OLDaily

The World's Best Film School is Free on YouTube
David Pierce, Wired, 2017/12/22

Wired is prone to grand overstatements, and that's probably the case here as well. Having said that, the phenomenon they point to is real. The article points to YouTube advice channels such as Every Frame a Painting,  VSauce, CGP Gray and Lessons from the Screenplay. The article talks about the "YouTube Film School", but it's just a concept, not an actually existing thing. I did find something called "No Film School", though. Also, there's a video talking about five channels that replace film school: D4Darius, Filmmaker IQ, Every Frame a Painting, This Guy Edits, and Rocketjump Film School. You'll find more if you search. What these channels don't replace, of course, is the feedback that you would receive from instructors and peers. You have to set that up for yourself, joining channels, commenting on others' work, and engaging in the filmmaking community.

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Critical Thinking Skills to Help Students Better Evaluate Scientific Claims
Leah Shaffer, Mind/Shift, 2017/12/22

So much of what people are calling "critical thinking" and even "digital literacy" revolves around the idea of evaluating claims. This article in Big Think is a case in point, describing efforts to engage students in assessing articles and thinking like a scientist. I think that this is misplaced, and causes students to go in search of irrelevant data, for example, that "the study was financed by an environmental advocacy group, not an unbiased source." Gak! Who, exactly, is "unbiased" on the environment? I think evaluating claims is just a small part of a much broader discipline of how to think, and this articles like this do a disservice to that broader objective.

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The Propaganda behind Personalised Learning
Benjamin Doxtdator, A Long View on Education, 2017/12/22

This is a more recent article from Benjamin Doxtdator on personalized learning (the previous one cited was from July). "Chomsky and Herman describe how five filters – media ownership, revenue through advertising, reliance on official sources, flak, and anticommunist ideology – shape not only the opinions expressed in the media, but the selection of what is newsworthy in the first place," he writes. "Here, I slightly modify their filters to examine how the venture philanthropy (specifically, The74 and EdSurge) media frames personalised learning."

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The Year We Found Out Everything We Thought We Knew About the World Was Wrong
Umair Haque, Eudaimonia, Medium, 2017/12/22

To my mind, this is the same argument I've been having with David Wiley. "The necessity to buy back the basics of life that citizenship should entail from the highest bidder, while selling one’s self to the lowest bidder, is not really much freedom at all, compared to the simple, humble, gentle right, ability, capacity, to live a sane, healthy, happy, and full life, that hurts no one, and lifts up everyone." Turning what ought to be social goods into capital goods is a fundamental error.

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Expectations make the difference
Matthias Melcher, x28s new Blog, 2017/12/22

Maybe nothing will come out of the idea of the 'pedagogy of harmony', or maybe I have at last found a worthy response to the idea of the pedagogy of the oppressed and even the pedagogy of hope. In any case, Matthias Melcher has teased out one fascinating strand, the idea that our exopectations make the difference between whether we are in harmony with the world of whether things sound a note of dissonance. It comes from an example offered by Laura Ritchie. Here's what she says: "The relationships of the notes, the ratios and intervals found within the natural harmonic series have not changed over the years, but the capabilities of reproducing the notes on manmade instruments has... What has also changed is our tolerance for adding new ideas to the conception of harmony." As we grow as individuals, as we grow as a society, we can become harmonious in new ways, by changing (and improving) our expectations.

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