OLDaily

Why Are Arrays So Hard For Beginners?
Alfred Thompson, Computer Science Teacher, 2021/06/23

There are some seriously odd concepts in computer science. These concepts are like air for programmers - so normal they're not even noticable. But for beginners, it's like not knowing how to breathe. Here's Alfred Thompson: "Somehow the idea that the index is, in some sense, part of the name and not the value being stored is hard for some to grasp. Though come to think of it, I never talked about an index as being like a name... Perhaps I will discuss indexes as part of the name next time I teach arrays." That's the sort of thing I mean. When I was studying logic and programming I found the lessons full of such background concepts that were never stated, but just assumed to be understood. (Society is like that too, and uses this as one of its primary differentiators of power and class).

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License Round-Up
Kyle E. Mitchell, /dev/lawyer, 2021/06/23

I appreciated this relatively light and light-hearted look at a number of different licenses and templates developed by the author (a lawyer, but not your lawyer) over the years. They're designed more for software than for content, but they give us a sense of how Creative Commons could have evolved had it been approached differently. For example, Prosperity, which is "a free license for noncommercial use, with a time-limited free trial for potential commercial customers," or the Parity licence for those "who preferred to make their work available free for use in open source, even commercial open source, rather than for noncommercial purposes, open or closed," or even the Patron license, for those "who really wanted a recurring-payment relationship with customers, rather than the one-time-payment structure." Or the Noncommercial license, which doesn't try to define 'noncommercial', but rather, is supplemented with specific 'safe harbors' that clearly cover common personal uses and noncommercial organizations.

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Realistic Job Preview as an Alternative Tool to Improve Student Readiness for Online Learning
Zahir Ibrahim Latheef, Robert Robinson, Sedef Smith, Online Learning, 2021/06/23

This is quite a good paper (25 page PDF) that questions whether a technique employed in business, the realistic job preview (RJP) could help prepare students for online learning. An RJP consists of a video where existing employees describe what the job is like, or a self-assessment questionnaire where prospective employees consider what they like and dislike (the paper suggests that a combination of both is preferred). It concludes by recommending schools create and use RJPs for online learning and makes a set of specific recommendations about content, timing, and detail.

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Designing Educational Videos for University Websites Based on Students’ Preferences
Zainab Alfayez, Online Learning, 2021/06/23

This paper (19 page PDF) adds to the research on the use of resources such as YouTube videos in education and assesses student preferences in that regard. The major issue identified is 'accuracy', though I wonder whether by 'accuracy' they mean 'can cite in a paper' (we read: "Unlike books and journals, they cannot rely on these videos as sources for their studies"). The paper also determined that a length of 10-15 minutes is preferable (as compared to previous work recommending 6-minute videos) and that students liked to see the speaker and also to have captioned text. My main criticism is that the student is focused exclusively on students enrolled in academic institutions (referenced as "the ideal audience for educational videos").

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Emily and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Professional Development Session
Emily Fintelman, Mrs. Fintelman Teaches, 2021/06/23

I'm sympathetic with the author because I was subjected to similar professional development on 'how to teach' and 'how people learn' (complete with learning styles and Bloom's taxonomy) in my early days as a philosophy instructor. More relevant, though, is the question of whether I've given terrible no good very bad professional development sessions. I can think of a few instances (and I've lived with that regret ever since). What's harder, though, is knowing how to do it right. "I really believe that people educating room full of experts on learning should be absolute masters of learning," writes Emily Fintelman. Maybe. But there are different types of experts, in different domains. Offering a one-hour professional development session to a roomful of teachers in a children's classroom is a specialized skill. So - maybe - it wasn't all the presenter's fault. Via Aaron Davis.

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Story by Story, Canada’s News Media Built Indigenous Oppression
Katłįà (Catherine) Lafferty, The Tyee, 2021/06/23

"The news portrayed Indigenous peoples as having a trio of all-encompassing negative qualities: depravity, innate inferiority and a stubborn resistance to progress. The rule of three is 'the reasoning that engendered the creation of the treaty system and residential schools.'" More: "Dominant society continues to portray Indigenous peoples as dangerous, though nowadays the risk is more commonly framed by mainstream media using what Callison calls a 'deficit model.' That framing assumes that it’s OK to control Indigenous peoples by deeming them unable to take care of themselves, their land and their children." Not only should we as Canadians take note, I would urge that people around the world look at the impact the repression of minority populations has not only on that population but on the oppressors themselves, as it twists their media, education system and national identity into something unrecognizable as just, moral or proper.

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Cohort based education
Viplav Baxi, LinkedIn, 2021/06/23

Viplav Baxi responds to the recent article on cohort based education written by Wes Kao and referenced here a few days ago. He notes that "cohort based courses are what we have been doing offline for quite a while, many hundreds of years," and it looks new only because of our recent infatuation with xMOOCs. "The answers lie in re-envisioning learning in the online space," he says, "instead of continuing to think of it as a conversion from the physical to the online format." If we look at each term in 'MOOC' we can define it differently. For example, "is there another definition of 'massive' - one that represents a very different (apples to oranges) way of looking at scale? What if we looked at 'massive' to represent the extent and depth of interaction between participants?" Quite right.

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Shifting Minds 4.0
Canadians for 21st Century Learning & Innovation, 2021/06/23

I've had this on my desktop for the last week or so as I've mulled it over. It's a product of a group called Canadians for 21st Century Learning & Innovation (C21 Canada). Mostly, they represent publishers, with some contributions form academia and partnerships from industry. This presentation comes in two parts: first, what they call "the C21 Canada 7Cs competencies" (creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, communication, character, culture, and computer); and second, a set of "system drivers for scaling innovation", which includes statements about curriculum, pedagogy, governance and more where the emphasis is on "shared responsibility". There's not a lot I like about this overall approach, but people should be aware it exists, because I've seen similar efforts elsewhere. Efforts to shape the attitudes and beliefs of a population are very rarely benign, and in my experience come at the expense of social agency and empowerment.

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