OLDaily

Colombia's ex-fighters taught skills for peace
Lucy Sherriff, BBC News, 2018/05/17

Readers will know I was in Colombia a couple of weeks ago so this story is fresh on my mind. This article underscores the umportance of, and the diffioculty of, the work to be done. Says one person, "I have many friends who regularly go hungry because they cannot find work. Who is going to employ a 50-year-old man who can only just read and write but has no other skills? The issue is not giving us education. The issue lies with giving us the skills to work so we can rejoin society. Otherwise peace will be impossible."

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HoweyCoin
SEC, 2018/05/17

"HoweyCoin is the newest and only coin offering that captures the magic of coin trading profits AND the excitement and guaranteed returns of the travel industry." It's also completely fake, even though there's a very convincing-looking white paper and everything. The site was set up (as O'Reilly notes) to illustrate the dangers of unregulated offerings.

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OER Methods – Generative Designs for Reuse-With-Modification
Tony Hirst, OUseful Info, 2018/05/17

There's some good thinking in this post from Tony Hirst as he follows up Martin Weller on why a focus on producing open educational resources is not enough. Weller argues that "if UNESCO really want to realise their aim of equitable education, they should foreground the need for support to accompany OER." But what is this support supposed to look like? “Assign that thing someone else wrote, and wrap it with your own teaching context”, or “pinch that idea and modify it for your own use”? What we need are recipes, he argues, not resources. It's like the difference between sharing Excel workbooks and sharing code. "Excel workbooks are hard to maintain, collaborate on, and debug because they are not reproducible."

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Skills Strategy Implementation Guidance for Portugal
OECD, 2018/05/17

Portugal is a compelling case study for educational development. It's inside Europe and benefits from EU membership. But it faces employment challenges and comparatively low levels of education. This report builds on previous 'diagnostic' studies (pictured) and focuses on what the OECD believes Portugal should do. Some of the recommendations make sense: promote community learning centres, increase the availability of educational opportunities, and especially promote the value of learning to the population at large. There's also an emphasis on measurement and quality control. OECD also recommends incentives be offered to employers, especially small and medium sized enterprises (SME) to support learning. My concern is that businesses would simply take the money but not spend it on learning. Excellent coverage of the issues, lots of international examples, and tons of references (most with links). There doesn't appear to be a way to download the report as a whole; it's presented as 190 page-sized images; I found a PDF link (190 page PDF) but maybe it will work for you, maybe it won't.

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Myths of Early Math
Douglas H. Clements, Julie Sarama, Education Sciences, 2018/05/17

This is a good article (8 page PDF), and I would say that many of its points can be made about logic and critical thinking as well. What points? Well, "Children can put together what they know and invent ways to solve... problems." They don't need a whole lot of domain knowledge first; they can model the problem in their own terms. Another important point: "good mathematics is about engagement and interest, not drudgery and drill." And another: "High-quality, good mathematics can involve moving, building, and playing."

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Javascript Highlighter to Form (or whatever)
Tom Woodward, Bionic Teaching, 2018/05/17

I'm linking to this so I can find it later, as I'll certainly want to use the code. It's "to allow users to highlight some text and push that highlighted text to a form." I want to use something like this to make referencing and citing articles easier in gRSShopper. You can see a working example in the CodePen in the article.

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'Laurel' or 'Yanny'? People can't decide
Chris Bell, BBC News, 2018/05/17

You've probably seen the 'Yanny vs Laurel' audio clip that has been all over social media (and the evening news). Simply, people listen to the same audio recording, but some hear 'Yanny' and others hear 'Laurel'. It's not really a mystery: " The secret, it turns out, is frequency. The part of the sound that makes some people hear Yanny is higher frequency than that which makes some people hear Laurel." What's interesting to me is this as an example of how people han have exactly the same evidence but come to completely different conclusions.

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