Orthoprint, or How I Open-Sourced My Face | Amos Dudley tags: 3d printing teeth dentistry weekly Joe Freedman’s Amazing Cycloid Drawing Machine – YouTube tags: art engineering math make maker weekly An Infantryman Learns To Code — Inside DigitalOcean — Medium I wonder how often this opportunity is there but the person isn’t . . . seems like the very definition of computational thinking. “In the end, the tool was very crude but accomplished something very useful: It had a flow that ensured all the reports required by people on the ground, and above, were sent in a timely and orderly manner. Each step of that flow was almost entirely automated. Each button filled a template and put the text in the clipboard for copy-pasting in the chat. Events were timed automatically. Distances and time of travel were computed automatically. A dropdown menu facilitated entering common values. Big warning signs were visible when a time critical step was ongoing, or some important data was missing.” tags: programming computationalthinking compthink weekly thoughtvectors Everything Is Crumbling ~ Stephen Downes “We see an awful lot in our field about what “the research tells us”, typically stated in such a way as to suggest we are charlatans if we don’t go along with it. I see this a lot, on a daily basis. “The […]

Presentation Zen: Can (and should) scientists become great presenters? “”People can only learn something new if they can relate it to something they already know. That’s the only way.” “When people like you [scientists & PhD students] talk about their research, half of the time even your peers don’t understand what the hell you are talking about, and when they do understand they find it boring. That’s the sad truth.” “Scientists cannot communicate very well with non-scientists, but in fact they cannot communicate well with other scientists either.” “If you are a PhD student, a post-Doc, or even a professor, where have you been all your life? In School! And school is the worst place where you could possibly learn communication.” “You see the problem here. We are learning to communicate by explaining things to people [professors] who all ready know [the material]. What kind of learning experience is that? It’s the wrong approach…..on top of that the purpose is being graded, which means we have to prove to those people grading us how clever we are.” “Find a simple way to explain something complex.”” tags: presentation zen scientists educators communication learning itrt weekly Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.