My world on the web
Base your selections on your enthusiasm, expertise, and independent research. Exercise caution against external negative influence, and believe in yourself. You don’t want to regret squandered opportunities.
Source: “Embracing Duality: Finding Value in Contrasting Perspectives” by Andrea Stringer
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Andrea Stringer provides a useful reflection on the different forms of study and the benefits of each.
Chris Aldrich (boffosocko.com)What do we mean when we say Zettelkasten? Thereās a specific set of objects (cards and boxes or their digital equivalents), but thereās also a spectrum of methods or practices which can be split into two broad categories.
Our definition of digital literacies is something created by a community and continually negotiated. More often than not, this definition is taken for granted, rarely given air. Belshaw does not identify the eight different elements as an answer, but as a point of discussion. The definition is start of this discussion.
Dan Allosso (minnstate.pressbooks.pub)First, weāll cover techniques (and a few tools) you can use to turn what youāre reading, watching, and hearing into useable information. This process has as much to do with taking ownership of ideas as it does with apps. Second, weāll look at how you can organize and link ideas to make them useful to you and direct them at new questions. Third, and maybe most important, weāll focus on how you get that information back out of your notes and into a form you can use to share your ideas with others.
ResearchBuzz (researchbuzz.me)On the one hand, I hate paywalls. I spend much of my day reading the news and paywalls are the bane of my existence. I want the news, not a login page. […]
Researcher Jane Waite explains how she summarised current research into teaching programming for a report teachers can download now.
So, what kind of āevidenceā is being referred to by the former Minister when he rightly insists we need to ensure that pedagogy is evidence-basedā. Is he referring to evidence derived from primary research, such as randomized control trials (RCTs) and observational studies; or secondary research, including systematic reviews of the research literature? The fact is there is no single type of evidence. It is generally recognised that different evidence types have different methodological strengths. At the pinnacle of the āhierarchy of evidenceā, are systematic reviews, followed by RCTs, cohort studies and then case-controlled studies, case reports and finally expert opinion. Without identifying the type of evidence to which he refers, the former Minister, appears to resort to lay-opinion disguised as evidence.
The promise of open source research is that anyone ā not just journalists or researchers at select institutions ā can contribute to investigations that uncover wrongdoing and hold perpetrators of crimes and atrocities to account.
When we say āanyoneā, we mean anyone: if youāve an internet connection, free time, and a stubborn commitment to getting the facts right, then you too, can be an open source researcher.
Education departments are increasingly investing in student surveys to improve classroom standards. But a study has found teachers donāt change their practice in response to student feedback.
Social annotation (SA) is a genre of learning technology that enables the annotation of digital resources for information sharing, social interaction and knowledge production. This study aims to examine the perceived value of SA as contributing to learning in multiple undergraduate courses.,In total, 59 students in 3 upper-level undergraduate courses at a Canadian university participated in SA-enabled learning activities during the winter 2019 semester. A survey was administered to measure how SA contributed to studentsā perceptions of learning and sense of community.,A majority of students reported that SA supported their learning despite differences in course subject, how SA was incorporated and encouraged and how widely SA was used during course activities. While findings of the perceived value of SA as contributing to the course community were mixed, students reported that peer annotations aided comprehension of course content, confirmation of ideas and engagement with diverse perspectives.,Studies about the relationships among SA, learning and student perception should continue to engage learners from multiple courses and from multiple disciplines, with indicators of perception measured using reliable instrumentation.,Researchers and faculty should carefully consider how the technical, instructional and social aspects of SA may be used to enable course-specific, personal and peer-supported learning.,This study found a greater variance in how undergraduate students perceived SA as contributing to the course community. Most students also perceived their own and peer annotations as productively contributing to learning. This study offers a more complete view of social factors that affect how SA is perceived by undergraduate students.
When I teach reading, I have to consider the research on reading and on child development in general and wellbeing and supporting children who have experienced trauma and a myriad of other areas. Teaching ā wonderful but complex. The art of teaching is using what we know from the science in all areas and working out how and when to apply it, then checking to see what impact it has had in our context, with our complex humans and all of their needs.
If youāre a longtime reader of Tedium, you might wonder how I manage to uncover so many strange stories. Well, let me tell you. Hopefully itās inspiring.
It is always interesting reading about how different people conduct their research. Whether it be Maha Bali’s reflection on researching and writing a paper in 10 days, Naomi Barnes’ comparison to walking around city streets, Lucy Taylor’s advice on completing a PhD,Ā Ryan Holiday’s five steps or Ian O’Bryne’s process for writing a literature review. At the end of the day, I feel that the method often comes down to the intended outcome. Writing a post for Tedium is going to be different to writing a long book which is different to doing a PhD.
As the three examples Iāve sketchily outlined here indicate, learning loss canāt be understood as a āwholeā without disaggregating it into its disparate elements and the various measurement practices they rely on. Iāve counted only three ways of measuring learning loss hereāthe original psychometric studies; testing companiesā assessments of reading and numeracy; and econometric calculations of āhysteresis effectsā in the economyābut even these are made of multiple parts, and are based on longer histories of measurement that are contested, incompatible with one another, sometimes contradictory, and incoherent when bundled together.
Thread by @DrNomyn: I’m thrilled that @bedforda1 and my edited collection is finally finding its way around the world. This has been a long road, a labour of love of pop culture, and nerding out about theory….ā¦
This book demonstrates how pop culture examples can be used to demystify complex social theory. It provides tangible, metaphorical examples that shows how it is possible to “do philosophy” rather than subscribe to a theorist by showing that each theorist intersects and overlaps with others.
Thereās a variety of useful teaching models ā and this includes explicit instruction ā which have been designed for different purposes. It is the educatorās task to select the most appropriate given the context.
