education-theory

This book is required for one of my classes. It is dry. The print is too small, there is so much content that it is a ton of tedious reading. The notes at the ends of the chapters are good though.. you can get most of what you need to know from them. After the first several chapters, I found that I could read the 2 review sections at the end of each chapter and go read the chapter content for anything I didn't understand.

If you need a lot of protracted explanation on topics, then this book may suit your needs well. I found my self thinking, "enough already"! Yawn!!

This book is a collection of information about learning including classical and operant conditioning, information processing theory, Piagetian theory, cognitive development, motivation, and social learning theory. It not only discusses the theory but gives you practical applications for leading a classroom. While there is more emphasis on teaching children, there is a good amount about adult learning as well. It is well written in understandable English. In short, it's a book worth reading!

The book discusses the discoursely created understandings of education. It is a very easy-read book considering the complexity of Habermas' work. The author manages the difficult task of using Habermas in his discussion of education. I have succesfully used the book to operationalize the difficult question of how to evaluate educational policy goals.

On the negative side, it is very easy to be caugth up in excitement about the perspectives and scope of Habermas' work. But there is a huge gap between the philosofical discussions presented, and the problems of how to.. Don't expect this to be an educational manual. However, having read a considerable amount of Habermas litterature, this was hardly any surprise. Furthermore most of Habermas' work on education was written during or immediately after the student revolts in the 60's. This is a problem, which I fell the author doesn't pay enough attention to in this book. Allthough Habermas is a firm believer in non-violence, the radicalism of his writing shows. This should be taken into consideration, when one reads this book. Radicalism may not be the most promising way to look at our childrens future.

This book deals with two concerns in particular: learning for life and the specific learning characteristics of adults. Parts 1-4 deal with adult learning, while the final3 sections of Part 5 tackle implications for policy and practice.

Editors: A.C. Tuijnman is at the Department of Education, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands. Max van der Kamp is at the Department of Pedagogy, Andragogy and Education, University of Groningen, The Netherlands.

Birnbaum provides an interesting analysis of educational institutions between 1960 and 2000 groping for silver bullets to salve perceived failures and save their positions of influence. The book is worth reading to understand something of the nature of education institutions' political climate. Birnbaum's premise is well stated and discussed admirably, not withstanding some simplification to accomplish this in under 300 pages. His writing style is quite readable, as always.

In the introduction of the book, Ur dedicated a section on the difference between "practice" and "theory", and why the subtitle of the book is "practice and theory", rather than the more conventional "theory and Practice".

However, only in Introduction, I found two places where Ur used "theory and practice", and "theories and practices". What a confused and confusing author!

I wonder if anybody can learn anything out of the book of such confused author.

Do whatever you can to find a text that more clearly explains the theories and theories in practice of language teaching. I am currently using as a textbook in an introductory Teaching ESL course. We read out of it, but most of the material is omitted, corrected or adjusted by our instructor.

In this book, Penny Ur has created an indispensable reference on language teaching. This book covers everything from classroom management to testing to presenting vocabulary. Every section is clearly written and easy to put into practice. There is also a list of references for each chapter, for those who want to explore a topic in greater detail. If you were to buy just one book on language teaching, I would make it this one!

This subject is confusing in general, I have this professor and he's really confusing, but when I read his own book it's actually better that him.

Peter Linz's "An Introduction to Formal Languages and Automata" does a pretty good job at what the title implies: providing introductory explanations of the field of formal languages and automata. By its nature, some of the concepts in this field are fairly obscure and to follow their power or relevance requires some mathematical training and rigor. (Translation: this stuff can be hard to grasp at first, particularly for students who are not experienced or comfortable with proof-based mathematical discussions.) Being a graduate student, I had the benefit of having significantly more math experience than the undergraduates who typically encounter this material for the first time, so my review may be a little biased towards those with more mathematical training than people likely to be using this book.

In general, the book is clearly written and, while there are a number of errors dotted throughout the text, Peter Linz happily accepts corrections to be integrated into later versions of the book. In the course of reading the book, I found about a dozen errors, with a large concentration of them in Chapter 9.1's introduction to Turing Machines.

This text was the required book for an introductory computer science course at Rensselaer Polytechnic in Fall 2002. I used it in conjunction with Michael Sipser's "Introduction to the Theory of Computation", reading the relevant sections of Sipser's book after reading the introductions provided by Linz. I found Linz to be useful for introducing ideas, but generally lacking in the rigor to drive the point home with mathematical precision. Many times I found Sipser could say more precisely in two pages what Linz did in ten. However, the copious examples and explanation provided by Linz are useful for providing a context for the material being introduced. I think it would be difficult to try to learn directly from Sipser as the presentation there is pretty dense. The combination of the two books served me well in the course.

I was disappointed in the last two chapters of the book, however, which lacked much explanation and spent a lot of time hand-waving. The message of the last two chapters seemed to be "anything that interests you here is beyond the scope of this book." As a result, the chapters probably could have been omitted or replaced with a paragraph that says, "if you want to learn more, read the books listed on page 405."

Bearing in mind that Linz's book is, after all, an introductory text, the lack of rigor can be excused. I found the book thoroughly readable and learned quite a bit of introductory computer science by reading it. I would recommend it to anyone else who is interested in learning a little bit about basic theoretical computer science.

