StATS: Interesting websites, publications and quotes for the month of February (February 13, 2006) Category: Interesting stuff

Note: any quotations on this page have been moved to Category: Interesting quotes.

Using Humor to Teach Statistics: Must They Be Orthogonal?. Lomax RG, Moosavi SA, The University of Alabama. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Diego, April 17, 1998. Accessed on 2006-02-13.

[Excerpt] Until the middle of this century, humor was not viewed as a widely accepted technique for instructional purposes (Bryant, Comisky & Zillman, 1979). This was largely due to the view of education as a serious, formal endeavor. Thus the use of humor as a pedagogical device is a rather recent phenomena. Empirical research on humor has been underway since the 1970's although anecdotal evidence has existed for much longer. The anecdotal evidence consistently suggests that humor is an extremely effective tool (e.g., Cornett, 1986). Initial empirical work tended to focus on documenting and describing the use of humor in the classroom (e.g., Bryant, Comisky & Zillman, 1979). This work has shown that humor of many types is in fairly wide usage across many disciplines (e.g., Bryant, Comisky & Zillman, 1979) and that the use of humor in the classroom is hypothesized to reduce tension (e.g., Wells, 1974), to improve classroom climate (e.g., Welker, 1977), to increase enjoyment (e.g., Gilliland & Mauritsen, 1971), to increase student-teacher rapport (e.g., Welker, 1977) and to facilitate learning (e.g., Robinson, 1977; Watson & Emerson, 1988). www.bamaed.ua.edu/~rlomax/LOMAX/HUMOR.HTM

Using Technorati Tags. Technorati. Accessed on 2006-02-06.

[My comments] Most blogs have a rather disorganized structure (mine included) and tags are a way to bring order back. It also makes it easier for you to search for information more effectively on the web. Technorati offers a service that indexes tags across a wide range of blogs as well as across image services like FlickR. technorati.com/help/tags.html

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