OLDaily

Let’s Get to Work with Productive Learning Strategies: Teaching Others
Tine Hoof, Tim Surma, Paul Kirschner, 3-Star Learning Experiences, 2021/05/19

This post continues the authors' development of their version of aggregeate-remix-repurpose-feed forward. They're slowly working their way toward that last step, as in this post they look at teaching others as a generative strategy. "During the teaching itself, they’re stimulated to explain the subject matter, expand on it, and make connections between the subject matter and their prior knowledge, in such a way that their peer(s) understand(s) it." This, I find, is the experience of sharing generally, and is the same as reported by John Stuart Mill in his autobiography (it's not like this is a new thing). The post also looks at limitations - for example, sharing is productive only if you prepare the content yourself; simply parroting content isn't the same. And "this strategy is especially effective if the students who teach do so without reading from their own prepared notes." Image: Research Digest, 'Learning by teaching others is extremely effective – a new study tested a key reason why'.

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Customers
Jonathan McQuarrie, Higher Education Strategy Associates, 2021/05/19

This is a retelling of the 'students as customers' argument, with the added coda near the end: “No you’re not.  You’re the product.” And it brings me to mind the discussion of social media services where, also, you're not the customer, you are the product. And to take this line of thinking well beyond Jonathan McQuarrie's original intent, when we ask, "who is the customer", we get different answers from different institutions. In some cases the customer is the state. In others, it's business, or as styled recently in an HBR column, employers. And - arguably - for elite institutions, the customer is the institution itself. The existence of students at Harvard, for example, is intended primarily to benefit Harvard itself. I'm just thinking out loud here, and there may be nothing to this, but it's useful to run through thought exercises like this.

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Computational Thinking for the Educator & Researcher
Ian O'Byrne, 2021/05/19

What I like about this presentation is that it takes the concept of computational thinking and, drawing from a number of recent models, presents it in a way that is accessible and easy to follow. But here's the thing. As I read Ian O'Byrne's presentation slides (there's also a video) I realized more and more that this is essentially a re-presentation of the system outline in Descarte's Discourse on Method, especially part 2, and Rules for the Direction of the Mind. Now Descartes is working with a different vocabulary, but the core ideas are the same. There's a history of what has come to be called rationalist thinking, and while there's a lot of value to it, it's important to remember that rationalism, and hence computational thinking, looks at the world in the abstract, and that this is not reality.

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Book fairs - unfair?
Doug Johnson, The Blue Skunk Blog, 2021/05/19

Doug Johnson here is talking about physical book fairs where publishers like Scholastic set up tables and students file through and buy the books they want. The results are inevitable. "Every year there are little kids who pick out the books they want only to find out they don't have money in their account." So yeah, they're unfair. But I would like to widen my scope to include the free marketing book publishers receive on radio (eg. Writers & Company), the advantage they earn from podcasters who interview people who publish books (you know who you are), the preferential placement their content enjoys on Amazon or Apple, the exposure they get during conferences. These publishers, meanwhile, select authors with name recognition (by that, I mean names like 'MIT', 'Yale', etc.).  It's not just the book fairs - it's an ecosystem of privilege, and schools and universities play along because, from time to time, the publishers offer them a small fee for product placement.

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