OLDaily

12 Building Blocks to Use Learning Technologies Effectively: All-In-One
3-Star Learning Experiences, 2020/05/01

This is a summary post linking to 12 previous posts based on Wilfred Rubens’ book ‘Wijze lessen. waalf bouwstenen voor effectieve didactiek’ (Lessons for Learning: Twelve Building Blocks for Effective Teaching). Find the original – in Dutch – here). It describes pretty precisely many of the instructivist principles being applied these days in 'remote teaching'. They basically describe a process of presenting information, having students practice concepts, and then testing them on their knowledge acquisition. I think it can be safely said that this method works for specific instruction, and students will pass the tests, but also that (at least for someone like me) it would be a form of excruciating torture.

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The true purpose of education
Doug Johnson, The Blue Skunk Blog, 2020/05/01

We have been forced more than usual recently to think about the purpose of school. Doug Johnson writes of the process, "this is simply society using education as a means of slowing cultural change by only allowing students who are willing to conform and delay gratification to gain positions of responsibility in society.... Graduating from school depends far more on a student's EQ than IQ, if EQ is the ability to conform to societal norms.  And how much of EQ is knowing when to simply shut up, go with the flow, and keep on keeping on?" Dean Shareski, meanwhile, makes two arguments: "1. Learning can and will happen with or without schools. 2. Community and Connections are the most important things schools do," he writes. "This crisis has solidified my beliefs." Or as he said a couple of days ago, "Unpopular Opinion: Learning isn’t the most important thing schools offer... Learning is obviously one of the promises of schools but I don’t believe it’s job one."

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Udacity Makes it Harder for Learners to Cancel Free Trials
Manoel Cortes Mendez, Class Central, 2020/05/01

This is not the sort of look you want to present to prospective new clients duiring a pandemic. "In response to coronavirus, the $1B e-learning startup Udacity started offering one-month free trials with a 'cancel anytime' policy. But a month later, they’re dragging their feet to process cancellations, resulting in undue charges for learners." This, in particular, seems skeevy: "instead of prompting me to confirm, the site said that to cancel, I’d have to chat with a Udacity advisor. I waited two hours for an advisor, but as you can see below, they never showed up."

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A new empirical challenge for local theories of consciousness
Matthias Michel​, Adrien Doerig, Mind & Language, 2020/05/01

Readers will recall my paper from a couple of years ago describing consciousness as experience. We have today a two papers that serve to refine similar sorts of theories. In the first paper, A new empirical challenge for local theories of consciousness (21 page PDF), the question concerns where precisely consciousness occurs in perception - 'localists' argue consciousness of a feature exists if it is "adequately represented and processed in sensory brain areas," while their opponents, 'globalists' argue that " consciousness involves the large-scale coordination of a variety of neuro-cognitive modules." This paper argues for the latter perspective based on the experience of separate phenomena only after they have been combined to form a single perception. In the second paper (23 page PDF), A Euthyphro Dilemma for Higher-order Theories of Consciousness, Daniel Stoljar, discusses the idea "that a psychological state of a subject is conscious if and only if the subject is conscious of being in that state."

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5 Learning Myths, Debunked
Laura Lynch, LearnDash, 2020/05/01

The first item on the list is of course learning styles. "People like to think that they have a special learning style, and some may even have learning preferences, but catering to those preferences does not show any learning benefits." Still. If you teach the same content the same way to different people, you get different outcomes (otherwise there would be no need for tests). So something varies from student to student. And if you're not getting any learning benefits by catering to that, then maybe it's your method, not the theory, that's at fault.

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'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far. Bring Back Blogs
Cal Newport, Wired, 2020/05/01

Speaking as a long-time blogger (not just this newsletter, but also my long-running Half an Hour blog, my Let's Make Some Art photoblog, my more recent Leftish political blog, and of course my articles) I can say that blogs never left, and we don't need to 'bring back blogs'. What left were the readers as by the millions they chose to favour the quick snarky come-back over more detailed discussion. What will bring readers back to blogs? Good question.

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Cloud Computing Based E-Learning in Malaysian Universities
Lubna A. Hussein, Mohd Faiz Hilmi, International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning, 2020/05/01

Though quite a few studies have been undertaken in cloud computing for higher education, the authros write, there is not a lot of work on adoption. So this study (18 page PDF) surveys Malaysian professors on the perceived benefits. With a study like this, the selection of factors to measure is quite important, and defines the results of the study. In this case, the authors look at factors raised in the prior literature, such as usefulness, ease of use, need, trust, and innovativeness. The results were what we might think of characteristic of new technology, with ease and usefulness scoring lower, need a bit higher, and innovativeness the major factor. I think there's a lot of analysis performed on what is in the end a small (265 responses) survey set.

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