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What Necessary Adult Skills Were You Never Taught Growing Up? Eric Ravenscraft, LifeHacker, 2015/03/02 Doug Belshaw flags this article in LifeHacker asking people to comment on the life skills they never learned growing up. As one commenter says, "I just realized, this entire article boils down to 'give Lifehacker ideas for future articles'." But hey, why not? In any case, the comments section is filled with ideas for good life lessons. Here's a sampling: basic hygiene habits like flossing/brushing teeth, taking showers, shaving, cosmetics, and hairstyling. education on how to have constructive relationships basic finance. My parents handled everything and didn't teach me about budgeting at all how to exercise or be physically fit emotional intelligence. Being able to communicate exactly how I feel instead of sticking my head in the sand knowing a little bit about car repairs and maintenance how to wear makeup how to handle repeated failure. How to be content with doing "alright", not "outstanding" in life how to cook Sensing a theme?

"In his book Seven Thousand Ways to Listen: Staying Close To What Is Sacred, Nepo, a poet and philosopher, describes listening as "the doorway to everything that matters. It enlivens the heart the way breathing enlivens the lungs. We listen to awaken our heart. We do this to stay vital and alive." Listening is how we relate to others and ourselves. It's the building block to meaningful, sincere relationships, and the building block to a meaningful, sincere life."

The numbers game Steve Wheeler, Learning With Es, 2015/04/15 Icon The assignment of a numeric value to student work is a technology. It's actually a relatively recent technology. Why did we adopt it? Steve Wheeler asks the question and the closest he comes to an answer is in saying "marking of students' work is... about how their work measures up against standards." In the wider scheme of things, though, surprisingly few assessments are made this way. Consider the way you recognize a person in a crowd - do you rate each person ("she's 40% of my grandmother, he's 25% of my grandmother")? Of course not. Do you give numerical values to the correct way (and various incorrect ways) of going to the office in the morning? These alternative assessments are not about "how (to)... get them to understand what they need to do better next time." They speak to a different assessment technology, one not based on grades, but on recognition.

wo Things to do in Learning nick shackleton-jones, aconventional, 2015/06/25 Icon This is an interesting way to view two separate approaches to learning. The first begins with "responding to challenges" that would be faced by a student or learner; the other is to "present challenges". In the first, the provider furnishes resources, services and other "useful stuff", while in the second it creates experiences and "impactful challenges". "This is," says nick shackleton-jones, "really a simplified version of the diagram set out in 'The Tragedy of L&D'. It is presented here as two options because this is how it often comes up in conversation." Interestingly, neither aligns with the concept of 'courses' as we currently define them. "'Courses' - in the sense of 'content-dumping' (either online or as part of an event) do not feature in either activity... At the very foundation lies the false assumption is that learning professionals are tasked with stuffing information into people's heads. And that is not how learning works."

The recall of facts is not nearly the whole of learning, of course (though it is often presented as though it were), but the methodology outlined here accords with my own understanding (which I have styles as "practice and reflection"). "Surprisingly," writes the author, "scientific knowledge of how to learn and acquire factual knowledge is not a standard part of the curriculum in medical school." The program should be "taught actively by posing questions and quizzing students, provide tests to foster learning, and repeat the learning strategies in spaced intervals." What's interesting is that if this method is practiced, the person's ability to remember facts itself is improved. Which, when you think of it, makes sense. "With practice, the memory can be trained comparable to the training of a muscle." Image: secretGeek. Via Emily Springfield in an EDUCAUSE listserv.

Icon I have talked in the past about how we as a society are developing a new multimedia language (and in the process, reshaping what 'language of thought' theories could possibly mean). We are seeing more and more evidence of this, beginning with this lead story. It's a great set of thought-experiments on how authors could respond to specific audience needs with more useful and informative multimedia responses. Do they work? Yes - as Poynter points out, the most popular features on the New York Times web site were interactives and multimedia, not stories. And the upstart (and excellent) news site Quartz has just launched Atlas, a site for charts and graphics. We won't recognize that we think of as 'learning content' in just a few years, as we move beyond texts and courses and toward engaging and interactive multimedia.

