OLDaily

Research Article: Success factors for serious games to enhance learning: a systematic review
Karl Kapp, Kapp Notes, 2018/10/09

This post summarizes a paywalled article (and the link provided is actually to an individual libraryu account, making it doubly walled) but you can fine the text on sci-hub (28 page PDF). Most of the article cosnsists of a large table summarizing other articles. Kapp rightly focuses on the conclusions and restates them accurately. For example, "Serious games need to have replay value rather than be a once-off learning endeavor." Also, "an intuitive game interface with minimalist control mechanics and an uncomplicated heads-up display are recommended to keep the player/learner focused on the learning at hand." It's funny how the game elements and the learning elements always sem to be in opposition, and how the focus is to get the gameplay into the background to focus on the learning.

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Learning Is a Complex and Active Process That Occurs Throughout the Life Span
Jonathan Kantrowitz, Education Research Report, 2018/10/09

According to this post, "A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine highlights the dynamic process of learning throughout the life span." It looks pretty interesting. It's available here - you have to log in to download the PDF (grr) or you can read the 347 pages for free online. "Learning is an ongoing process that is simultaneously biological and cultural. Each individual learner functions within a complex developmental, cognitive, physical, social, and cultural system. Learning also changes the brain throughout the life span. At the same time, the brain develops in ways that impact learning and are in turn shaped by the learner’s context and cultural influences." There is much much more.

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Technology Was Supposed To Save Us. It Hasn’t
Dan Pontefract, 2018/10/09

I was born 12 years before Dan Pontefract. And while I would be the first to agree with him that technology isn't perfect, I think those 12 years make all the difference in understanding the impact of new technology. We had television from my early childhood, but depended more on radio, since we only had two channels (CBC and CTV). I worked with some of the earliest computers, before they were small enough to fit inside a house. My life is neatly divided between the paper era and the digital era - and believe me, the digital era is much better.

It's not, as Pontefract claims, that technology has made us more busy. We were always busy. I'd read three newspapers a day (and in my younger years, deliver two of them; I also sold greeting cards, sorked as a hot dog vendor, and mowed lawns - work invariably involved physical labour, even for kids). My nose was always in a book, morning, noon and night (except when I was involved with newspapers). In university, I had to write my papers by hand, or (later) type them on a typewriter. And there was waiting - so much waiting - at the bank, at the store, at government offices. All of this pain has been replaced by really simple computer applications.

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Common Core Produces Massive Failure in Writing
Diane Ravic, National Education Policy Centrer, 2018/10/09

We've seen calls in Canada for 'education reform' that looks a lot like the American Common Core focus on instructivism, core content, and a lot of testing. The promise was that it would improve outcomes, but Diane Ravich reports on a study that shows it produced the opposite. "National NAEP scores flatlined, and scores for the poorest kids dropped. Here is the latest from New York, which embraced the Common Core wholeheartedly. Since the introduction of the Common Core, the proportion of students in New York who scored zero on the state writing tests has doubled. In addition, the achievement gap has grown."

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A new study provides some dispiriting evidence for why people fall for stupid fake images online
Laura Hazard Owen, NiemanLab, 2018/10/09

The usual advice given to people about fake news (and fake images) usually has something to with: consider the source, consider the content, does it look professional, are other people linking to it? Etc. I'm thinking for example of Mike Caulfield, who often gives this advice, as in this interview. Not so, according to this report. "Instead, what matters are digital media literacy skills, experience or skill in photography, and prior attitudes about the issue." Not that any of this is easy, and the study also points to the risk of government and institutional overreaction.

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Why data culture matters
Alejandro Díaz, Kayvaun Rowshankish, Tamim Saleh, McKinsey Quarterly, 2018/10/09

One of the topics we cover in E-Learning 3.0 us the transition from document-based culture to data-based culture. This article explores that transition. It identifies "seven of the most prominent takeaways from conversations we’ve had with these and other executives who are at the data-culture fore." It presents data as a trool for making decisions, the democratizing effect of data, data as an element in risk management, data as an enterprise's "crown jewel" asset, and the link between data and management and talent.

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