090108

There’s a new user of CommentPress in comp-land: Glenn Blalock and CompPile are using it to allow comments on roundtable statements from the WPA 2008 conference.

“Seems like people usually talk about power as a zero-sum game – somebody has it and somebody else doesn’t. But in some cases a teacher might gain a little power and a student might gain some, too. It’s not really taken from anybody.”

– Tom Newkirk, today

…categorizing the massive blogroll. If you’re not yet categorized, wait a bit.

Cognitive Daily discusses the findings of two interesting studies that suggest that simply seeing the colour red makes us perform worse on tests.

The articles discuss a couple of elegant studies by a research team, led by psychologist Andrew Elliot, which confirmed that seeing red makes us tend to do worse on tests. They then set about trying to understand why.

In a second study, students were given test booklets with the title in one of several possible colours. Interestingly, those who had booklets with red titles tended to choose easier questions…

More:
Mind Hacks: Seeing red can really affect performance

NEW YORK - Certain initials may look better than others as monograms but they can also have an impact on how well a person performs in a sport or at school, according to a new study.

Researchers who studied the impact of initials found that baseballs players whose first or last name starts with the letter K, which signifies a strikeout, tended to strike out more often than other players.

And students whose names start with the letters C or D, which denote mediocre marks in some grading systems, did not perform as well as other pupils with different initials.

More:
Name initials may influence grades: study

I’ve started a dissertation webtext. Whereas the Ungrading blog is the place where I toss around every academic idea I’m working with, the webtext is the actual dissertation-in-progress in electronic format. It’s still technically a blog with 20 posts and a commenting function, but the presence of the CommentPress system enables me to create a linear text while still enjoying the benefits of paragraph, section and whole-text comments.

In short, you’ll see more writing here, but it’ll be better sorted and organized there.

So check it out! My prospectus will make an appearance there first, followed by dissertation pieces and a bibliography. While I’m working, I’ll also be writing a short piece on the experience of dissertating with CommentPress (see section 19 of the webtext).