OLDaily

Critical Thinking for Educators
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, 2018/03/30

Educators, of course, are told a lot about critical thinking. Sometimes, if they are lucky, they take a critical thinking course in university and learn first-hand about the practice. Or they may be given a demonstration at an educational conference. Sometimes they are informed about critical thinking during discussions of pedagogy and policy. Or sometimes they simply read about it in magazines and journals.

I've focused this article on critical thinking for educators because I am concerned that teachers and school administrators are exposed to a lot of misinformation about critical thinking. Various writers have developed 'their own' approach to critical thinking, which sometimes muddies the waters. Others confuse critical thinking with creativity, various literacies, lateral thinking, or rhetoric.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

6 creative ways to solve problems with Linux containers and Docker
Sean Kane, O'Reilly, 2018/03/30

I've mentioned things like Docker and virtualization from time to time but haven't exactly addressed why these things would be interesting. This article helps fill that gap by offering six ways these solutions can solve problems such as read-only filesystems, solving operating system incompatibilities, or running specialized graphical applications.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Collaboration and the creation of a new journalism commons
Carlos Martínez de la Serna, Columbia Journalism Review, 2018/03/30

I think that a case could be made that a similar cooperation is beginning to develop in education (albeit at a slower pace). "A core function of cooperative practices since the late 2000s, collaboration fills the vacuum left by the industrial decline of media and the constant erosion of the conditions for journalism." The idea is that "The rise of network collaboration in journalism might seem, with hindsight, expected in the context of the network society, defined as an era of intrinsic collaboration. An essential condition of network relationships is that 'one part is dependent on resources controlled by another, and that there are gains to be had by pooling resources, sharing and collaborating.'" I would call this cooperation, rather than collaboration, but the model remains unchanged.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

The Mind-Expanding Ideas of Andy Clark
Larissa MacFarquhar, The New Yorker, 2018/03/30

This is a really good article, cogent and clear, describing Andy Clark's philosophy and theory of cognition. It also takes us through some side-trips involving David Chalmers and Karl Friston. But the focus is on Clark and his theories concerning the extended mind - the idea that the mind isn't just what's in our head but also incorporates the conceptual and physical world around us. What I like about this article is the way it embeds the description of Clark's philosophy with an account of Clark's personality and style of engaging with the world. Do read the article to the end; otherwise you'll miss the account of Friston's work (to me much more appealing than Clark's) describing how human cognition is, in essence, a prediction engine.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]