Man trademarks Pi, tries to cut out geeky T-shirt designers
Kevin Poulsen, Wired, June 11, 2014
I wish I could say that the headline is a joke, but it appears instead to be an all-too-real example of an IP regime gone off the rails. More power to those people ignoring the law and using PI for their own purposes. More...
Looking at Link Between Violent Video Games and Lack of Empathy
Nick Bilton, New York Times, June 16, 2014
OK, I'll confess, I watch 'fail' videos on YouTube. If you're not familiar with the genre, it consists generally of people doing things which end badly. Sometimes you just know the person felt some pain at the end of it. In my case, at least, there is an empathetic response - I experience an involuntary shudder as though it were me about to experience that fall. More...
Going All In: How to Make Competency-Based Learning Work
Katrina Schwartz, Mind/Shift, June 16, 2014
Examination of the employment of competency-based learning in New Hampshire and a discussion of the issues around competency-based learning in general. For my own part, I think something like competency-based learning is the way of the future, but not for the reasons suggested. More...
Scott Mcleod, Dangerously Irrelevant, June 16, 2014
Although behaviourism has several flavours, it is in general the idea that you can (only) talk about mental phenomena, such as learning and cognition, in terms of behaviour. The mind in behaviourism is treated as a black box, to which we do not have evidentiary access. This for the most part remains the case today, which means that most all educational theory belongs either to the category of (a) continuing to use the black box, or (b) making stuff up that we think characterizes cognitive phenomena. More...
Theory of Change in Education
Oliver Quinlan, June 16, 2014
So here basically is the basis for instructional design: "Start with what you want them to learn, design an experience that will cause them to learn it, build in some checks that this is happening along the way and has happened by the end. This is one of the core lessons of teacher education, and something all effective teachers master, whilst they may decide to tweak it and experiment later." In this post about change Oliver Quinlan looks how this core idea gets lost as, say, new technology takes centre stage. More...
Three issues with the case for banning laptops
Robert Talbert, The Chronicle: Casting Nines, June 17, 2014
I am often present in meetings and sessions where the request is made that people close their laptops. I don't do it. For me, the laptop is the machine I use to help me think; I engage with the ideas being presented in real-time, and create a record I can search and integrate into later work. More...
Curation: Creatively Filtering Content
Sue Watters, The Edublogger, June 17, 2014
I think this is a good article and well worth a look because it encourages the revival of a disappearing activity online these days: reading and writing about other people. This of course is the central activity of OLDaily, so it's close to home for me. But I reject the term 'curation' to describe what I do and what others should do. More...
Are All Experiential Learning Opportunities Created Equal?
Ailsa Bristow, Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance, June 12, 2014
Co-op learning and work placement are good means of ensuring authentic learning experiences, but to be effective they must reach those students who would benefit most from them. This is what is not happening, reports the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance. In general, university participation rates are lower among aboriginals, students with disabilities, and the poor. More...
New Learning
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, June 12, 2014
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