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Diane Ravitch's Blog: Adam Grant: What We Can Learn From International Assessments
Diane Ravitch, National Education Policy Center, 2023/12/01

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First, there's Diane Ravitch's criticism of PISA: "Real life teaches us that the test scores of 15-year-old students do not predict future economic success for nations. I find it bizarre that people say that America is a great country but its schools are no good. That doesn't make sense." Second, there's a long excerpt from Adam Grant's New York Times article suggesting a factor in Finland's and Estonia's success in PISA ratings: "Those students didn't have better teachers. They just happened to have the same teacher at least twice in different grades." I heard Matt Galloway interview Adam Grant on the Current CBC yesterday and wondered about that, especially since I had the same teacher in two successive years (grades 2 and 3) and again in high school.

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Notetaking Formats
Althea Need Kaminske, The Learning Scientists, 2023/12/01

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My own system of note taking isn't any of the five formats listed here. Rather, what I do is represent the structure of the information being presented - which, in 90% of cases, is a list (sometimes ordered, sometimes nested). Here, for example, are my notes from an article I reviewed this morning. For me, the trick to remembering lists is to remove the extra words surrounding the list items, and to remember the overall structure. To me, each of the five examples in this article (ie., of flashcards, flowcharts, diagrams, charts and mixed) are different representations of a list. When I write, by contrast, I like to do something a little more complex, and to describe systems, networks, causal webs, ecologies, etc. (see? another list). You can't do philosophy or computer programing with just lists. That's why it's such an advantage to build something, and not just take notes.

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USask Learning Technology Ecosystem Toolkit
University of Saskatchewan, 2023/12/01

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Alan Levine passed along this resource, the Learning Technology Ecosystem (LTE) "made up of the tools that the USask community uses to create, deliver, manage and analyze learning content." It's not a long list of tools - this is good, because it makes it easier to select tools, but less good, because many tools do not appear or are not supported. See more recommendations on Levine's Pinboard.

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AI in L&D: The State of Play
Donald H Taylor, Egle Vinauskaite, 2023/12/01

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The whole story, I think, is told in the graphic, through the report as a whole (15 page PDF) fills out the details, in particular outlining technological, business and personal barriers to adoption. Also note that "The scope of this paper isn't to outline all the possible uses of AI to support administrative tasks in learning, of which there are plenty." The paper offers suggestions around the adoption of AI and links to a number of useful resources.

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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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