By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. It'S Not Plagiarism, It'S an Easy Essay
Leigh Blackall was offered money to link to this essay service, Custom Writing, from his blog. The service offers essays for sale to students - "the papers we provide are plagiarism free – neither TurnItIn, nor any other plagiarism detecting software cannot find any plagiarism. Papers are 100% custom written." He linked all right - for free - and as a bonus tossed in an interview with the service's representative, Andrew Schwatz. The result is a fascinating discourse on the mechanics of testing. The position taken by the company is that essay writing is not an accurate assessement of student performance, that they are essentially a waste of students' time, and so the service helps them get past an unreasonable and unfair hurdle. "When it comes to applying for a job – experience and testing conducted by a hiring company – is what does count, not educational credentials". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Bridging Differences
Education Week has ventured into the world of blogs, including this column featuring a conversation between Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch. The issue is the usual set of questions around testing in schools - the usual fare for mainstream media. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Write Nonsense
We haven't heard much from Jakob Nielsen recently. As this post from John Connell suggests, we can understand why. I lost interest in his article when I read this, under an illustration: "Histogram of expertise scores for 1,000 authors. Each dot is one person". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The problem with using scientific evidence in education (why teachers should stop trying to be more like doctors)
Lucinda McKnight, Andy Morgan, EduResearch Matters, 2019/03/26
The pushback against 'scientific evidence' in education continues (I put 'scientific evidence' in quotes because in reality it is neither). This article calls for "an urgent halt to the imposition of ‘evidence-based’ education on Australian teachers, until there a fuller understanding of the benefits and costs of narrow, statistical evidence-based practice." It substantiates that call with some very reasonable points: "In education, though, students are very different from each other. Unlike those administering placebos and real drugs in a medical trial, teachers know if they are delivering an intervention. Students know they are getting one thing or another. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Constructivist pedagogy is like a zombie that refuses to die
Isak Skogstad, 2019/03/26
This is the other side of the 'scientific evidence' debate. I have no doubt that the evience has led Paul Kirschner to the conclusions he has reached (just as it has let the also-mentioned John Hattie to reach his conclusions). The question is: can we trust the evidence, and can we trust the inference that leads to the conclusion? For Kirschner, the answer is clear. "Cognitive load is about how our cognitive architecture affects how we learn and how this interacts with instruction". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Pragmatic Theory of Truth
John Capps, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2019/03/25
While most educators know John Dewey as one of the founders of progressive education, in the wider world he is known (along with William James and Charles Sanders Pierce) as one of the three leading lights of pragmatism, and in particular, the pragmatic theory of truth. This article, just posted in the SEP, outlines that philosophy. "By focusing on the practical dimension of having true beliefs, Peirce plays down the significance of more theoretical questions about the nature of truth. In particular, Peirce is skeptical that the correspondence theory of truth—roughly, the idea that true beliefs correspond to reality—has much useful to say about the concept of truth. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Digital Expansion of the Mind Gone Wrong in Education
Daniel T.Willingham, Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 2019/03/29
This is another article from what I previously described as the other side of the 'scientific evidence' debate. In this article Daniel Willingham looks at three proposed effects of digital technology - less memorization, flipped classroom and personalized learning - in order to argue "that the suggested education reforms are founded on a misunderstanding of the cognitive processes involved." What follows is (in my view) intellectually questionable. There isn't room here to break it down, but you can't prove a trend by citing a survey from 19 years ago, or cite a single paper to show that "college students attending a selective university use a feeble strategy" in search. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. This Is How You Kill a Profession
Herb Childress, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2019/03/28
I thought at first that this would be an article by and for professors bemoaning how badly they've been treated, but in fact it looks at the academic profession from the perspective of an outsider, that is, from the perspective of the many who obtained their PhDs and didn't have the luck or connections to latch onto a proper teaching and research position at a college or university. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The great support mystery
Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, 2019/03/28
I think this is important, and that it doesn't apply only to university students. I'm talking about "a feeling of being supported – that someone out there knows about you and your studies as an individual, will look out for you, and share your highs and lows." This is the sort of thing that will get a person out of bed in the morning and keep them working on something into the evening. It's what I miss most on those days I feel alienated from my own work. It's probably the difference for many people between success and failure. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Dr. Mashup; or, Why Educators Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Remix
Brian Lamb leads off the current issue of EDUCAUSE Review with a look at the mash-up - and demonstrates the form with an audio mashup (MP3) of his own. From the audio: "DRM is an arms race between the major corporations and 13-year olds in Finland. And the 13-year olds are winning." yeah. "Electronic transmission has already inspired a new concept of multiple-authorship responsibility in which the specific concepts of the composer, the performer, and, indeed, the consumer overlap. . . . In fact, implicit in electronic culture is an acceptance of the idea of multilevel participation in the creative process". More...