OLDaily

Globalization at a Crossroads
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, 2017/05/11

The suggestions at the end of this article are reasonable but I'm more sceptical of the discussion learning to them. No, I don't think opposition to globalization is due to " the tendency to overestimate globalization levels" or "thinking your own country is superior". It very much has to do with replacing social imperatives - such as education and health care - with business imperatives. There's nothing inherent about globalization (or anti-globalization, as we've seen recently) that makes this the case, but the way globalization has been structured, business interests supersede the public interest. Trade pacts - from the European Union to NAFTA to Trans Pacific Partnership - make it much more difficult to protect labour, the environment, pensions, health care, education and a host of other services. I am generally supportive of globalization, but I am not supportive of corporate rule - and that's what globalization represents today.

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Learning’s Role in Innovation
Clark Quinn, Chief Learning Officer, 2017/05/11

The nature of productivity is changing, writes Clark Quinn. "The ability to plan, prepare and execute is no longer sufficient. Agility and the ability to adapt is imperative." This puts an increasing weight on innovation. Quinn cites Keith Sawyer’s 2007 book, Group Genius. "innovation is about creating an environment where people can be exposed to different concepts, interact productively, experiment safely and be allowed time to reflect." Learning plays a role here in four areas: explicit skills, process facilitation, culture and leadership.

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Auto-Annotating News Articles To Scaffold Media Literacy Skills In Students
Michael Caulfield, Hapgood, 2017/05/11

This is a really nice example of using automation hand-in-hand with instruction to develop metacognitive skills. To over-simplify: Mike Caulfield describes the use of a tool to extract data from large sets of articles where the data references funding, support or authorship from a partisan think-tank, then looks at these and asks about what sort of agenda these think-tanks may have. "It’s the sort of thing an perceptive student would select and search on, to find more about the source of the information. And it’s the kind of thing a majority of students wouldn’t notice or think about at all."

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Emotions are not hardwired but learned in our brains, says author
Anna Maria Tremonti, CBC | The Current, 2017/05/11

This was an exceptionally good interview with psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett. The main point of her book How Emotions are Made is that that emotions are learned, not hardwired, and that they are part of the general mechanism of the brain as a whole, which is in essence to predict, not react. "Everyone has the same networks but the wiring is dependent on experience," says Feldman Barrett.  "Anger, sadness are not universal. The way people make sense of sensations differ by culture."

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Educational Technology and Education Conferences for June to December 2017, Edition #37
Clayton R. Wright, 2017/05/11

Clayton R. Wright's excellent conference list is available once again. He writes, "The 37th edition of the conference list covers selected professional development events that primarily focus on the use of technology in educational settings and on teaching, learning, and educational administration. Only listings until December 2017 are complete as dates, locations, or Internet addresses (URLs) were not available for a number of events held after December 2017. In order to protect the privacy of individuals, only URLs are used in the listing as this enables readers of the list to obtain event information without submitting their e-mail addresses to anyone. A significant challenge during the assembly of this list is incomplete or conflicting information on websites and the lack of a link between conference websites from one year to the next." 

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