The title of this post is the title of the paper, and very much not a statement of my opinion. The paper explains how. The questions that immediately spring to mind are ‘effective for what?’ and ‘compared with what?’ The answers from the paper are that it is effective (ish) for making children behave the way you want them to behave, if done in the recommended manner for a limited subset of contexts and people, compared with explaining to kids why their behaviour is unacceptable. Sigh.

Behaviourist approaches do often work as a way of producing the desired behaviour – that is their appeal and that is their point. They do not work at all well when compared with alternatives (explaining is only one of thousands of alternatives, the choice of which depends entirely on context), and they almost always have extremely undesirable side-effects. There are many subsidiary lessons that punishment teaches, including that you should obey those with more power, that you are less worthy than those with more power, that forcible manipulation is an acceptable thing to do to other people, etc. The same applies to rewards.

When I was young, untutored, and overwhelmed with the hassles of parenthood I did sometimes use punishment for my kids in much the same way that this research recommends as well as, occasionally, in anger. I am not proud of that. I think it is entirely understandable but it is a thing to be ashamed of, not to be celebrated. It is a lazy, short-termist short cut that has far more unpleasant side-effects than the benefits it brings. There is always an alternative and, though it may take longer, may be uncomfortable and it may take more patience, that alternative is almost always better in the long run. If we treat children like dogs (and behaviourist methods aren’t even that great for dogs) they will likely grow up obedient – unless they react against it, which is a strong possibility – and, like dogs, if we let the leash slip or they spot a way to avoid punishment while doing something bad, they are likely to take it. Even if they don’t, if the only reason they don’t do the bad thing is habitual fear, the world will be a much sadder place.

Address of the bookmark: http://apa.org/news/press/releases/2015/08/punishing-child.aspx

Brilliant piece by our own George Siemens on his thoughts on visiting the White House for a special meeting on higher education. There’s a strong US-centric focus to George’s report, understandably enough, but many of the issues he speaks of resonate internationally. Things are changing, and the change is coming soon, and George is very good at pinning down the implications of that. A worthwhile read for anyone with an interest in the future of higher education.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2015/08/03/white-house-innovation-in-higher-education/

Unwanted gift: a few careless owners, many botched repair jobs, not firing on all cylinders, tarnished reputation, some wheels missing, but only slightly used.

A bargain for anyone with a 19th Century attitude to education, seeking thousands of locked-in, resentful customers who will continue to complainingly pay through the nose for any old rubbish because it is too difficult and expensive to move to a different platform. Get it before they all go!

Address of the bookmark: http://www.businessinsider.com/education-software-company-blackboard-is-looking-to-sell-for-3-billion-2015-7

The second part of AUSU’s Voice Magazine’s interview with Kinshuk (first part here) in which he talks about some of his rich ideas around smart learning, the interplay between digital technologies and pedagogies, fine-grained accreditation, and the value of social interaction in learning. Excellent insights into the thinking of one of AU’s finest profs, who also happens to be one of the smartest (and most prolific) edtech researchers on the planet. His bubbly personality and deeply humanistic, caring perspective on such things comes across very well in this interview.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.voicemagazine.org/articles/featuredisplay.php?ART=10648

A post about the Dunning-Kruger effect, which basically claims (and, in a series of studies) demonstrates that ignorance is often typified not the absence of knowledge but by the illusion of it. People think they know more than they do and, at least in many cases, the less they know, the more they think they know. People as in us.

For teachers, this is one of the trickiest things to overcome when we want to give learners control: how do learners distinguish between ignorance and knowledge? If you do not know that you need to know more, you do not have the power nor motivation to take the steps to change that. The role of a teacher (whether an appointed individual or not) to challenge misconceptions and highlight ignorance is a crucial one.  But it should not be about proving or, worse still, telling someone less able than yourself that they are wrong: that’s just a power trip. Ideally, learners should develop ways to uncover their own ignorance – to be surprised or confounded, to see their own mistakes – rather than have someone do it for them.  I think that this means that teachers, amongst other things, should create conditions for surprise to occur, opportunities to safely fail (without judgement), opportunities to reflect, and support for those seeking to uncover the cause of their new-found ignorance.

Address of the bookmark: http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/expertise-and-the-illusion-of-knowledge/

Justin Ferriman provides commentary on a Synotive infographic on the history of the LMS, noting a couple of omissions. I think there are dozens if not hundreds of omissions, though nice to see a couple of shout-outs to Athabasca University and our own Rory McGreal. Did Rory really design a DOS-based LMS? You learn something new every day, even about old friends! Not to mention about operating systems: I know that it was possible to network DOS computers – I did it quite a lot – but I’m not sure it would be fair to describe anything built on the back of that as an LMS.

For me, the big missing chunks are mostly in the 1990s, which was an extremely prolific time for things like VLEs, MLEs and LMSs, with most of the major commercial players like Blackboard, WebCT, Lotus LearningSpace, Desire2Learn creating products back then, not to mention a huge range of concurrent and prior things like (say) FirstClass, Bodington, WOLF, CECIL, Web-Course-in-a-Box, and many many more. Even I helped to write an LMS in the 90s – everyone was doing it back then. Then there are all those interesting open source projects like ILIAS and DOKEOS, and somehow the infographic manages to include Sakai but not OKI (that Sakai’s component LMSs all used and that made it easy to bring them together). And where did all those MOOs go? Hard to miss what was then a big movement. And of course the wealth of standards that go unmentioned (where is IMS in this?), things like PLEs, beyond-LMS systems like Elgg, etc. etc. And there’s a chunk between 2007 and 2013 that includes the odd ‘minor’ event like Instructure Canvas or EdX. I could go on. Looks to me like they have no idea about the real history of it at all. Infographics are seductive things, making poorly researched weakly linked randomly chosen events culled from Wikipedia look like a believable story.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.learndash.com/history-of-the-lms/

A brief and kindly review of Teaching Crowds from the good folk of AACE. The review focuses on the teaching of crowds aspect of the book, which is indeed part of what it is about, though it is at least as much about how crowds themselves (can) teach.

Address of the bookmark: http://blog.aace.org/2015/07/15/book-review-teaching-crowds/

Donald Clark’s collected critical introductions to a wide range of theorists that have some connection with learning. They are not all learning theorists as such, despite the title, though all relate to things that matter in learning and/or teaching and/or education. It’s an eclectic mix that covers far more than those we normally consider to be learning theorists: the likes of Jesus and Marx are not normally grouped with the likes of Dewey and Gagne, for example.

Donald positively relishes the demolition of holy cows and many of his critiques – e.g. of social constructivistm or learning styles or Sugata Mitra  – challenge orthodoxy and commonly-held-but-mistaken beliefs in a very refreshing way. He’s not always right, but he is always well-informed, thought-provoking and interesting. And, if you do disagree with anything he says, he’s normally willing to engage in a reasoned debate about it on his blog – this is a million miles away from a static textbook.

For anyone wanting to get a quick, informative introduction to learning/teaching/education theories and some incisive commentary on them, as well as some excellent references to further reading, this is a brilliant learning resource.

Address of the bookmark: http://planblearning.com/articles/learning-theorists/