Projectories

An article from Mark Warschauer in Learning Inquiry that seems interesting:

What constitutes learning in the 21st century will be contested terrain as our society strives toward post-industrial forms of knowledge acquisition and production without having yet overcome the educational contradictions and failings of the industrial age. Educational reformers suggest that the advent of new technologies will radically transform what people learn, how they learn, and where they learn, yet studies of diverse learners’ use of new media cast doubt on the speed and extent of change. Drawing on recent empirical and theoretical work, this essay critically examines beliefs about the nature of digital learning and points to the role of social, culture, and economic factors in shaping and constraining educational transformation in the digital era.

Gustav Holmberg (as usual) pointed me to the new version of the Swedish National Library Search System LIBRIS. You can subscribe to searches via RSS, save search hits, browse your immediate search history, group your search, etc. Of course, there is also an Open Search Plugin (which makes my own plugin obsolete).

I was reminded by Gustav Holmberg about a review by Steven Shapin that a friend of mine sent me a couple of weeks ago.  At the time, I enjoyed reflecting on pneumatic tubes for mail, but didn’t note it anywhere. So here comes a late notice.

Edgertons book seems interesting, I might have checked it out at the library, except the Stockholm University Library is closed due to sabotage. Let that sink in for a while… Sabotaging a library. Who does these things? Disgruntled student? Lots of overdue books?

Anyway, check the review out.

In the largest Swedish newspaper today there is an article about mathematics making you a better student. I’m quite surprised that the journalist doesn’t seem to have a clue about the difference between correlation and causality.

According to the journalist, the research showed that students that attended three years of math in high school had better grades in biology, chemistry, and physics at the university. The question is: does three years of math make you a better student, or do better students (more motivated, smarter, more supported from home, etc.) to a higher degree choose three years of math? If you ask this question it might not be a question of causality, but of correlation.

In my high-school, all the motivated students selected certain subjects, while all the slackers chose others ? just because the subjects had a reputation for being a slacker subject, or a hard-worker-subject.

So there was a correlation between being a hard worker and choosing certain subjects, not necessarily a causality between attending certain subjects and becoming a better student.

Please, DN, before putting something on the first page, get your argumentation straight.