Icon There are three distinct phases to this article: first, the author describes the development of creative technologies (Wordpress, Lulu, Garage Band) is enabling us all to create and distribute images, objects, sound and text. However, second, as these technologies become more complex, they require teams of people to produce quality materials. "Lone instructors rarely have the time, incentives, budgets, or skill sets required to fully realize the potential of the digital format." This leads to the final phase, whereby "the academic may be perceived as being 'deskilled'; that is, one of the core functions of the occupation is taken away from the academic and done elsewhere." Image (and useful slide show): Chrissi Nerantzi.oldailt

Interesting article about Facebook's response to 'dangerous speech'. The article is situated with respect to "the Buddhist monk Ashin Wirathu, who spent seven years in jail for inciting violence against Muslims and now advocates exiling them from Myanmar." The article lists five criteria for identifying "dangerous speech" (and therefore presumably for the banning of it or its utterers): It takes place in a social or historical context ripe for violence, such as longstanding religious tensions or struggles to control valuable resources; The audience has grievances or fears a speaker can exploit; The speaker is highly influential or charismatic; The speech is clearly understandable as a call to violence; The speaker employs an influential medium-typically a radio or television station. To me, the only criterion of any merit is the fourth: the speech is clearly understandable as a call to violence. The others are merely mechanisms for legitimizing dangerous speech emanating from more traditional agencies. I think teachers and educators should look at these criteria, and tackle the question of what counts as "dangerous speech", and what we should do about it, directly. P.S., why can't we have options like "'it's a rumor or has false information,' 'it promotes violence,' and 'it disturbs social harmony'?" Aren't these things dangerous in North America as well? -- OLDaily

Tacit Knowledge Acquisition and Dissemination in Distance Learning Annel Ketcha, Jokull Johannesson, Paul Bocij, The European Journal of Open and Distance Learning, 2015/12/28 Icon This is quite a good discussion of the concept of tacit knowledge, how it evolved since its original description in Polanyi, and focusing on the the "organisational view supporting the articulation of tacit knowledge" by people like Nonaka and Takeuchi. Tacit knowledge is "is that part of knowledge that is widely embodied in individuals but not able to be readily expressed." In more recent years, one objective of e-learning in organizations has been to disseminate tacit knowledge across the organization, but as the authors note, this use is contentious. "Many researchers argue that means to share tacit knowledge cited by the previous schools are no longer suitable in the current digital era." Maybe so. Or maybe - as I think - all knowledge is tacit knowledge. Either way, the discussions of tacit knowledge in the field are premature. "A major gap in tacit knowledge in e-learning research is the lack of empirical evaluation of tacit knowledge and its flow among online learners and tutors." Image: Nonaka and Takeuchi (1997) (from here) (more).old

Icon No, this is not Dale's Cone (though you'd be forgiven for thinking it is). It is "a framework - for content curation." I've criticized the educational researcher's over-reliance on taxonomies in the past; this old saw is equally the villain. What we see here is very similar to Gagne's 9 events model. And like so many models before and after, it's a step-by-step model of how education or learning does or should work. It's very procedural, it's very prescriptive - and it's so utterly wrong. Education is not a linear process. It's not even something we can flow-chart. It's a constant complex and adaptive process, involving and balancing feedback from dozens of elements, pursuing a strange attractor of varying motivations, means and methods.

nge de Waard links to this collection of xAPI case studies - these are "short (average 15 min) videos covering xAPI in a variety of settings.... real stories on how people in EdTech are using Experience API in their context. The videos were taped during the Orlando happening, and they include wonderful experts." See also the Connections Forum.

Challenging MOOCs Audrey Watters, Hack Education, 2015/06/25 Icon Audrey Watters completes a MOOC on superheroes in popular culture and reflects on it. "My fear: the treatment of Wonder Woman in "The Rise of Superheroes and Their Impact On Pop Culture" is symbolic of how all topics will be treated by popular MOOCs. We'll get tittering, but no theory." I'm less concerned about the lack of theory (criticism as a discipline is overly fond of Theory) but share Watters's concerns about lack of depth. Additionally, the difficulty of managing a centralized discussion forum for a MOOC is something we encountered and addressed in our MOOCs (addressed by encouraging people to set up their own fora in their own locations around the web; our favourite troll could dominate the one central discussion, but was utterly defeated by the distributed discussion - a lesson the centralized MOOCs still haven't learned).

I don't know enough to appreciate how this look was created but I like it!