How Debate Structures Allow English Learners' Brilliance to Shine
Katrina Schwartz, Mind/Shift, 2018/04/17
This is being posted to an NPR website as an example of good teaching, but my concern here is that this approach is not grounded in a proper understanding of critical thinking (which is why I recently wrote Critical Thinking for Educators). The non-standard approach is something called 'claim-evidence-reason' where the reason 'explains why' the evidence supports the claim. More...

Open Science Training Handbook
Sonja Bezjak, et.al., GitBooks, 2018/04/17
The Open Science Handbook has launched version 1.0 on Gitbooks. "The Handbook is available under Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0 1.0 Universal) and is oriented to practical teaching of Open Science principles. It was written by 14 experts during a book sprint organized by FOSTER and the TIB Hannover in February 2018. After including suggestions from the community the handbook was moved to Github and we can announce the release of version 1.0 now." It is intended to be a living text and will be revised through contributions in the future. More...

The Future of Well-Being in a Tech-Saturated World
Janna Anderson, Lee Rainie, Pew, 2018/04/17
According to this survey (92 page PDF) of internet experts, "Some 47% of these respondents predict that individuals’ well-being will be more helped than harmed by digital life in the next decade, while 32% say people’s well-being will be more harmed than helped. The remaining 21% predict there will not be much change." Count me as being among the 47%. More...

Google’s online learning platform to offer free basic digital skills
Naushad K. Cherrayil, Gulf News, 2018/04/16
According to this report, "Google has launched an Arabic online learning platform — Maharat min Google — in an effort to help people in the Middle East and North Africa to find jobs, advance their careers or grow their businesses by offering a free basic digital skills-building programme." More...

Blogging is most certainly not dead
Jason Kottke, kottke.org, 2018/04/16
This is mostly just a set of links to some odds and ends in the blogging world, but there are comments I want to highlight. More...

Change the title, change the work?
David Hopkins, Technology Enhanced Learning Blog, 2018/04/16

Am I an instructional designer (ID) or a learning technologist (LT), asks David Hopkins. More...

Creative Problem Solving
Adobe, 2018/04/16
Adobe has released a study (64 page PDF) that appears to be based on a survey of 'policymakes and influencers' and 'educators' (their terms) from the U.S., the U.K., Germany and Japan. The premise is to highlight the importance of teaching creativity in schools, to suggest it's not happening as much as it should, and to identify the reasosn why (which are mostly related to policy, access to technology, and training). More...

How to build a chat bot in 10 minutes
Natalie Afshar, Australian Education IT blog, Microsoft, 2018/04/16
OK, despite the title of this post, you are not going to create a chatbot in ten minutes, despite what the headline says (I followed through and found that you have to have a FAQ already written, in which case (presumably) the chat bot is simply selecting the most likely response from your FAQ to type or say. More...

Helping the Lab Feel More Familiar
Amanda Baker, Scientific American, 2018/04/30
I think a lot about the idea of knowing things that other people just take for granted, things that may have been part of their childhood experiences, but not of mine (or vice versa). This article looks at just some of them - the skills learned in a kitchen, for example, Or, from the perspective of science, the skills learned in a lab. Some of these cross over; some do not. More...

Jeff Bezos Banned PowerPoint in Meetings. His Replacement Is Brilliant
Carmine Gallo, Inc., 2018/04/30
This is a bit of nonsense being served to us as a three-point list by an author who doesn't recognize the irony. Carmine Gallo wants us to believe that narratives - stories - are better than bullet points, and supports this with two argument: first, that Jeff Bezos thinks this, and second, that a "prominent neuroscientist" friend of his confirmed "the human brain is wired for story." Gallo's use of Aristotle's forms of rhetoric - "ethos, logos, and pathos" - is a knowing nod to home-schoolers who still believe in things like the trivium. More...