OLDaily

Syllabus Language, Teaching Style, and Instructor Self-Perception: Toward Congruence
Christopher Richmann, Courtney Kurinec, Matthew Millsap, International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 2020/12/09

I read so many poor academic papers it's easy to get despondent, but here we have a paper (12 page PDF) that hits all the right notes. Basically, the paper asks about the relation between the emotion expressed in language used in a course syllabus and the teaching style (perceived and actual) used by the teacher in the associated class. You'd expect that they would match, so that the syllabus would give you some idea of what to expect. There are so many good bits. For example, they use the Pleasure-Arousal-Dominance (PAD) scale instead of just using vague off-the-cuff vocabulary (like so many others). Based on the name the scale might seem inappropriate, but it's well-explained and fits the bill. Then they "created an algorithm in Jupyter Notebook that calculated scores for each text." They used Grasha’s inventory of teaching styles (again, a standardized measure) and then examined the relationships between Grasha’s inventory and the teaching PAD scale. That's how you do it! The results are specific, not overly generalized, useful, and can be replicated.

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Archivo - Ontology Archive
Sebastian Hellmann, DBpedia, 2020/12/09

In my email today was an announcement of "an augmented ontology archive and interface to implement FAIRer ontologies." By FAIR the authors mean "Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable".   Each ontology is rated with 4 stars; the stars don't measure quality, but rather, how well the conform to  basic FAIR features. "We discovered 890 ontologies reaching on average 1.95 out of 4 stars. Many of them have no or unclear licenses and have issues w.r.t. retrieval and parsing."

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Online peer learning: A growing trend sees 2 different approaches
Chelsea Waite, Christensen Institute, 2020/12/09

There are some seriously wrong ideas about learning in the corporate world, and seriously wrong ideas about life in general. I present this actual quote from an article as evidence: "I’ve argued in the past that now is the time to lean into student agency by reframing students as assets." Now I get the point; I've made it many times myself. We don't need to depend on teachers and tech alone to provide learning; students can and should help each other. It's not exactly a new or growing trend; it has been around as long as I can recall. But I've never framed this as a strategy to "lean into student agency" nor to "reframe students as assets". I recognize that this is corporate-speak; I've certainly see enough of it. But the fact that corporates speak this way is what enables them to dehumanize students and employees.

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The mind science behind microlearning
Amit Garg, Upside Learning Blog, 2020/12/09

What I liked about this article was the one-paragraph description of how Pringles potato chips are made. What I didn't like was pretty much everything else. The Pringles example stands out enough and is clear enough that you probably will remember how they're made (4 tons of pressure, 11 seconds in hot oil). But the rest of it is just a grab-bag of (apparently) randomly selected theories of learning not actually connected to microlearning. I'm concerned that almost all of what I'm reading in e-learning is falling into one of three categories: misleading advertorial content like this; poorly-reasoned and constructed academic articles; stuff about ed tech that is actually interesting and well written but is too esoteric for most  readers.

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System of Logical Structures in NaturalScience-Oriented Curriculum and its Effect on Teaching
Renáta Bernátová, et.al., International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning, 2020/12/09

This is not a strong paper (19 page PDF) but I like (part of) the topic, which is why it's here. This article is based on Jerome Bruner's idea "that when students understand the schematic structure of the subject matter first, it will be easier for them to understand the whole topic afterwards" (I think this is what they mean, but it's not clear). It then runs through a longish list of structural representations, for example, hierarchies (which the paper calls 'word maps') and Venn Diagrams (it bothers me that the carnivore-omnivore labeling (fig. 9) is wrong). The empirical component of the paper is an analysis of what the authors call the "NESVL method", based on these principles (we are never told what NESVL stands for), but the real value is the depiction of structure in science teaching (which would have made a compelling study, perhaps updating this work, if the authors had focused on it).

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How to Emerge Stronger in the Post-Pandemic New Normal
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, 2020/12/09

A trend I can see coming is a tendency of authors to blend post-Covid recovery priorities with other agendas. At least, that's the sense I get after reading this summary of a McKinsey report (159 page PDF) from last September. For example, how does "speeding up decision making, deploying nimble teams, redeploying talent, and empowering tomorrow’s leaders" fit into a recovery strategy? It's just your standard manic CEO-speak. Or "look at technology investments and reset them for value and speed." Same again. Now some of the suggestions make sense, such as 'the recovery will be digital'  and rethinking supply chains. But most of them are just babble, and would have been the same with or without Covid.

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