OLDaily

The Pivot From ‘Learning’ To ‘Performance’ with Guy Wallace
David James, Looop, 2020/09/25

Goof article about an important trend. "We, in L&D, produce too much content. Again, we’re trapped in our training or learning paradigm where instructional content is what we do, rather than thinking about the clients trying to use us as a means to an end of performance." Now this isn't just about creating job aids (though if you could solve a problem with a job aid, why on earth would you build and offer a whole course?). Anyhow, this article is the lead-in to an interview David James with Guy Wallace, a pioneer of performance-focused learning and development, though it doesn't show up yet on the podcast page.

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School should be free for everyone
Ben Werdmuller, 2020/09/25

Yesterday I disagreed with Ben Werdmuller; today I agree with him. "I don't see government services as monopolies in the business sense. They're services in the civil sense: social infrastructure for all... I strongly believe that private schools shouldn't exist... Private schools, and private colleges, entrench existing power networks. Why shouldn't a kid who happened to be born poor, or in the wrong neighborhood, have access to them?" Exactly. To my mind, a lot of the focus on content and instruction in learning (including higher learning) is a red herring to lead us away from this real function of private educational institutions and to make us think that if kids are getting the same learning they are getting the same opportunity.

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QM and the Politics of the “Unbiased” Bias
Matt Crosslin, EduGeek Journal, 2020/09/25

There's some good discussion in this post about how the choice of a course assessment framework reveals biases about the sorts of approaches to education are preferred. It is presented in the context of a tweet (and thread) from Stephanie Moore: "When Quality Matters trumps learning sciences as the evaluation framework for course design, then Houston, we have a problem." As Matt Crosslin says, "it is harder for some approaches like heutagogy, ungrading, and connectivism to pass... these are all well-researched concepts that don’t always have content, assessment, activities, and objectives in a traditional sense... (but) the institution is going to look at it as a worse course than a traditional instructivist course that scores a 98." And the point here - made quite rightly - is that this is a determination that was made before the assessment, and not as a result of it.

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Data Visualization in Society
Martin Engebretsen, Helen Kennedy, Amsterdam University Press, 2020/09/25

We've been engaged recently in a project to define and assess data literacy, and topics related to this were in my mind as I attended the AI Policy Community of Practice (AIPCoP) discussion this afternoon. These topics overlap in the concept of data feminism, a "way of thinking about data science and data ethics that is informed by the ideas of intersectional feminism." This open access book provides one way of approaching the topic; it's a collection of 26 papers discussing data literacy, the role of data visualization in media, and its relation to inequality in society. Related resources include the AI for Development (AI4D) project, the The fr Network, Research ICT Africa (RIA), and the (unfortunately closed-access) books Data Feminism and Design Justice.

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Keeping girls in the picture: youth advocacy toolkit
UNESCO, 2020/09/25

This document (31 page PDF) is part of a UNESCO campaign to ensure girls are able to receive an education during and after the pandemic. The concern is that 11 million girls will be added to the 130 million already being denied an education. The document is intended to help people "influence decision-makers like local counsellors, the government, a board of directors, educators and people who invest in and fund projects" on behalf of these girls. Among other things, the document speaks to the role of distance education and online learning. "For many girls, continuing to learn while schools are closed depends on access to the internet and mobile phones, and having digital skills... If girls have digital skills and access to the  internet it will help them access distance learning materials safely."

Other elements of the campaign include the UNESCO campaign page, a policy brief series starting with this publication, and a series of videos created by the girls impacted by the crisis themselves. See also these publications: A New Era for Girls, Education Cannot Wait, Building Back Equal, and Back to the Books. Via Teachers Without Borders.

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A Gentle Introduction to Using a Docker Container as a Dev Environment
Burke Holland, CSS-Tricks, 2020/09/25

I must admit I had more than one knowing chuckle as I read this. It illustrates so many of the problems inherent in working in development environments today. How often have I had this reaction: "Apparently everyone is supposed to know this already. I didn’t know it until about four hours ago." Yeah. People who write documentation for this stuff (if they write any at all) assume a lot of background knowledge that often just isn't there. And that's not counting the local limitations that nobody tells you about (like, say, computer services blocking volume sharing) that will cause your work to just break for no reason.

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In Defense of Cognitive Psychology
Clark Quinn, Learnlets, 2020/09/25

Clark Quinn responds to a recent short piece I write in response to Donald Clark's post on intelligence. In it, as Quinn summarizes, I argue "that education and cognitive psychology have put on layers of ‘cruft’ (“extraneous matter“) on top of the neural underpinnings." Quinn's defense is essentially that "the theories that have arisen have provided useful guidance for designing systems and learnings that wouldn’t have emerged from strictly neural explanations." I would respond that the proponents of cognitive psychology represent their theories as rather more than simply 'useful guidance' (otherwise they wouldn't so urgently criticize different theories). And the criticism is that cognitive psychologists extrapolate beyond the observable evidence (and not merely that they extrapolate beyond strictly neural explanations).

Clark uses Sweller's cognitive load theory, and that's a good test case. The theory essentially states that there are limitations to our ability to process information in short-term memory, and so having extraneous information impairs our ability to learn. Now it's well established that there's such a thing as sensory overload; we can experience itself and model it in simulations. But it does not follow that there is a corresponding 'cognitive overload' describable in terms of information theory. The mechanisms that are postulated in cognitive load theory - processing, storage, buffering - are extrapolations that draw on an outdated and mechanical theory of mind that is nowhere observed or confirmed except in experimental designs that presume their existence. And, as I have argued over the years, the outcome of postulating these theoretical mechanisms is bad practice, not good practice. Image: MindTools.

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