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Icon Sam Chaltain is gaining traction for some ideas that will be familiar to readers of this newsletter (plus one about school buses that is new to me). From his newsletter: "What if... we started to design schools in ways that imagined young people moving more like a murmuration of Starlings than, say, a regiment of soldiers? What if, in order to reimagine schooling, we got specific about all the things we have always done that we will need to hold onto - and all the things we must let go of in order to make space for something new? And what if, instead of viewing a thing like a school bus as merely a vehicle for transporting children to and from school, we viewed it (as one community has done) as an essential link in the chain of our overall effort to support the needs of children?" -- OLDaily

Icon This post captures what is for me one of the major motivations for building a personal learning environment in the LPSS program: "The importance of giving students responsibility for their own domain cannot be overstated. This can be a way to track growth and demonstrate new learning over the course of a student's school career - something that they themselves can reflect upon, not simply grades and assignments that are locked away in a proprietary system controlled by the school. And if a student owns their own domain, as she moves from grade to grade and from school to school, all that information - their learning portfolio - can travel with them. Education technology - and more broadly, the culture of education - does a terrible job with this sort of portability and interoperability." To me this is simple and logical. Getting people to actually build it and pay for it - this is the much greater challenge (and the one I've been engaged in for the last few years).

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.

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