Weeknote 36/2014
Doug Belshaw, 2014/09/11

Doug Belshaw has interviewed a number people (including me) over the last week or so on the topic of the Mozilla Web Literacy Framework. He writes, "I’m starting the ball rolling towards a v2.0 update of the Web Literacy Map (which looks prettier here in the Webmaker resources section). To do this, I’m recording the conversations and posting the audio together with a summary on this blog. Below is a list of the 15 people I’ve talked to this week, together with links to the recordings – where I’ve had time to process them. You can find the repository on archive.org."

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Using Webb's Depth of Knowledge to Increase Rigor
Gerald Aungst, Edutopia, 2014/09/11

Just another example of a case in education research where a pointless taxonomy is developed and named after someone (one wonders how far education would advance if this practice were no longer allowed). Webb's "Depth of Knowledge" taxonomy is purported to "categorize tasks according to the complexity of thinking required to successfully complete them." In this case, "complexity" appears to be a completely arbitrary measure, especially as it applies to the difference between "strategic thinking" and "extended thinking". It feels like a really artificial effort to reproduce Bloom's taxonomy, complete with verb lists. Why is this stuff in Edutopia? I wish I knew.

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College in a Box
Gabriel Kahn, Slate, 2014/09/11

As textbook publishers are now effectively 'teaching' college classes, students can't be blamed for wondering why they're paying tuition. "Both students worked their way through the same online textbook, watched the same series of videos, and took automatically graded quizzes pulled from the same question bank. All the teaching that might have taken place in a classroom was handled by the MyPsychLab software."

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