OLDaily

Teaching Strategies for Critical Thinking Skills
Janelle Cox, TeachHub, 2018/04/03

This is exactly the sort of nonsensical article I was trying to protect people from with my Critical Thinking for Educators post last week. Janelle Cox's article is unmitigated nonsense. The five 'strategies' for " getting our students to use their higher-order thinking skills while learning" are: encouraging students to think for themselves, helping students make connections, activating students' prior knowledge, placing students into groups, and activating the turn-around strategy. These might (or might not be) good bits of advice, but they have utterly nothing to do with critical thinking. Posts like this are just so much noise and do nothing to advance good teaching or good learning.,

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Data-based decision making on students’ mathematical achievement: no effect
Jonathan Kantrowitz, Education Research Report, 2018/04/03

Wouldn't it be something if the data showed that there was no effect to be had from using data-driven decision-making (DBDM)  in education? The paper from last June this short post is based on is locked behind a subscription paywall, so there's no way of verifying the report or finding any other nuance in the study (yet another case of why it's so frustrating that people actually publish this way - it's like they don't want to be read). This result is probably a misinterpretation. But if it isn't, my guess is that it would all even out: the benefit you get from an intervention on one person is offset by the disruption the intervention causes to another. Plus, maybe, treating students like robots. But let's not get too excited; as with all such studies there's another with contradictory outcomes; you can find one from 2015 here. And here's a paper outlining all the factors related to DBDM implementation in schools.

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The Edublogger’s Guide To Podcasting
Kathleen Morris, The Edublogger, 2018/04/03

This guide from Edublogs is for educators and dips into the now-rich history of educational podcasting to create an every-teacher's guide. It's funny how podcasting was all the rage for a while, went out of fashion, and now has returned with a vengeance. No matter: I'm just happy to see it. And there's this: "The main reason I like podcasts is because you can consume content while doing something else— exercising, driving, cleaning the house etc.... podcasts allow a lot more flexibility to learn or be entertained on-the-go than other sorts of media like video or written text. Podcasts are also free! You don’t need to buy a book or sign up for a course to learn something new. With hundreds of thousands of podcasts available, there’s a good chance there’s a podcast on a topic you’re interested in."

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College for all — but not college degrees
Joanne Jacobs, Linking and Thinking on Education, 2018/04/03

As always, I am suspicious when reading a Joanne Jacobs column, but this one seems backed by good data and (even more importantly) good intentions. In a nutshell, " More first-generation, low-income students are going to college — but not completing a degree, writes David Leonhardt in the New York Times. " Obviously this is a concern because these students are accumulating a huge debt load, but not the earning power required to offset that. " I’m convinced that the college-graduation problem is one of the big barriers to economic mobility," writes Leonhardt  in the Times. I'm thinking that whatever is preventing them from graduating is also that big barrier to economic mobility, and one that won't be addressed simply by increasing graduation rates.

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In Defense of Design Thinking, Which Is Terrible
jenkinsEar, Metafilter, 2018/04/03

This is a really interesting pair of presentations. In one, mostly a video, Natasha Jen criticizes the idea of design thinking. “Why did we end up with a single medium?" she asks. "Charles and Ray Eames worked in a complete lack of Post-It stickies. They learned by doing.” In response, Khoi Vinh argues, "it matters less to me whether it leads to a lot of bad design or not. What matters to me is whether it helps broaden the language of design, if it helps expand the community of design, if it helps build a world that values and understands design better than it does today." I fit more into the 'design by doing' school, though I've certainly heard from the other side around here.

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Philosophical Implications of New Thought-Imaging Technology
Justin Weinberg, Daily Nous, 2018/04/03

We have always taken for granted the fact that our thoughts are private. The developments described in this article challenge that idea. " Dan Nemrodov at the University of Toronto-Scarborough is working on a way to use electroencephalography (EEG) and machine learning to digitally reconstruct the images that subjects are seeing. In other words, he is developing a kind of mind reading technology." More here and here. Before encoding it and signing up hundreds of millions of users, let's first ask: what are the ethical implications of this: "communications for the impaired or ill, evidence for criminal investigations, opportunities for commercial data mining, new forms of art creation, etc"? And in education: could we 'know' what a person 'knows' by using this technology to 'read' their mind?

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Teachers and students create interactive STEM lessons that inspire, motivate, and teach others
Microsoft, 2018/04/03

In a conversation with Doug Belshaw this morning we discussed the idea of student-produced open educational resources (OERs), how they didn't have to be high-quality and glossy to be effective, and how the metaphor of 'learning exhaust' might not be the best way to describe them (what would be better: 'learning by-products'? 'learning productions'?). This Microsoft post from yesterday describes the same idea (but in a specifically Microsoft-branded way, of course). The story focuses on José Pedro Almeida, a 12-year-old student from Portugal. “Mr. Sousa encouraged us to learn programming, and we created a project to motivate other students and teachers to learn programming, too,” José says.

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The Missing Building Blocks of the Web
Anil Dash, Glitch, Medium, 2018/04/03

Anil Dash, still with Glitch, is continuing to advocate "the idea that the web was supposed to be made out of countless little sites." This is something that resonates with me as well. The missing building blocks, he writes, are the technologies that made the old web work: the idea that you could view source and use what you saw to create your own web site; embedding bits and pieces of one website on another (the way we used to do with Flash, and the way I still do with videos and slide shows); having your own web address. In a follow-up article Mike Loukides adds to the list things like RSS, which creates simple syndication, along with better security and privacy.

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