The paradigm shift: Redefining education
Peter Evans-Greenwood, Kitty O’Leary, Peter Williams, Deloitte, 2015/09/18

Deloitte's Centre for the Edge in Australia has released a report arguing that "being educated" will take on a much broader definition than it has in the past.

• First is the shift from a traditional, formal education, to work-integrated learning.
• Second is the emerging trend for employers to move away from using formal credentials as the gold standard.

Here's the direct link to the 44-page PDF (but you still might be blocked by their wall asking for name and email address, the better to send you unwanted email in the future). They write: "educators need to turn their attention to creating environments and platforms where students can learn what they need to learn when they need to, and instilling in them the habits of mind, attitudes and behaviours that will enable them to thrive in today’s (and tomorrow’s) knowledge-rich environment."

I don't think this is particularly wrong, though I would question the almost exclusive focus on workplace training. Education is more than that. And as argued in the Teaching TomTom, while Deloitte cites changes in education toward constructivist models, it's not clear that it embraces them nor recognizes their influence in the education community today. "Much of the paper argues for a shift from 'knowledge stocks' to 'knowledge flows'." That sounds nice, but it's still treating learning like inventory, not growth.

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Writing
Google, 2015/09/18

Guidelines that make web writing clear. They should be posted on the wall of every design shop (including ours): "Clear, accurate, and concise text makes interfaces more usable and builds trust. Strive to write text that is understandable by anyone, anywhere, regardless of their culture or language."

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Learning is Not a Spectator Sport: Doing is Better than Watching for Learning from a MOOC
Kenneth R. Koedinger, et.al., Proceedings of the Second (2015) ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale, 2015/09/18

Nobody subscribed to this newsletter will be surprised by the results of this study, but it's always nice to have a study to cite. "We find that students doing more activities learn more than students watching more videos or reading more pages. We estimate the learning benefit from extra doing (1 SD increase) to be more than six times that of extra watching or reading." 10 page PDF.

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