OLDaily

Advising Software Says Philosophy Majors Have Two Career Options
Justin Weinberg, Daily Nous, 2021/09/28

When people talk about learning styles being a fad or a scam, they're probably referring to products like TypeFocus. And I have to say, I can't disagree with the critics here. "After students get labeled a 'type,'... they are then encouraged to explore majors that may be suitable for them. Under 'What Can I Do With…?' there are 22 different programs/major groups, but the humanities are conspicuously absent." Even more, while "there is a ‘Knowledge Area’ section that includes humanities... ‘Philosophy and Theology’ only two jobs are listed: clergy and director of religious activity and education." So even if learning styles are being accurately identified (and there's no reason here to believe that they are) the relation between them and preferred majors or occupations appears to be entirely arbitrary and uninformed.

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Busted: 5 top myths about VR and AR training
Alex Young, Chief Learning Officer, 2021/09/28

I actually think it's far from proven that the five things listed here are myths, but it seems relevant to advance the discussion. For example, the investment in immersive learning is significant ($26.05 billion in 2020), and we should talk about that, but a large investment does not entail that it's not a fad. Also for example, it's probably an overgeneralization to say immersive reality "does" or "doesn't actually improve learning". The third myth rebutted is that immersive reality is "expensive and inaccessible for SMEs." Well, it is expensive. It may be true that "immersive learning almost always works out to be significantly cheaper than traditional in-person learning," which is also expensive. But that's not the only alternative. These are all issues that should be discussed, but they haven't been resolved just yet.

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Giving time for students to think – using learning logs to guide student reflection
Alice Leung, 2021/09/28

In what was probably the most influential moment in my education, my grade 10 English teacher assigned me (and the rest of the class) a journal-writing assignment. We could write or create anything - and I created stories, drawings, crossword puzzles, and much more in my journal. I never stopped the practice, and carried it over to the digital world as soon as posting stuff online became a reality for me. This article describes a more structured approach to the same sort of concept, and I think it would be more appropriate for younger students who need prompts like 'this week I worked on...' or 'this week I was surprised by...'. The big challenge, reports Alice Leung, is time. "Having dedicated time to support students to self-assess, to think about their own learning and reflect on their successes will help them grow into self-regulated learners."

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10 EdTech Tools to Help Teachers Create Interactive Media-rich Lessons
Med Kharbach, Educational Technology and Mobile Learning, 2021/09/28

This is a list of ten tools, each of which is presented with a link and short outline. Most of the items also have a link to a longer discussion of the tool on the author's website. Some of these were familiar to me, but some - InsertLearning, Buncee, Thinglink - were new to me. I can see the value of the tools-based approach to learning technology, as it allows instructors to move from one tool to another to offer different types of activities (the tools mostly centre around content creation, annotation and interaction). But for each tool you have to watch out for platform requirements (Insertlearning, for example, requires a Chrome plugin, and ergo, requires Chrome).

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Moving the graduate story beyond employment
Catherine Turner, WonkHe, 2021/09/28

From Neil Mosley's enjoyably opinionated Twitter feed we read: "Why do people still allow conference presentations (where) we have no idea whether it was effective or not and we have no way of finding out?" If I had to advance a reason, it would be that there is still no consensus on what constitutes 'effective' in our field (and there might never be). It is with this sort of discussion in mind that Catherine Turner writes, "until now, the reporting of successful higher education outcomes has focused mainly on employment," which "only shows us showcases part of the impact higher education can have."

She refers readers to the Graduate Index, "a survey that measures graduates’ successes across seven social and personal measures: social capital, civic engagement, confidence, resilience, quality of life, fulfilment, and career progression." Now it seems to me that the relation between a particular technique or technology and the outcomes described in this index will be difficult to define at best. Sure, if you reduce 'effective' to a simple outcome, you can perhaps discern effect sizes, as Hattie does. But any realistic assessment of the 'effectiveness' of a particular intervention is going to be far beyond the scope or ability of any individual research project.

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Building Classroom Community, Even When We’re All Alone
Marta Bashovski, Hybrid Pedagogy, 2021/09/28

There's a lot to like in this article, but there is also significant room for caution. I am especially wary of the following expressed as a classroom objective: "I worried mostly about what would happen to the particular alchemy that takes place in the classroom, when the abstract questions that I deal in become concrete and urgent as they become shared. How could I approximate the conversations, the back and forths, and the in-jokes that together cohere into the space of shared purpose?" It brings to mind something I saw in the very next article I read this morning: "Fitting in is human: forcing someone to fit in is oppression." Or perhaps a more neutral way of putting it: you can ask students to think and reflect critically, or you can ask students to cohere around shared understanding and objectives, but you can't do both.

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