OLDaily

Curriculum design and the teaching of 21st century skills
Tony Bates, Online learning and distance education resources, 2021/11/29

Tony Bates - who reads and reviews academic literature for fun - offers an overview of recent work on program renewal, a.k.a. curriculum renewal. This is especially relevant in like of the recent emphasis on competencies and skills, which he takes pains to distinguish. "Competency-based learning often aims for 100% proficiency," he writes, but "‘soft skills’ are different... these have no limit." Also, "competencies are job-specific," while "soft skills have high transferability" from one discipline to the next. He then looks at Deesha Chadha's model in more detail, which describes several levels of transferable skills development.

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Neurocognitive Mechanisms: Explaining Biological Cognition
Michael Rescorla, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2021/11/29

I have to say, I'm of a mind with Gualtiero Piccinini, who says, "I am calling for abandoning the classical approach of just searching for computational explanations of human behavior without worrying much, if at all, about neural computation." Instead, "good explanation of a cognitive phenomenon should identify neural components and describe how the neural components produce the phenomenon." Of course, that creates a requirement on the part of cognitive psychologists (and those who use their theories in, say, educational research) to explain how the cognitive phenomena could be instantiated in neural mechanisms at all, and then to describe (more or less plausibly) how those mechanisms could work. Now, the reviewer isn't happy with this. "Piccinini denigrates vast amounts of cognitive science as misguided speculation or at best feeble groping towards a more fruitful cognitive neuroscience." But yes, I'm still with Piccinini.

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The big idea: Should we leave the classroom behind?
Laura Spinney, The Guardian, 2021/11/29

Will Pollard in Hello Spiders comments "previously I do not think the print Guardian would have published this" because of the print journalists' disinterest in online learning. But now, as Diane Laurillard is quoted as saying, “It took a global pandemic to drive home what we’ve been saying for 30 years.” Which, of course, is quite true. Now we're beginning to hear the messages that were current in our field in, I suppose, 2021. Like this: “This is a time for schools and systems to reimagine education without schooling or classrooms,” says Professor Yong Zhao. Or this: "Professor Manu Kapur of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich argues that students learn better from their own or others’ failed attempts to solve a problem."

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Houdini Is Not as Scary as You Think
Robin Rendle, CSS-Tricks, 2021/11/29

The image that accompanies this article was created entirely from HTML and CSS - no Javascript, no SVG, and no image files. It's thanks to a set of new CSS APIs called Houdini. They "extend CSS by hooking into the styling and layout process of a browser’s rendering engine." The Paint Worklet, for example, "enables developers to define canvas-like custom painting functions that can be used directly in CSS as backgrounds, borders, masks, and more." It's introduced in this article by George Francis on CSS-Tricks, and discussed in more detail here by Robin Rendle.

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Theory and process for interdisciplinary undergraduate course development
Ana M. Corbacho, Integration and Implementation Insights, 2021/11/29

This article addresses how "interdisciplinary courses for undergraduates (can) move from being intuitively designed to theoretically based." To be clear, I'm not sold on the idea, because an experienced educator or designer's intuition is more than just a hunch or uninformed guess. But I can see the appeal to many. The article outlines three theoretical perspectives: social constructivism and situated learning; the MUSIC model of academic motivation; and "a diversity perspective". It then applies these to course design.The main thing I took away from the article is that teachers need to employ and experience the theoretical approach (or any tool really) in their own learning before trying it out on students. Via Gabriele Bammer.

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Decolonising Learning Technology
Danielle Marie, #LTHEchat, 2021/11/29

This post doesn't actually explain what is meant by 'decolonizing learning technology', and perhaps that would have been to expect too much. And I don't think it would have been possible from the starting point selected, which defines 'decolonization' as, in part, "a paradigm shift from a culture of exclusion and denial to the making of space for other political philosophies and knowledge systems." The 'other' in this definition is of course is defined from the colonizer's perspective. Similarly, reference to "the dominant white anglophone majority" applies only in a specific context. The relevant word in the definition is 'dominant', and to decolonize is for the dominant (whoever they are) to stop being dominant. But how then could they manage the process of decolonization? That, of course, i's precisely the point of contention, which is probably there is so much dancing around it.

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