This is my first attempt to assemble things I come across and which may be of interest into a blog post. These finds are more or less serendipitous and I think I am drawn to them because they help me make connections with my large set of notes that might be described as a really rough and ready zettelkasten which I maintain in DEVONthink.
Education
Dean Ashenden is one of the wiser heads in the noisy and too often ill-informed debates about schooling and education. This piece is well worth a read. If the whale is to be unbeached, it will need to be done by other than by the policy parrots who have far too much say in the lives of the four million. As Ashenden puts it:
Schools are sites of the production of learning, not by teachers but by a four million–strong workforce otherwise known as students. The big determinant of their productivity is not the quality of supervision but the organisation of their work.
AI
As if the digital has not done enough to grab and hold, sometimes, our attention, enter AI and all the cute, fun dodads to perhaps stretch our attention further. This post by Charles Arthur offers a useful over view of developments.
Books
A thoughtful piece on the personal library by Freya Howarth. In an environment of non stop ideas and information some of which can be found in a bound ordering of knowledge (aka a book), spending some time on curation and organisation is worth it. It will make the offline search for that quote, reference a little easier.
Research, intervention and evidence
This long, interesting and provocative post by Kevin Munger draws on the work of Donald Campbell and his notion of the experimenting society. A useful companion piece is: White, H. (2019). The twenty-first century experimenting society: the four waves of the evidence revolution. Palgrave Communications, 5(1). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-019-0253-6 which describes waves of evidence-oriented research. The fifth wave (machine learning, big data) is gestured to. His closing comment:
Most interventions don’t work, most interventions aren’t evaluated and most evaluations are not used. As a result billions of dollars of money from governments and individual donations is wasted on ineffective programmes.
Perhaps a little to the side of this analysis is Kim Chan and Renée Mauborgne’s notion of blue ocean strategy (two books). Guillame Carton offers an insightful commentary on their ideas and the place of academic work. More than useful for all those seeking to put the odd dent in the universe. Their thinking resonates with the often used example of Cirque du Soleil’s invention, i.e. take all the features of a traditional circus and invert them.
Fun
Tom Gauld does great cartoons about books, libraries and also writes wonderful books for kids. A recent one:
James Ladwig picked up this Twitter thread. Well worth the read.
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