Youth Voice and Positive Identity-Building Practices: The Case of ScienceGirls
Jrène Rahm, Audrey Lachaîne, Ahlia Mathura, Canadian Journal of Education, Jul 20, 2014

The current issue of the Canadian Journal of Education is focused on youth voices inside and outside of education. I especially appreciate the latter focus; as I commented on Friday during my talk, learning takes place every conscious moment and the social environment is at least as important as the classroom in determining educational outcomes. This this essay (in situ) on the Science Girls: "in ScienceGirls, we have a choice; we choose the themes and subthemes, whether it is for the newsletter or the science fair project, so we have more choices. We make decisions by ourselves; it helps us develop our personal curiosity, autonomy and independence." How important is that, not just to science learning, but learning in general? See also the article Science isn’t just what we learn in school by Allison J. Gonsalves.

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Five Steps to Making Your Content Mobile Ready
Dawn Piulos, Xyleme, Jul 20, 2014

Some good stuff in this article on adapting your learning content to mobile delivery, including a nice table listing the impacts of different media on mobile devices. Performance support was the leading application, followed by videos and assessments. Virtual classrooms and course modules were at the bottom. Also, there's the observation that "the mobile delivery of learning content does not need to be a monolithic event. It can come in phases, just like adoption," which I think is a good point. There's more; if you're interested in mobile learning this is a good post.

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A Critique of Connectivism as a Learning Theory
Cybergogue, M.C. Wade, Jul 20, 2014

Here are a couple of things I hadn't seen before, courtesy of this post scooped by Susan Bainbridge
into the Connectivism resource base. It's essentially an extended argument against the idea that connectivism is a learning theory, and is notable because of a long background on just what counts as a theory. There's also this slide show from Vilimaka Foliaki from Tonga comparing connectivism and constructivism.

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