Stephen Downes

This article offers a much-needed corrective to the application of cognitive load theory in education, based on a paper on the same subject by the author and colleagues. "The core concern is not that CLT is totally wrong or irrelevant, but that it is radically incomplete, and that treating it as a general theory of education distorts both pedagogy and teacher understanding." In particular, "Children are not fragile information processors waiting to be protected from difficulty. They are unusually exploratory, socially attuned, and cognitively plastic... We propose treating learning as a dynamic interaction between cognitive, emotional, social, and self-regulatory processes, unfolding across development." That's actually about as far from cognitive load theory as you could get, but it's accurate.