OLDaily

How My Teaching and Technology Almost Failed One of My Students
Farhat Ahmad, EdSurge, 2018/05/10

The title should be "How bad questions misdiagnosed one of my students." And it's something that long predates the current digital age. In this case, the student is expected to pick up on some satire, but understanding satire requires background knowledge the student might not have. I remember in grade seven (this would be in the 1970s) being given what turned out to be a test of my reading speed. It consisted of short instructions to follow. I didn't know it was a test of reading speed so when I encountered questions like "draw a cross" I sat and thought about whether I was expected to draw a Christian cross or an x. I finally settled on the former, but the time it took me to think through what they were asking for led to my diagnosis as a slow reader. At the time, though, I had previously been measured as reading 600 words per minute, and reading speed has always been one of my strengths.

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What kinds of research matter to educators?
Benjamin Doxtdator, 2018/05/10

This is a good discussion of the place of research in education. Benjamin Doxtdator takes Tom Bennett’s researchED conference as a point of departure, noting that "Bennett’s argument for evidence-based education has also largely been an argument to shore-up traditional practices in the face of new fads." It's not that we don't need a defense against fads. It's that we need a better defense. "Rather than carefully dissect errors in sociological studies of education, he (Bennett) takes incoherent pot shots," writes Doxtdator. The careful dissection is needed because it's not just fads that need to be criticized, but many of the assumptions inherent in traditional education and education research. This is a good intelligent read and the links (to Vince Ulam, to Nicki Lisa Cole, to Yong Zhao) are worth following.

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New North-South-South project to be launched: EPICA
eLearning Africa, 2018/05/10

Here's the entire post in eLearning Africa: "EPICA, funded by the European Union research programme Horizon 2020, is a project 2018 - 2020 coordinated by ICDE with 4 partners from Africa and 4 partners from Europe. The project will develop and implement ePortfolio in Sub-Saharan Africa. For more information about the project: www.epica-initiative.africa." Related: The Learning Portfolio in Higher Education (40 page PDF).

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