OLDaily

Making and programming
Terry Freedman, ICT & Computing in Education, 2022/04/19

I found this article a bit one sides, which is perhaps not surprising given the experiences described in this article. But Terry Freedman raises some important questions: does 'making', properly so-called, actually yield any learning outcomes? And how do you prevent young students from using bits of electronics as catapult projectiles? "There seems to be no academic research which reports that as a result of 'making', pupils have learnt to code," he reports. Freedman also notes that "what the research does say is that the kind of step-by-step instructional activity that seems to accompany making in classrooms is really not what the maker movement is all about." Rather than plodding step-by-step instructions, making seems more to be about open-ended creativity and bricolage. And maybe 'making' isn't really about computer programming at all. Perhaps there are wider benefits? Marina Umaschi Bers, for example, "argues that schools can teach computer coding in ways that develop character as well as technical skills," according to this report.

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Bridging the digital divide in online learning
Tony Bates, Online learning and distance education resources, 2022/04/19

Tony Bates reviews How one city closed the digital divide for nearly all its students from The Hechinger Report April 14. In a nutshell: in Oakland, California, only 12 percent of low-income students, and 25 percent of all students, had proper internet access. "Two years into the pandemic, Oakland has been able to connect 98 percent of the students in the district." The mechanism was "a public-private partnership called #OaklandUndivided that included the school district, the Mayor's office, the nonprofit Tech Exchange, Oakland Promise and other community-based organizations." Bates notes that the problem of internet access extends well beyond schools. He also notes that "the Oakland School District is not a rich jurisdiction." But in this, as in most such cases, it's a matter of institutional will. The city made it a priority, and that's how it got done.

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The Case Against Homework
Alfie Kohn, 2022/04/19

When I was in school I delivered newspapers after school every day (this was before the era of morning papers). If I was assigned homework, either I wouldn't do it, or I would finish it quickly the morning before it was due. So unsurprisingly here, I am supportive of Alfie Kohn's stand. "There are virtually no pros to balance the cons. Even if you regard grades or test scores as good measures of learning, which I do not, doing homework has no statistical relationship to achievement in elementary school. In high school, some studies do find a correlation between homework and test scores, but it's usually fairly small."

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DALL-E 2, the future of AI research, and OpenAI’s business model
Ben Dickson, TechTalks, 2022/04/19

The world is being flooded with artificially generated images and they're pretty good (check out these AI-created portraits of philosophers in the style of Maurice Sendak). OpenAI's new image generating tool, DALL-E 2, "adds enhanced textual comprehension, faster image generation, and four times greater resolution." As Ben Dickson summarizes, "DALL-E 2 is a 'generative model,' a special branch of machine learning that creates complex output instead of performing prediction or classification tasks on input data. You provide DALL-E 2 with a text description, and it generates an image that fits the description." Via Angel.co (see more) and TNW.

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