Crows Understand a Fundamental Part of Logical Reasoning
Jason G. Goldman, Animals, March 30, 2014
David Hume wrote, "It is certain that the most ignorant and stupid peasants — nay infants, nay even brute beasts — improve by experience, and learn the qualities of natural objects, by observing the effects which result from them." We see this over and over again; this link adds to that evidence, as we see crows using heavy objects to raise the level if water in a glass in order to reach food floating in it. More...

How To Think
Shane Parrish, Farnham Street, March 17, 2014

Doug Belshaw shared this piece over the weekend and while I think it's an inspirational story I think that it's misleading in a fairly pernicious way. In a nutshell, the basis of the story lies in describing the methods used by an inner-city school with poor and minority students to create chess champions out of them; all the other champion schools, we are informed, are private or elite school. More...

Instructivism, constructivism or connectivism?
Ryan Tracey, E-Learning Provocateur, March 21, 2014
I think this is a really good post even if I disagree with it. The premise is that while popular perception sees constructivism as replacing instructivism, and connectivism as replacing constructivism, in reality each of them has its place, and they should be viewed as complementary approaches rather than in conflict. So why do I disagree? Because while as pedagogies it is easy to imagine them being alternated, as theories they contradict each other. More...

Journeys of the Mind: Yes, We Went to the Moon

Bonnie Bracey Sutton, educational technology & change, March 13, 2014

I watched what I assume was the first episode of the New Cosmos series with Neil DeGrasse Tyson and had the usual reaction for people my age to the effect that he is not Carl Sagan. More...

Goodbye One Laptop per Child
Wayan Vota, OLPC News, March 11, 2014

OLPC news plays the eulogy. "The XO-1 laptop is history. Sadly, so is Sugar. Once the flagship of OLPC's creativity in redrawing the human-computer interaction, few are coding for it and new XO variants are mostly Android/Gnome+Fedora dual boots. Finally, OLPC Boston is completely gone. No staff, no consultants, not even a physical office. Nicholas Negroponte long ago moved onto the global literacy X-Prize project." Not a noble end. More...

Can You Solve This?
Veritasium, YouTube, March 5, 2014

I like this video a lot. It gets at an important element of the scientific method (not the only element - the scientific menthod is much more complicated than one simple rule) and it also gets at why so many people reason poorly. More...

Today's eLearning: Michael Allen & Experts Say "Enough is Enough"
Michael Allen, Allen Interactions, March 4, 2014
Someone will have to wake me up when the date finally rolls around, but on March 13 Michael Allen and three others will release the "serious e-learning manifesto". They are rallying, they say, against bad e-learning design. More...