OLDaily

Social Media Has Not Destroyed a Generation
Lydia Denworth, Scientific American, 2019/10/28

Compared to the sorts of things that destroyed earlier generations - the plague, say, or world war - social media already appears pretty benign. But even compared to nothing in particular, social media appears not to have been as bad as people thought. "The power of mindset serves as a reminder of the power of perspective. In the 1980s people were wringing their hands about the time kids spent staring mindlessly at television screens, says Gentzkow, who has studied that era. He imagines asking those worrywarts about new technologies that would allow kids to instead interact with one another by sharing messages, photographs and videos. 'Anybody then would have said, ‘Wow, that would be amazing.’'"

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Learning Out Loud
Laura Ritchie, lauraritchie.com, 2019/10/28

This post is a lecture with musucal accompanyment. Laura Ritchie talks about self-efficacy and how that relates to 'learning out loud' and supports it talking about learning the Kodály Sonata for solo cello (which I knew nothing about, but which is definitive for cellists). Scroll down to read the full text of the lecture. "In our own lifetimes we feel the remnants of an antiseptic view of learning as something that is mass produced and can just be poured into people’s heads through rote dictation and regurgitative testing. Fortunately that tide has receded and we know and understand that people learn for themselves." Exactly.

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The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University
Sean Reardon, et.al., 2019/10/28

By 'educational opportunity' the authors of this project mean 'test scores, interpreted three ways (raw score, improvement in score, and trends in scores." But beneath the misleading terminology used is a fascinating study. As stated in a (now deleted) Reddit post, the authors "have compiled and analyzed over 350 million standardized test scores across 50 million students for the last 8 years across the country." One interesting result is a study of racial and ethnic disparity in children's academic performance. The major cause is differences in the socioeconomic status of parents, reflecting a persistent disparity in American society. A secondary cause is school segregation; "If it is possible to provide equal educational opportunity under conditions of segregation, no community in the U.S. has discovered the way." Not that anyone has any plans to address these causes (it's so muh easier to blame teachers) but the results are good to know. More coverage.

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Dreaming is Free
Terry Greene, Learning Nuggets, 2019/10/28

I like this article and associated presentation by Terry Greene. I like them a lot. They lead us through a set of topics - some pretty cutting edge, others a bit less so, each with its own icon - related to the work he's doing in Ed Tech. What I like: not only his description of Ontario Extend, but the follow-on idea of "Ontario Extend but for Students." He writes, "The Extend framework could just use a little nudge and a tweak and become something very useful for empowering students to learn with technology." Also the Open Learner Patchbook, "sixty short pieces of writing, each by a different student or teacher, about how they do the things they do to make learning happen." I also tried the Always Open Virtual Meeting Room, but it was closed. Well - it was late on a Friday while I was having supper. Because I like to eat to the beat.

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