Items to Share: 8 December

Education Focus:

Knowledge vs. Skills

• What I now tell my students about knowledge | Webs of Substance 'You might think this is a bit of a stretch but consider this: the evidence for transferrable skills is pretty limited. Yes, such skills do exist but they are far less facilitative than you might think. On the other hand, background knowledge enables reading and comprehension - something essential to future learning. Background knowledge enables critical thinking.' 

• Why we shouldn’t close down the skills-knowledge debate | Pragmatic Education 'The point of this blogpost is to challenge those calls to move beyond the knowledge versus skills debate and its polarising binaries. I would urge those who make them to rethink these calls, and those who hear them to resist them. We are yet to excavate the full insight from the rich seam of the knowledge and instruction side of the debate. Cognitive science, international comparisons and statistical meta-analyses are not going to go away, and as they become increasingly sophisticated, we must not preclude thinking through this tension carefully.' 

• What’s Essential in the Education Debate Part 2: Reason [A sort of meta-contribution to the substantive debate linked to above—about how it should be conducted.] 'As well as those who have no enthusiasm for truth in education debate, there are also those with no particular regard for rational argument. At its core, the issue is still the same one of truth. If claims are contradictory, arguments fallacious or inferences poorly thought out then false claims can be supported as easily as true ones. Those expecting to argue over education should be familiar with the most common informal fallacies, or at the very least be willing to look them up when required, yet I still encounter those who think it unfair or underhand to point out that their argument is invalid.'

PISA

• PISA Headlines from the UK: World League Standings! 

• Don't let dubious Pisa league tables dictate how we educate our children | Peter Wilby | 

• Try the test - Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Here are some of the source materials for the PISA test. 

And...

• The Simplest Way To Solve Several Ofsted Problems | LKMco, Education and Youth Development Ofsted should publish the observation notes from all lessons rated as outstanding. 

• Maths curriculum: full of howlers & schoolboy errors

• Literature and Bureaucracy by Tim Parks | The New York Review of Books 'If I were asked what was the greatest problem in the university I work in today, I would definitely say bureaucracy: in particular, the obsession with codifying, regulating, recording, reviewing, verifying, vetting, and chronicling, with assessing achievement, forecasting achievement, identifying weak points, then establishing commissions for planning strategies for regular encounters to propose solutions to weak points, and further commissions empowered to apply for funding to pay for means to implement these solutions, and so on.'

Other Business

• The Golden Mean: a great discovery or natural phenomenon? 'The Golden Mean – also known as the Golden Section or the Divine Proportion – is a mathematical concept that is typically traced to the 15th century, a period in which geometry served both practical and symbolic purposes. It is a ratio that defines a recurring relationship between a larger element and a smaller subset of that element.'

• Simplifiers and Optimizers, by Dilbert creator Scott Adams - Boing Boing 'Some people are what I call simplifiers and some are optimizers. A simplifier will prefer the easy way to accomplish a task, while knowing that some amount of extra effort might have produced a better outcome. An optimizer looks for the very best solution even if the extra complexity increases the odds of unexpected problems.'

• Stephen Fry Responds to Grammar Pedants | New Republic

• A neuroscientist's radical theory of how networks become conscious (Wired UK) 'According to Koch, consciousness arises within any sufficiently complex, information-processing system. All animals, from humans on down to earthworms, are conscious; even the internet could be. That's just the way the universe works.'

• Nelson Mandela, 1918-2013 Invictus (W E Henley)-- the poem which sustained Mandela through the prison years.

• New Center for the History of Psychology Online Exhibit: The IQ Zoo [Advances in the History of Psychology]

• Why it's time to lay the selfish gene to rest – David Dobbs – Aeon 'if merely reading a genome differently can change organisms so wildly, why bother rewriting the genome to evolve? How vital, really, are actual changes in the genetic code? Do we even need DNA changes to adapt to new environments? Is the importance of the gene as the driver of evolution being overplayed?' (Robust comments follow) 

• Vermeer’s Secret Tool: Testing Whether The Artist Used Mirrors and Lenses to Create His Realistic Images | Vanity Fair 'David Hockney and others have speculated—controversially—that a camera obscura could have helped the Dutch painter Vermeer achieve his photo-realistic effects in the 1600s. But no one understood exactly how such a device might actually have been used to paint masterpieces. An inventor in Texas—the subject of a new documentary by the magicians Penn & Teller—may have solved the riddle.'

• Home And Wet Andrew Sullivan gets all nostalgic (?) about the resilient persistence of old England.

• xkcd: File Extensions Trustworthiness of information by file extension.

• Designing for readers: five tips for effective typography theconversation.com 'My aim here is to offer basic tips for designing long form texts in a way that encourages people to read them. More than making texts look good, my concern is making them readable.' 

• Swedish Chef/Gordon Ramsay cook-off  So it goes!

• The Practice of Advent [Experimental Theology] Richard Beck meditates on this first season of the liturgical year; it's not just about advent calendars, it's about gearing up to Christmas spiritually, and although Beck doesn't mention it, anticipating Judgement:The Collect for Advent: Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness and to put on the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which your Son Jesus Christ came to us in great humility; that on the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.