OLDaily

The Formative Future: AI, standardised testing and student outcomes
Marten Roorda, The PIE News, 2022/01/12

Here's the take-home message: "AI can now predict with over 90% accuracy a student's test score, identifying their weakness and strengths with about 10 minutes of interaction." If this is true (and I have my doubts) then I have to ask why we're even giving students tests. Are we just using them as data to train AI of the future? Ah, well, it seems that maybe the AI is depending on, um, tests. "The assessment itself becomes formative. It’s not just a conclusive, one-test value judgment. It becomes part of the learning process during which we micro assess the learner, with low stakes, multiple times throughout a school semester or school year." Maybe many small tests are better than one big one. But you don't need an AI for that.

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Trends Shaping Education in 2022
Tom Vander Ark, Getting Smart, 2022/01/12

I picked up this item not so much for the trends (which are just last year's trends, continued: active learning, competency, etc) as for the diagram, which I liked. But 'OST' isn't defined anywhere in the article, so I followed the reference to an article in The 74, an advocacy blog with the (unbelievable) post headlined "parents want bold changes in schools — with more learning inside and outside the classroom." It also referenced the diagram with no definitions of key terms, so I followed it back further to a report and slide deck from Learning Heroes (as in, parents can be a 'learning hero' for their kids). These defined Out of School Time (OST) as including sports, religious, scouting and at school activities. I was a fan of these (at least, I was when I wasn't working after school, which was most of the time). So are these a 'trend'? Well, no. 

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Pilot study suggests online media literacy programming reduces belief in false news in Indonesia
Pamela Bilo Thomas, Clark Hogan-Taylor, Michael Yankoski, Tim Weninger, First Monday, 2022/01/12

I'd feel more confident if the authors were evaluating other people's learning materials, not their own. But it's still encouraging to find support for an idea that should be intuitive, that media literacy education helps people detect fake news. "This work presented a small, limited study to understand the misinformation landscape in Indonesia, and demonstrates the feasibility of conducting a larger research project of this nature."

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