
write commentFebruary 21, 2013
I read an interesting article recently about over-parenting, where children are made helpless because of too much support from their parents (and teachers). After I read the article, I remember ...
read 5 commentsFebruary 20, 2013
I've been playing with paper folding recently, and exploring the mathematics involved. I'm simply amazed by the number of mathematical ideas that can be represented by paper folding, so I thought ...
write commentFebruary 20, 2013
(Image credit: Left - Multnomah County Library, Right: Sam Howzit)
If you ask people who attempt to predict the future of education, you will find out quickly that there are two very ...
read 4 commentsFebruary 19, 2013
I've been working on improving ActivePrompt, and I decided to split it off to it's own domain. This script was originally created by Riley Lark, and I've been working on my own fork of his ...
write commentFebruary 18, 2013
If you are involved in educational research or you are interested in learning more from educational research, I strongly recommend watching this presentation by Dr. Sam Weinburg (via Dan ...
read 1 commentFebruary 16, 2013
I don't think we are doing a good enough job of preparing high school students for the university experience. We need to do more!
We should increase class sizes in high school up to 500, so ...
read 4 commentsFebruary 15, 2013
I am presenting in Hope, British Columbia today, on the topic of Math in the Real World. Here are my presentation slides.
You will probably notice that sections 6 and 7 of my presentation are ...
write comment