Deploy a Website
Codecademy, 2016/05/19

If you don't know how to do this, this will be a really useful skill to learn. "We'll teach you how to build a static site quickly, host it on GitHub, and put it on the Internet using your own custom domain name. After completing Deploy a Website, you'll be able to launch your own websites on the Internet." Codecademy is one of the best, and working with GitHub has additional bonuses that will become apparent later.

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Highly novel research proposals ‘being systematically rejected’
David Matthews, Times Higher Education, 2016/05/19

I can identify with this. "Highly novel research proposals are being systematically turned down because they fall outside evaluators’ paradigms of understanding, a new study suggests." Novel proposals fared even worse if they were within the evaluator's domain of expertise. I think that ranking proposals for novelty is a good idea, but the algorithm suggested ("sing keywords in each proposal. If two keywords rarely appeared together in the existing literature, an idea was considered novel") is too easy to game, creating the illusion of novelty. Mitosis igneous. Here's the paper: 20 page PDF.

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The empty brain
Robert Epstein, Aeon, 2016/05/19

Please please please read this. If you do any theorizing about learning at all, or want to explain why good pedagogy works, or anything like that, read this. "We don’t store words or the rules that tell us how to manipulate them. We don’t create representations of visual stimuli, store them in a short-term memory buffer, and then transfer the representation into a long-term memory device. We don’t retrieve information or images or words from memory registers. Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not." If you're reading bout learning and pedagogy and the article contains these concepts, it's made up. Fiction. There's more, so much more. For example: "there is no reason to believe that any two of us are changed the same way by the same experience." And " the uniqueness of each brain, brought about in part because of the uniqueness of each person’s life history." 

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Dear Mommy Blogger
Josi Denise, 2016/05/19

There's a lot of off-colour language in this post announcing Josi Denise's resignation as a 'mommy blogger'. The full post, though, is worth reading, as it gives us a glimpse of a world in which brands manipulate bloggers and bloggers so whatever it takes to gain readers - and stay in touch with company PR reps. And at a certain level, as this post says, it's all fake. Josi Denise ran her 'mommy blog' since 2013 making money and earning tens of thousands of followers, but finally had a crisis on conscience and abruptly quit. I wonder how much of the edublogosphere is like this? probably not many of the people I follow on a regular basis are, but there's a very large mass of 'teacher bloggers' out there that follow a similar paattern: shill for the vendors, do publicity stunts to attract readers, and maybe even make most of the stuff up. Via Motto, via Ben Werdmuller.

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What Homework and Adaptive Platforms Are (and Aren’t) Good For
Michael Feldstein, e-Literate, 2016/05/19

This is a follow-up to Michael Caulfield's post on e-Literate earlier this week and looks at the subject of personalized learning in a lot more depth. "Mike’s stories show truly significant learning of the kind that changes students perspectives and, if we’re lucky, their lives. It is not just personalized but deeply personal. He was able to reach his daughters because he understood them as humans." Robots aren't going to take on this role any time in the near future, writes Feldstein. But they can play a positive supporting role, and that's the model Feldstein considers. By helping students achieve a level of proficiency at the 'what' question, they allow the teachers to focus on the sort of 'why' question that really engages students. But this homework cannot become an end in itself, and it has to clearly connect the 'what' with the 'why'. 

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