Formal languages and automata are highly theoretical topics. They would be difficult for anyone to explain. It is not fair to judge this book by the same rules that you would judge say a C++ book or a database book. Linz does as good a job as any I have seen in explaining this difficult material to a person learning it for the first time. I suspect that the reviewers that gave this book a bad review have not seen the competition. My experience is that this is the easiest to understand of the bunch.

Another thin book on a standard subject with horrendous price. Another cheap effort hope to reap in good cash. Look elsewhere, plenty of choices.

I had to get this book for an undergraduate class in number theory, so I had no choice but to shell out the cash. Price aside, it really is a decent textbook. It is easy enough to understand for even a non math person, and there is a nice range of easy, medium, and hard problems. Still, although I haven't looked at too many other textbooks, I bet you could find a book just as good for half the price.

The Bell Curve is not "exact science" but well researched observations. The Bell Curve findings are eye-opening and sad.

Unless the sub-cultures in America, mainly the blacks, get in step with mainstream America, the Bell Curve notion will continue to prove the observations made by the author of the The Bell Curve theory correct over and over again

It's a shame that the Bell Curve is considered racist by blacks.
The black's hatred of caucasians will always blind them to the steps that they need to take for them to share in the American Dream and contribute to American society rather than being lifelong liabilities to it.

The Bell Curve is not "exact science" but well researched observations. The Bell Curve findings are eye-opening and sad.

Unless the sub-cultures in America, mainly the blacks, get in step with mainstream America, the Bell Curve notion will continue to prove the observations by the author correct over and over again

It's a shame that the Bell Curve is considered racist by blacks.
The black's hatred of causians will always blind them to the steps that they need to take for them to share in the American Dream and contribute to American society rather than being lifelong liabilities to it.

When I read the Bell Curve in 1994 and again this year, I found it convincing, though I don't consider myself a racist. I was looking forward to hearing the "other side" of the debate, and this book provided one of the first opportunities. But I was truly dissapointed.

I did start out biased in that I didn't expect to be convinced. But I expected the contributing writers (or at least some of them) to provide some scientific evidence behind their claims. Yet precious little is there.

Don't get me wrong, it is well written, eliquent, and entertaining, it just doesn't hold up to scrutiny. For one thing, so many of the writers clearly didn't even read the Bell Curve. They use ideology instead of science in a desperately vain attempt to make their point.

That point?

Most could guess before reading that all contributing writers feel that it is in fact environment and socioeconomic factors are the main (or only) things that contribute to who we become. They do not give an inch on their traditionally liberal views that all or nearly all the differences in behavior in blacks, whites, and other races are the result of society. Genes play no role in their world.

We must open our eyes. The Bell Curve is not correct on everything. But the genie is out of the bottle. There is just too much evidence in so many scientific fields to support the main thesis of the Bell Curve.

Does anyone take Chomsky seriously? This book is worthless. By the way, Chomsky's remarks about the Holocaust denial book were not "misconstrued," and to my knowledge, he has never repudiated them. In fact, on the subject of the reality of the Holocaust (perhaps the most heavily documented historical event ever to take place), he declared himself "an agnostic." Why should anyone listen to a person who would say such a thing?

The comments in the above review are overly caustic. This is a detailed history, somewhat mundane at parts, but always informative. In regards to the comments on the holocaust controversy let me say this: Chomsky is a jewish intellectual, his parents were Hebrew teachers. He is a self-proclaimed agnostic and no doubt does not embrace the Jewish faith. However, the French intellectual you are indirectly referring to (who wrote a particularly racy tract saying that no formal extermination program existed in Nazi Germany), was defended by Chomsky on grounds of freedom of speech, as the book was being heavily censored. Chomsky has said "If we don't believe in freedom of speech precisely for our enemies, then we don't believe in it at all." The issue here is freedom of speech, not the extermination program. I also recall another quote of his: "It is a sad disservice to the the victims of the holocaust to adopt the maxim of their masters." It makes this reviewer wonder if a) if you even finsihed the book before your jurassic biases took over, b) if you have even read any of Chomsky's actual work, and c) if you are even remotely familiar with Chomsky's contributions to psycholinguistics.

Reimer wants his readers to think he's done something important by putting his tired, old ideas into new words (here and there) and using a new cover. Only his rabid followers will agree. This is the same old stuff that Reimer has always tried to sell and it fails for the same basic reasons: Reimer does not have -- Reimer never had -- a plausible explanation of the nature and value of music. Reimer is obvioulsy desperate -- he's running very hard -- to save his legacy in this "third" book (the same book x 3!). But he cannot. He fails, again, because a new generation of music education philosophers -- Bowman, Jorgensen, Elliott, Regelski -- has already exposed Reimer's poor thinking, weak scholarship, and faulty logic in the past. This "third" edition is full of the same old problems.

This book is poor. It 's not "philosophical" in any sense because it's not logical and it's not supported by the majority of music scholars today. Reimer contradicts himself at every turn; he doesn't understand what Langer is really saying; and. his absolutist notion of music is completely out of synch with what most scholars argue about music today. Reimer just mouths a lot of fluffy, feel-good nonsense.

The man has interesting viewpoints, but these are all overshadowed by the overwhelming verbage. He can explain these principles in fewer paragraphs without missing out on anything. Instead, he opts to confuse readers by using too many words and by beating around the bush. I'd rather read something else if this weren't a required text.