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Welcome to Online Learning Daily, your best source for news and commentary about learning technology, new media, and related topics.

Reading Comprehension: An Essential Process for the Development of Critical Thinking
Narcisa Medranda-Morales, Victoria Dalila Palacios Mieles, Marco Villalba Guevara, Education Sciences, 2023/11/20

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This article "analyzes the relationship between reading comprehension and the development of critical thinking, focusing on the education of high school students in Ecuador." I think it's a relationship that is understated. When I taught critical thinking, I often spent most of my time on comprehension; I found that once the article in question was well understood, students had no trouble determine whether or not it was flawed. This article quickly reviews definitions of comprehension and critical thinking and then outlines Ecuador's standing in these areas. The specific research studied 200 students between the ages of 12 and 16 to find the relationship between them and reported "a statistically significant, substantial, and positive linear correlation between the two variables." For my own part (and, I think, suggested in these results) I found that students were more inclined to put the effort into comprehension when they explicitly understood the payoff in effective critical thinking.

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Toward a Theory of Child Well-Being
Ramesh Raghavan, Anna Alexandrova, Social Indicators Research, 2023/11/20

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What is child well-being? This has become a more and more central question in education as behaviourist and instructivist approaches give way to pedagogies based in care and nurturing. But there's no single account of well-being; as Raghavan and Alexandrova note (18 page PDF), it can be divided into three consequentialist approaches: mental states theories, desire-based theories and needs-based theories. The authors offer a type of developmentalism as their own proposal: "child well-being is invariably a developmentally-situated notion." At the same time, "well-being is inherently an "ecosocial" or contextual notion, rooted within the social ecology of the particular child." It's also worth reading Jennifer Hawkins's response to Alexandrova's book on the topic. Hawkins, " trying to understand her concerns as linguistic concerns," argues "dfferent explanations seem appropriate depending on whether we are studying the claims of social scientists or the claims of ordinary people," but suggests "what I want to know is not how we currently talk, but how we ought to talk, and that is really at bottom a question about the value of concepts and conceptual clarity." Image: Carter and Andersen.

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What Creativity Isn't
Blake Harvard, The Effortful Educator, 2023/11/20

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This article is a response to Ken Robinson's now 17-year-old argument that schools kill creativity. The response: "Creativity only occurs with a firm understanding of a specific domain of knowledge and schools should situate that foundation of knowledge as a central pillar." Blake Harvard uses car engines as an example. "To truly design a creative and more fuel efficient car engine, I need an incredibly vast foundation of knowledge on car engines and fueling." Maybe - or, on the other hand, you could design an electric engine with no knowledge of fueling whatsoever. And that is the truism widely observed: the deeper one is immersed into one approach to things, the harder it becomes to imagine a creative alternative. What's most useful - to my mind - is partial knowledge. Enough to trigger pattern recognition, but not so much to cause overfitting to one specific approach.

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Where is the wisdom in AI?
Sheila MacNeill, howsheilaseesIT, 2023/11/20

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"What about wisdom?" asks Sheila MacNeill, "There doesn't seem to be time now to value the time that it takes to develop wisdom. To understand, critique, ponder information and create our own personal corpus of knowledge which we can share." It's true that everything is faster with AI, because (as we have seen with calculators and computers) computers compress the time it takes to everyday tasks. In this case, the computer assimilates new data with existing in a fraction of the time it would take for a human to do the same. Sure, we can wax nostalgic for the time it takes for us to do this, to savour the journey, if you will, but it feels a little bit like nostalgia for the three days it takes to walk to London compared to the hour it takes by train today.

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AI Text Generators: Sources to Stimulate Discussion Among Teachers
Anna Mills, Google Docs, 2023/11/20

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Anna Mills has curated a lengthy list of articles related to AI text generation. She has also added an experimental 'chat' with this list by asking a question of AIinEdu (via Poe.com) or AI EduGuide (requires ChatGPT Plus). "These are bots that search this list and return 2-3 sources in response to your question." The list itself is divided into 21 topic areas including such things as 'implications for higher ed writing assignments' and 'sample policy statements about text generators'.

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We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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