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Hot off the presses...

For those who were not able to participate personally in the AEA's Teaching Innovations Program (TIP), you can still get a taste of the project through a new book, Teaching Innovations in Economics: Strategies and Applications for Interactive Instruction. The first few chapters talk about the program itself and then there is a chapter on each of the interactive strategies that TIP focused on, i.e., cooperative learning, classroom experiments, interpretive discussion, formative assessment, context-rich problem solving, teaching with cases, and active learning in large-enrollment courses (full disclosure: I'm a contributor to one of the chapters - take a wild guess which one!). There are tons of good ideas, with solid advice from people who have implemented the techniques themselves.

I also just got a notice that the paperback version of The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates is coming out in May. I haven't read it yet but just have to give props to a book that can (apparently in complete seriousness) claim, "Leeson argues that the pirate customs we know and love resulted from pirates responding rationally to prevailing economic conditions in the pursuit of profits."

And while I'm sharing cool resources, someone sent me a link to a list of 15 Fascinating TED Talks for Econ Geeks, most of which actually are pretty fascinating. I'm a big fan of TED talks - they are short enough that I can justify watching them as a break from whatever else I should be doing but usually educational/insightful enough that I still feel like I'm doing something productive while I'm procrastinating...


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  1. Don CoffinMarch 23, 2011 at 3:05 PM

    I love two things about the book. the first is the price ($125)--they're not aiming at the individual market, are they? Large economics departments only need apply. And, according to Amazon, they'll ship it in 1 - 3 weeks...so they're not carrying any inventory.

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  2. Jennifer ImazekiMarch 24, 2011 at 12:54 PM

    Yeah, I was tempted to make a snarky side comment about the price but I have no idea who makes the decisions about those sorts of things and I didn't want to offend the editors :-). But I think most college libraries should be willing to get it for you...

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  3. Don CoffinMarch 24, 2011 at 1:41 PM

    Yeah, we're working on that. Another possibility is our teaching-learning center.

    ReplyDelete

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