Critical Thinking for Educators
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, 2018/03/30
Educators, of course, are told a lot about critical thinking. Sometimes, if they are lucky, they take a critical thinking course in university and learn first-hand about the practice. Or they may be given a demonstration at an educational conference. Sometimes they are informed about critical thinking during discussions of pedagogy and policy. Or sometimes they simply read about it in magazines and journals. More...

Unlocking the Science of How Kids Think
Daniel Willingham, Education Next, 2018/03/29
Now with the correct link. I thought this was a pretty good article. I don't think that we've yet "unlocked the science of how kids think" but the way the article is set up allows us to set the overstatement aside and focus on how we think about some principles of learning in our day-to-day work. The context is set by looking at how we approach teacher training. More...

Apple’s Strongest Case to Reclaim the Education Market Is Not the New iPad
Jin-Soo Huh, EdSurge, 2018/03/29
Apple chose to launch its new education-specific iPad at an exclusive private school, Lane Tech College Prep in Chicago. That should tell you all you need to know about its approach to education. The pitch is that students can be more creative with a iPad than with (say) a Chromebook. At three times the price (plus a $90 pen) I'm not surprised. More...

Why schools should not teach general critical-thinking skills
Carl Hendrick, Aeon, 2018/03/29
Carl Hendrick restates the tired and wrong argument that critical thinking cannot be taught as a general skill. But from where I sit, if a person says critical thinking cannot be detached from context, then this tells me that the person does not understand what critical thinking is. Critical thinking is not factual recall or provision of implicit premises. More...

5 Ways You Can Use Psychology to Boost Ecommerce Sales
The Blog Herald, 2018/03/27
When I was in the Canary Islands a number of years ago I learned an expensive but valuable lesson about sales as I was convinced to pay far too much for a zoom lens for my then-brand-new camera. The lesson was: they are professionals, and I am a rank amateur. The same is true of sales generally. Which is why the whole Facebook-Cambridge Analytics debate is in reality nothing new, and is, in one way or another, very widespread, as this article shows. Sales is ultimately about psychology, making you feel a need you didn't know you had, and making you willing to pay something or (in the case of elections and referenda) do something. More...

Facebook Container Isolates Facebook From The Rest of Your Firefox Browsing
Justin Pot, How-To Geek, 2018/03/27
I use Firefox to browse the web because it doesn't report back to Facebook or Google. It's not that I'm paranoid, but I don't trust businesses that collect and sell my data. It's also the same reason I don't use Facebook. But if you need to use Facebook for whatever reason, this might be an option. More...

Redirect FB algorithms now and 4 lessons from Cambridge Analytica
Inge de Waard, Ignatia Webs, 2018/03/27
This is a nice compendium of some of the lesser-known strands of discussion around the now-boiling debate on analytics. One strand is an "MIT research project on “How to manipulate Facebook and Twitter instead of letting them manipulate you’." Another turns the whole "correlation is not causation" argument on its head (especially relevant to discussions about PISA). More...

Let’s stop pretending Facebook cares
Violet Blue, Engadget, 2018/03/26
Companies do a lot "to get their products embedded in our brains and part of our thinking." They want us to think of them as people, so we'll care for them, and so we'll think that they care for us. But they don't. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of Facebook, which knew about data mining and election tampering activities as far back as 2015, but is only now doing the apology tour. More...

Analytics on the go with Power BI
Natalie Afshar, Australian Education IT blog, 2018/03/26
I've been involved in a Business Intelligence (BI) project for the last few months so I'm a bit more attentive to stories about BI in the ed tech press. This article is from the Microsoft publicity machine but it's a pretty good outline of how BI is being used by educators as they use "predictive analytics with Power BI to group students according to specific needs, and allow teachers to deliver lessons based on a child’s learning style." It also allows them to blend open data with school data. More...

Style Transfer as a Service
Rodrigo Castro, 2018/03/26
This was a really interesting article to read. At certain points you might have to just skip over some of the tech details (unless you really want to dig deep, which I applaud). The idea here was to offer a machine learning application as a service. The application takes regular photos and renders them in the style of some artwork (hence: 'style transfer'). More...