By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Clinical Teaching of Interprofessional Child Development Assessment Skills in a Large Group Setting
Teresa Carter, Eileen Hanna, Marilyn Swinton, Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario, 2014/08/29

So what to make of this? As summarizzed, "The research found no discernible difference in student learning between the facilitated and non-facilitated workshops; however, students in the non-facilitated workshop indicated that they would have preferred a more guided discussion." Links: Report | Appendix. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. OER Beyond Voluntarism
Brian Jacobs, Inside Higher Ed, 2014/08/29

I don't think panOpen.com's Brian Jacobs gets the concept of OERs. here's what he writes in Inside Higher Ed: "A better way forward is to compensate the stakeholders -- faculty, copyright holders, and technologists, principally -- for their contributions to the OER ecosystem. This can be done by charging students nominally for the OER courses they take or as a modest institutional materials fee". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Crowd-Sourced Peer Review: Substitute or supplement for the current outdated system?
Peter Suber, London School of Economics, 2014/08/27

Many authors, writes Peter Suber, prefer to have their work reviewed in private. But this may be about to change. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Readers absorb less on Kindles than on paper, study finds
Alison Flood, The Guardian, 2014/08/27

So the premise here is that context has an impact on memory, and that eBooks read on the Kindle lack the appropriate context for remembering. "In this study, we found that paper readers did report higher on measures having to do with empathy and transportation and immersion, and narrative coherence, than iPad readers," said Mangen. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Employers Aren’t Just Whining – the “Skills Gap” Is Real
James Bessen, Harvard Business Review Blogs, 2014/08/27

"The idea of a 'skills gap' as identified in this and other surveys has been widely criticized," writes James Bessen, citing criticism from Peter Cappelli, Paul Krugman and the New York Times. "A worldwide scheme by thousands of business managers to manipulate public opinion seems far-fetched.," he says (naively. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Common sense for some and new and inspiring for others
Barb Brown, Weblog, 2014/08/27

Barb Brown responds to a post I wrote back in 2013. I complained: "Course instructors discuss their approaches to backward instructional design and describe the digital tools used to support collaboration.... Well, this too could have been written in the 1990s, I guess....". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Self-Regulation: The Other 21st Century Skills
Jackie Gerstein, User Generated Education, 2014/08/26

The whole character-building thing has been in vogue recently, what with people writing about "grit" and other aspects of successful learners (and people). There is some point to this - you will not become successful at anything (whether work, hobbies or even lifestyle) without putting the effort, which takes motivation and perseverence. But there's also an aspect of this movement whereby these are externally defined. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Learning Vs. Performance -- The Dichotomy
Sahana Chattopadhyay, ID, Other Reflections, 2014/08/26

This article gets at the difference between learning and performance, identifying aspects distinguishing a focus on one as opposed to the other:

• Growth mindset - Carol Dweck, in her research, differentiated between Fixed Mindset and Growth Mindset.
• Limiting beliefs – Related to fixed mindset, limiting beliefs constrain us in many ways.
• Fear of failures – This could directly stem from the organizational culture and environment.

In a follow-up article, Sahana Chattopadhyay makes it clear that training is only one aspect of performance. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. At OTF Teaching, Learning & Technology Conference – Hopscotch, Sphero, Social Reading
Doug Peterson, doug - off the record, 2014/08/26

What Doug Peterson describes here is very similar to my own workflow, readingflow, whateverflow. It's a restatement of the "aggregate-remix-repurpose-feed forward" methodology, identifying specific tools that can be used to accomplish it. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How to measure the success of learning in rhizo14?
Heli Nurmi, Heli Connecting Ideas, 2014/08/26

Heli Nurmi offers an insightful look at what constitutes success in dave Cormier's Rhizo-MOOC. More...