By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Misreading the Numbers
I must say, it is so nice to be able to go from the blog post that identifies an issue to the news report that covers it to the media release that announces it to the actual study itself. It would also be nice to be able to follow the citations, but we're still waiting for the academic press to catch up with the world. The study, by the way, examines the TIMSS and PISA evaluations of student achievement, argues (reasonably) that they have been misinterpreted, and presents alternative explanations for reports of shortages of engineers and scientists. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Summary: Content Is Infrastructure
Summary of David Wiley's post, Content is Infrastructure which assertions a proposition with which I am in basic agreement. "If we want to see education radically improved, we can't architect it. None of us is that intelligent. We have to understand that content is infrastructure in order to start Linus' massively parallel feedback cycle running." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blog Action Day
I want to celebrate the blog day of action for the environment by linking to this video, Lion Love, which on the one hand is a heartwarming reunion between some people and a lion they raised from a cub, but on the other hand, is two people being jumped on by a lion. Eek. But so heartwarming. Because being an environmentalist doesn't have to mean being a communist or protesting in the street or throwing paint on people or harassing people who drive Hummers or getting into fights about global warming. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blogs: Enhancing Links in a Professional Learning Community of Science and Mathematics Teachers
This article reports on a smallish study of the use of blogs in learning. The authors look at blogs strictly from the perspective of community-building, ascribing an overtly constructionist purpose to their use, "which emphasizes a social or situated process of learning and personal construction of knowledge, including 'modeling, coaching, scaffolding, articulation, reflection, and exploration'." They then studied the posts written by a small population. Surprisingly (and not plausibly) they found that "the majority of the blogs (over 75%) posted by the participants demonstrated an in-depth level of information processing." This may be true of teachers but not the wider population. they also suggest that inductee teachers do not comment as much on their peers' blogs, and thus need more formal introductions to blogging. But I don't think this is a problem specific to the technology - I remember in 1986 in John Baker's philosophy of Mind class doing something (on the university mainframe) something very much like blogging (I still have every page, every post, all bound together). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Thomas Davenport and Blogging - He Is Wrong!
Does blogging hurt productivity? There's two ways to look at it. Blogging most definitely helps you and your career and your learning. So it improves productivity. But it may take away from what your boss wants you to be doing (especially if this has nothing to do with helping your career and your learning). So it may hurt productivity. This is the thing: who defines poductivity. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Learning Signal
Harold Jarche links to a site called Learning Signal, a new aggregation site that ranks learning-related blogs. He quotes an email from the company: "The posts you're seeing listed on LearningSignal.com are not random. We're actually assigning a score on every post based on a math algorithm." My own experience running this kind of thing with Edu_RSS is that it's really easy to do for a few sites, really hard to do for a few hundred. Which may be why the Learning Signal home page is unresponsive. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Overdrive: That Classroom Blogging Grail, and How Teaching and Grading Obstruct It
Oh goodness yes: "Anybody who's taught high school English should know why most students hate to write in schools. It's because they're taught to write badly." And even more to the point: "If I assigned any of you to write about ideas that aren't self-selected, in forms that aren't self-expressive, for an over-worked audience of one that puts two or three words, random red hieroglyphs, and a permanently-branded number into a ledger that threatens to determine your fate, face it: you would learn to hate writing (and school) too." I want to teach writing some time. I used to teach writing (it was a class called 'Critical Thinking' but I kind of repurposed the content, focusing on helping students pass their other classes rather than forcing them to pass mine). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blogging Across the Disciplines: Integrating Technology to Enhance Liberal Learning
Discussion of the use of blogs in the classroom, including a study of a particular classroom. The most interesting aspects were the discussion of gender differences (males had no problems with the technology, but females reported problems) and the argument that blogging promotes "liberal education goals". More...