By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. On rote memorization and antiquated skills
Daniel Lemire, 2015/03/11

"To my surprise," writes Daniel Lemire, "there is an abundant supply of teachers and parents openly supporting rote memorization and antiquated skills." He then deals with some of the objections people raise. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Skills for the Networked World
Sahana Chattopadhyay, ID, Other Reflections, 2015/03/10
This is an interesting post because it summarizes a number of other posts on new skills and comes up with a list as a bit of a synthesis of them. I think that overall it's a good list, though there's some duplication and cross-categorization. And it mixes skills and values. Things like autonomy (aka 'courage zone') and diversity are values (and he should add openness and interactivity). More...

By Michael Feldstein. In part 1 of this series, I talked about some design goals for a conversation-based learning platform, including lowering the barriers and raising the incentives for faculty to share course designs and experiment with pedagogies that are well suited for conversation-based courses. Part 2 described a use case of a multi-school faculty professional development course which would give faculty an opportunity to try out these affordances in a low-stakes environment. In part 3, I discussed some analytics capabilities that could be added to a discussion forum—I used the open source Discourse as the example—which would lead to richer and more organic assessments in conversation-based courses. But we haven’t really gotten to the hard part yet. The hard part is encouraging experimentation and cross-fertilization among faculty. More...