By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Wrong Answer: In an era of high-stakes testing, a struggling school made a shocking choice
Rachel Aviv, The New Yorker, Jul 31, 2014
It makes me wonder how many of the 'success stories' in the literatire are based on cheating, just as this one from a school in Atlanta did, complete with published papers and a 'Dispelling the Myth' award. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Competency Education in a K-16+ World
Jonathan VanderEls, Connected Principals, 2014/12/01
The redefinition of learning as defined by outcomes rather than process is in full swing and there are proponents and opponents equally. I think the debate boils down to two sentences: first, competency-based education can support student learning as evidenced by good test scores (that's what this post shows), but second, is that all there is to an education? But maybe we're thinking of this incorrectly. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Don't Email Me
Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed, 2014/08/29
I guess everyone has read the story about the professor implementing a no-email policy for his class. He wants to speak to students in person only. He argues that he is "teaching students to be more self-reliant by making them read assignments and the syllabus more closely, and freeing up time for conversations in the classroom and during office hours" but really he's just cutting back on the level of interaction between professor and student. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Why Learning From Mistakes Is Overrated
Stephen J. Meyer, Forbes, 2014/09/01
I'm not sure exactly how I want to respond to this - and after several minutes thinkibg about it decised that this fact makes it work passing along. Here's the author's main point: "Maybe failure is really interesting to explore only after success has been achieved." Before success, people haven't found out what they're good at - and this is what they should focus on. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Disentangling The Effects Of Student Attitudes and Behaviors On Academic Performance
I commented the other day that a study was misleading because it didn't take into account motivation. This paper documents that effect. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Reclaim & Rethink
Tim Klapdor, Tim Klapdor, Jul 31, 2014
Tim Klapdor explores the concept of self, paticu;arly with respect to identity and learning. It's a complex issue. At first blush we think we have one self, but then everyone can think of an instance when we were (if you will) "not ourselves". Klapdor explores "Jung... the anima/animus (male/female). This underlying unconscious mind helped balance and maintain the persona..." Except that's too simple as well. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. http://www.tonybates.ca/2014/07/27/why-lectures-are-dead-or-soon-will-be/
Tony Bates, online learning and distance education resources, Jul 29, 2014
As a test of Tony Bates's assertion, go to Codeacademy and try it out for an hour, and then come back. OK, back? Now ask yourself, could you even stand having the same content delivered to you by lecture? Keep in mind that you would have to do another hour's worth of work to practice it and actually learn it. And that's why the lecture is dead as a learning device. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Confound it! Correlation is (usually) not causation! But why not?
gwern branwen, LessWrong, Jul 27, 2014
When somebody proposes a simple mechanism to improve (say) learning outcomes, they're most always wrong. But why? It's because they have ascribed a simple cause-effect relation onto a complex phenomenon. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The real 10 algorithms that dominate our world
Marcos Otero, Medium, Jul 28, 2014
This is an interesting and alternative way of looking at how our world is structured. For people who design systems, these algorithms are second nature. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Decision-making ponderings
Col Beer, Col's Weblog, Jul 15, 2014
I want to flag this item because I want to identify it as being wrong. There are two ways this item is wrong, at least in my view:

• "people base their decisions on their internal representations... richer, more stylized, incorporate multiple levels of abstraction, and take on a structure that enables rapid retrieval of relevant decision-making heuristics and procedures (recognition-primed decision-making (RPD))" - this involves the postulation of a rich representational structure that probably doesn't exist - I would base decisions on what might be called DRD - direct recognition decision-making process.
• "Zachary et al. (2013) there are four context awareness levels: perception, comprehension, projection, sense-making." I think it's too easy to create cross-categorized taxonomies. This is an example. We could probably identify each of these elements in a 'perception', but there is no principled distinction to be drawn between them, and they actually overlap ('what it means' is another way of saying 'how does it make sense').

In general, through the history of cognition, people have devised elaborate structures to characterize comprehension and decision-making. More...