While looking for something else...: Items to Share: 24 November

Education Focus

Why some kids can’t spell and why spelling tests won’t help ( theconversation.com) 'If spelling words are simply strings of letters to be learnt by heart with no meaning attached and no investigation of how those words are constructed, then we are simply assigning our children a task equivalent to learning ten random seven-digit PINs each week.'

Mindset and the cult of personality adjustmentby Harry Webb. 'Am I the only one who is a little uneasy about the new fashion for promoting a growth mindset? Something about it has unsettled me for a while now and I’ve probably just reached the point where I can articulate it.'

Txtng Rules – Lingua Franca - Blogs - The Chronicle of Higher Education 'Savvy EMC users have developed a set of written conventions that usefully serve their purposes when texting, instant messaging, Facebook posting, and the like. There’s a myth out there that students are now turning in formal essays filled with these same conventions; in 20 years of university teaching, I’ve never seen one.'

Four Revealing Facts on How Learners Read On Screen [Infographic] There's still a lot we don't know about screen-based reading. But we do know some important behavioral changes emerging in the digital environment. These could definitely impact how we design our eLearning courses.'

Donald Clark Plan B: 9 reasons why I am NOT a Social Constructivist 'To be honest, I’m not even sure that social constructivism is an actual theory, in the sense that it’s verified, studied, understood and used as a deep, theoretical platform for action. For most, I sense, it’s a simple belief that learning is, well, ‘social’ and ‘constructed’. As collaborative learning is a la mode, the social bit is accepted without much reflection, despite its obvious flaws. Constructivism is trickier but appeals to those with a learner-centric disposition, who have a mental picture of ideas being built in the mind...'

Donald Clark Plan B: Big Data – bums on seats measures wrong end of learner 'Education and training has always coveted data. But in any honest appraisal of this data collection we have to admit that it is largely the wrong data. There has, historically been too much focus on start and end point data. All dull inputs and outputs, it’s like judging a person simply by measuring what he eats and then excretes. It may even stretch to how long that process took to complete. What we need to focus on is the cognitive improvement of the learner.'

Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course | Fast Company | Business Innovation The comments are more interesting than the article which seems to believe that Thrun invented distance learning. The comments do address the implicit question of how MOOCs should be evaluated, but there is still no discussion of how to incorporate dialogue and feedback with such volumes. Actually, it's being done all the time by the Open University--but it ain't cheap.

Does lesson observation still have a role to play in teaching? | Perspectives on professional development '[...] observation has become normalised in colleges and schools as a crude, reductive assessment tool, largely serving the interests of a performance management agenda with little benefit to practitioners and resulting in many counterproductive consequences. Teachers have come to experience a growing sense of disempowerment, increased levels of anxiety and general discontent in relation to the use of observation over the last two decades. But is this reason enough to discontinue its use?'

Chorleywood Teaching and Learning | Sam Shepherd 'Chorleywood lessons – lessons which meet the criteria, because, simply, they contain the correct ingredients put together in the appropriate way. I don’t mean this dismissively to trainees either, it’s a pretty full-on learning curve, and to hit those standards is one hell of an achievement. I was definitely (indeed barely) a Chorleywood teacher when I first started. Standards on any teacher training course have much the same effect – include the correct standard elements in the correct order, know what you are talking about, and hey presto, Chorleywood teaching and learning. Indeed, if we are talking teaching standards, then we need only raise the spectre of an inspectorate to wonder if there are parallel issues there.'

Other Business

Questions You Should Never Ask a Writer - New York Times Doris Lessing: 'A successor to “commitment” is “raising consciousness.” This is double-edged. The people whose consciousness is being raised may be given information they most desperately lack and need, may be given moral support they need. But the process nearly always means that the pupil gets only the propaganda the instructor approves of. “Raising consciousness,” like “commitment,” like “political correctness,” is a continuation of that old bully, the party line.'

“The Human Propensity To F*ck Things Up” (Andrew Sullivan) --re-defining original sin (after Francis Spufford)

Breaking Bad News | More Intelligent Life 'For decades, the way bad news was broken was, as one official British report put it, “deeply insensitive”. Now we do it better, thanks to the efforts of one American widow.'

Policy: Twenty tips for interpreting scientific claims : Nature News & Comment '[...] the immediate priority is to improve policy-makers' understanding of the imperfect nature of science. The essential skills are to be able to intelligently interrogate experts and advisers, and to understand the quality, limitations and biases of evidence. We term these interpretive scientific skills. [...] To this end, we suggest 20 concepts that should be part of the education of civil servants, politicians, policy advisers and journalists — and anyone else who may have to interact with science or scientists.'

Frontiers for Young Minds Frontiers for Young Minds is a web-based scientific journal with an editorial board of kids.

The evolving role of the Oxford English Dictionary - FT.com 'Lexicography, unlike journalism, is a field in which deadline extensions can occasionally be justified. James Murray (1837-1915), the indefatigable editor who oversaw much of the first edition, was originally commissioned to produce a four-volume work within a decade; after five years, he had got as far as the word “ant”. Similarly, the lexicographers toiling behind the neoclassical columns at the Oxford University Press, the dictionary’s home and publisher, have been forced gradually to extend their horizons. When work began on OED3 in the mid-1990s, it was meant to be complete by 2010. Today, they are roughly a third of the way through and Michael Proffitt, the new chief editor, estimates that the job won’t be finished for another 20 years.'