Kamadia: Why I didn't get a PhD – and why you shouldn't either
Aly Kamadia, Ottawa Citizen, 2017/12/18
I don't have a PhD but I have a PhD education - that is, I completed all the coursework for my PhD, passed five rigorous comprehensive exams, and prepared a dissertation proposal. I also spent four or five years teaching classes as part of my graduate assistantship. More...
5 Ways to Teach How the Brain Learns
Vicki Davis, Cool Cat Teacher Blog, 2017/12/18
I was expecting this to be pop pseudoscience, and while it's a bit pop, the five things seem pretty solid to me. They are: you can't learn when stressed, learning is based on similarity, learning requires repetition, the brain changes and adapts, and assessment (and hence reflection) is important. More...
Fake news and Facebook: Campaign kicks off to help Canadians separate fact from fiction
Clare Hennig, CBC News, 2017/12/15
This is an example of the deployment of education outside the usual channels. The public service message has been around for as long as there are ways to send messages (1950s radio dramas are full of them). Does the PSA actually work? There's a case to be made. Canada's Participaction program has a longstanding history of promoting fitness. We all remember the sounds from the Hinterland Who's Who program. And over the years the government has produced 86 Heritage Minutes to inform Canadians of our hgistiory and culture. More...
The Fake News Culprit No One Wants to Identify: You
danah boyd, Wired, 2017/12/15
I waver back and forth on the topic of institutions. On the one hand, I find that they are capable of significant harm, as they concentrate power and authority and and easily usurped to work for an elite. Exhibit A: the university system. But by the same token, institutions create the fabric of society, without whiuch we exist only in a dog-eat-dog world of feudal authority. Whatever your views, institutions are being challenged in 2017. We have Umair Haque, formerly of Harvard Business Review, writing that American institutions are broken and near collapse. More...
Mobile augmented communication for remote collaboration in a physical work context
Jana Pejoska- Laajola, Sanna Reponen, Marjo Virnes, Teemu Leinonen, Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 2017/12/15
This report documents "field studies in actual work contexts to map how participants solve physical tasks with remote help powered by augmented video calls, and examined how the drawing feature was used in these contexts... augmented video calls enhance remote collaboration by allowing workers to point at task objects and locations, thus potentially improving informal workplace learning." It's interesting to see how far back work in this field goes - some of the early references date from the 1990s. More...
Key themes in mobile learning: Prospects for learner-generated learning through AR and VR
Claudio Aguayo, Thomas Cochrane, Vickel Narayan, Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 2017/12/15
"Mobile learning still requires the theories, methodologies, and practices of its own as a field," write the authors. "We also see a need for mobile learning to be conceptualised around ever-changing learning affordances and educational settings, rather than focusing on static structures such as content-delivery approaches, while embedding it within the scholarship of technology enhanced learning." All of which makes sense to me. More...
New post
Moodle News, 2017/12/15
Short article in Moodle News pointing to some interesting resources about a forthcoming MoodleNet: "Users and enthusiasts can follow the developments on a dedicated blog at blog.moodle.net, maintained by Doug Belshaw. There is also a (very preliminary) white paper available here." More...
Trends in the Future of Learning
Stephen Downes, Dec 15, 2017, Learning Futures Workshop, Gatineau, Quebec
Work in the future will require higher levels of analysis, access to experts, and greater autonomy. How can the College@ESDC equipped itself for what’s coming? What form(s) is learning, and especially operational training, likely to take in 10-15 years. More...
Modern copyright law can't keep pace with thinking machines
Andrew Tarantola, Engadget, 2017/12/14
Copyright meets artificial intelligence. Who owns the product when one part is responsible for the digital input or data used by an AI, while another cerated the AI. More...
Big Data in Education book launch
Ben Williamson, Code Acts in Education, 2017/12/14
I haven't read the book (and probably won't unless there's an open access version) but this assertion is interesting. More...
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