How the “industrial era schools” myth is a barrier to helping education today
Sherman Dorn, 2018/03/22
When I went to school in the 1970s the school was experimenting with small classes, open concept classes, electives, and a bunch of other things. Yes, I am a benmeficiary of progressive education. So it has always been clear to me at some level that we've moved beyond 'industrial age' education. And in other, equally important ways, we haven't. More...
A Few Responses to Criticism of My SXSW-Edu Keynote on Media Literacy
danah boyd, Medium, 2018/03/22
This is quite a good response from danah boyd to some of the criticisms raised after her talk at SXSW last week. She has been offering the argument that some of our efforts to teach critical thinking may be doing more harm than good. See here. This isn't an argument against critical thinking per se but an insight into how it is taught. More...
IMS Global Learning Consortium Announces Open Badges 2.0 Certifications
IMS Global, 2018/03/22
This post from late February was referenced today in an email dfrom Rob Abel to IMS members updating them on the status of open badges patents. More...
Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse
Mike Taylor, Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week, 2018/03/22
I have a lifelong history of pushing back against overbearing management and some good reasons for doing so. In addition to these endless conflicts being stressful and distracting, the end result (whether I resist or not) is usually poorer performance. And this article bears me out. More...
The AIMS wolf is no longer simply at the door
Grant Frost, frostededucation, 2018/03/22
I think it's important to point to this post because these think tanks - not only AIMS, but also the Frontier Institute, the Fraser Institute, C.D.Howe, etc. - get a lot of media coverage, far more than anyone else. They have a specific agenda, which is made clear here. More...
The Google News Initiative: Building a stronger future for news
Philipp Schindler, The Keyword, Google, 2018/03/21
Google has launched a subscription service for news content. Called Subscribe, it offers bundled access to participating publications and centralizes payment using Google's existing payments system. It's part of a wider Google News Initiative. I would imagine that Subscribe will replace Google News, or at the very least, show up as a premium service, effetcively converting Google News into advertising for its Subscribe service. More...
Dimensional Modelling by Example
Barry Williams, 2018/03/21
This short book (132 page PDF) contains an overview of the concept of 'dimensional modeling' and then a ton of examples. You can find the origin of dimensional modelling in Ralph Kimball's 1997 Manifesto. More...
The For-Profit Education Old Guard Has More to Worry About Than Government Regulation
Henry Kronk, eLearningInside News, 2018/03/23
The point of this article is to argue that the greatest threat to for-profit education is the for-profit industry itself. This became clear when regulations were drafted to weed out bad actors. "At this point, there are ample data that suggest the for-profit education sector in the U.S. doesn’t just have a few bad apples; it’s primarily comprised of them." Recently, we've seen two major incursions from the for-profit sector into the educational technology space: for-profit MOOCs, and coding bootcamps. More...
The Internet of Bad Things
Jenna McLaughlin, Utne Reader, 2018/03/23
I've heard it called "the internet of broken things" in the past, though the new name is probably more appropriate because the things aren't broken, they were just badly designed to begin with. This article is a good compendoium of some recent breakdowns, referencing such threats as Mirai and Stuxnet and Heartbleed. More...
The Fundamental Power of Explanation
Brett Hall, Philosophy of Science, 2018/03/23
One of the advantages of having a background in the philosophy of science (and, to a degree, in the sciences themselves) is that it puts me in a good position to assess claims that "researchers have found" this or that pertaining to education (mostly, the assessment is that they have found no such thing). More...
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