Creating simplistic binaries in a field as complex and nuanced as education impoverishes the debate.
David Price touched upon the issues raised through the PISA report a few years ago:
The extreme polarisation weāre currently witnessing between āTraditionalistsā and Progressivesā, is incredibly damaging and not representative of the teaching profession as a whole. Because the PISA hysteria that has politicians all around the world spouting nonsense, arguing for the end of inquiry-based approaches, and a return to direct-explicit instruction, sees the world in black-and-white. This polarisation ignores the reality of what goes on in the leading nations, and assumes that getting to the top of PISA is the end goal, in itself, of a successful education system.
While Peter Skillen and Brenda Sherry capture the flux in this visual:
I am also reminded of a piece I wrote a few years ago about ‘pedagogical cocktails‘:
I think that the problem is that sometimes we think that we feel that we can only partake of a particular cocktail, that someone else always knows better, therefore we should listen to them. However, this denial of choice often results in teachers who have little engagement and ownership over their curriculum and classrooms, while it also restricts many potentials and possibilities. Instead, teachers maintain a status-quo that often no longer accounts for the world that will come tomorrow, let alone we live in today.
My fear is that in restricting the debate has the risk of stunting the growth and development of teachers. Instead of taking the time to appreciate the nuance, there is a danger of teaching based on the default.
There is evidence that instruction, practice and repetition works, if the aim is to retain large amounts of information, although itās less clear whether you can successfully impose this on other people without a very strict regime of control. The quibble is more about philosophy of education and whether retaining large amounts of particular types of information is the goal we should have for our childrenās education. And there are some difficult questions about exactly what the purpose is of requiring children to learn a lot of information before they are allowed to engage in critical thinking or question what they are learning.
The cognitive model is only one of many. There is an extensive body of research which shows how, from a very early age, children are engaged as active agents in their learning and learn through play. They test hypotheses, problem solve and come up with creative solutions. Alison Gopnik, professor of developmental psychology at University of California, Berkeley, calls this the āchild as scientistā theory of learning, and anyone who has spent time with a young child will have seen it in action. They mix things together, they experiment with floating and sinking, they ask purposeful questions. My own daughter did a series of complex experiments aged about six when she would put various concoctions in the freezer, oven and in the bath under water, to see what would happen. The first I knew of it was when black smoke started emanating from the kitchen. Scientific enquiry was so alive in our home that every time I opened the fridge a new experiment fell out.
This reminds me of Gert Biesta’s three key arguments for a āgood educationā: qualification, socialization and subjectification
But surely composers of hit songs can’t keep upping the levels of harmonic surprise indefinitely without hitting some kind of aesthetic threshold. That’s part of the next stage of Miles and Rosen’s research. This latest study focused on chords, but fortunately, there is more than one way to inject elements of surprise into a song, including dynamics, rhythm, tempo, timbre, and so forth. Based on a few pilot tests last summer that took all those various elements into account, when listeners do peak on a certain level of surprise, Rosen said that “the fastest way to reset or recalibrate how surprise is functioning in music is to dive into a new genre.”
Youāre having trouble writing not because you canāt find the right words, but because you donāt know what youāre trying to say. You donāt have the right facts at hand.
So the solution is to gather more facts. You need to step away from the keyboard, stop trying to write, and do some more reporting: Make phone calls to some new sources, consult new experts, read a relevant book or article. Once you have the facts at hand, the words will come.
Or to put it another way, when youāre writing nonfiction, the words flow from the research. If the words arenāt flowing, usually the problem is the research isnāt there. To say something, you have to have something to say.
In order to connect dots, one must first have the dots
It also feels like it could be a lost chapter to Austin Kleon’s book Keep Going.
Navigating social systems efficiently is critical to our species. Humans appear endowed with a cognitive system that has formed to meet the unique challenges that emerge for highly social species. Bullshitting, communication characterised by an intent to be convincing or impressive without concern for truth, is ubiquitous within human societies. Across two studies (N = 1,017), we assess participantsā ability to produce satisfying and seemingly accurate bullshit as an honest signal of their intelligence. We find that bullshit ability is associated with an individualās intelligence and individuals capable of producing more satisfying bullshit are judged by second-hand observers to be more intelligent. We interpret these results as adding evidence for intelligence being geared towards the navigation of social systems. The ability to produce satisfying bullshit may serve to assist individuals in negotiating their social world, both as an energetically efficient strategy for impressing others and as an honest signal of intelligence.
Overall, we interpret these results as initial evidence that the ability to bullshit well provides an honest signal of a personās ability to successfully navigate social systems, fitting the current work into existing frameworks whereby human intelligence is geared towards efficiently navigating such systems
The researchers were mindful to point out that the inability to bullshit was not a sign of a person being unintelligent.
By analogy to humor, a person who is funny is likely to be rather intelligent, however one can identify many brilliant people who are profoundly unfunny.
Interestingly, they found that you can indeed “bullshit a bullshitter.”
we find that those more willing to bullshit were also more likely to be receptive to pseudo-profound bullshit (i.e., rate pseudo-profound bullshit items higher on profoundness) … Thus, contrary to the common expression, it may indeed be possible to ābullshit a bullshitter.ā
It is an intriguing idea, especially when you consider the fine balance of buying into the lie.
į„ in Honest Signals of Intelligence ā Digitally Literate ()
A medical reversal is when an existing treatment is found to actually be useless or harmful. Psychology has in recent years been racking up reversals: in fact only 40-65% of its classic social results were replicated, in the weakest sense of finding āsignificantā results in the same direction. (Even in those that replicated, the average effect found was half the originally reported effect.) Such errors are far less costly to society than medical errors, but itās still pollution, so hereās the cleanup.