Top all-time · #23247
Doug Holton
Personal blog · edtechdev.wordpress.comotherwriting
Doug Holton writes EdTechDev, a personal blog at edtechdev.wordpress.com about writing. Since 2011, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 23 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-11-03, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (1) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Linked in an HN thread on how Asian test-prep companies quickly exposed the new SAT, so the posts appear to cover test wiseness. One commenter cited a quiz of gibberish questions that can be answered through test wiseness.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 1 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
developing educational technology
What Hacker News says?
Cognitive load isn't a valid or useful concept: https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/cognitive-load-th... https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00131857.2024.2... There are separate contexts involved here: the coder, the compiler, the runtime, a person trying to understand the code (context of this article), etc. What's better for one context may not be better for another, and programming languages favo…
Comment linking /2009/11/16/cognitive-load-theory-failure/
on “Cognitive load is what matters”Submitted Developing Scalable HTML5 Apps on the Cheap: Serverless, Unhosted, No Backend as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThere have long been issues with LDAP in Mac OS X. They don't use a standard version. It doesn't work with PHP's LDAP module. And there have long been security issues, too: PHP was often out of date with security vulnerabilities. So much so that our campus ended up blocking all Mac web servers. Here are several other issues I wrote up a couple of years ago, the last time I was forced to use Mac OS X server: http://e…
Comment linking /2009/01/31/dont-use-mac-os-x-as-a-server/
on “Mac OS X Lion accepts any password when authenticating via LDAP”Submitted Browser-Based IDEs as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI would look at actual math education research and research-based materials and lessons and tools, such as at sites like NCTM and MAA. Most educational research is not consistent with Lockhart's views. As an example, here's a summary of research-based best practices for teaching Calculus: https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2014/06/03/calculus/
Comment linking /2014/06/03/calculus/
on “A Mathematician’s Lament (2002) [pdf] ”Submitted Fixing Calculus Courses as a story · 1 points
HN discussion6 years ago there was an initiative at Harvard to focus on teaching and not just research, but I don't know what came of it: http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/02/task-force-pro... http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/10/education/10harvard.html?_... But yes, the general state of things at virtually all universities (except community colleges) is that teaching is very much secondary to research, and as a result, a…
Comment linking /2013/07/17/two-courses-that-made-a-difference-in-student-retention/
on “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-track-faculty Life”Submitted Horace’s Compromise and the Faculty-Student Non-Aggression Pact as a story · 1 points
HN discussionCognitive load theory is unfalsifiable and wrong about many things https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/cognitive-load-th... Of course we have limits to how much we can do at once, but learning isn't like filling a bucket. Learning takes active work, effort. An analogy would be like saying 'weight lifting is easier with tiny weights' or 'don't lift too much weight.' Yes, but that's obvious, useless, and forget…
Comment linking /2009/11/16/cognitive-load-theory-failure/
on “Cognitive load theory and its applications for learning”Submitted In Defense of Hand Washing: Lessons from Healthcare for College Teaching as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThere have been numerous refutations of this opinion piece: https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2007/07/25/problem-based-lea... As well as criticisms of their central underlying theory, cognitive load theory, which is unfalsifiable: https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/cognitive-load-th... And there is a wealth of counter-evidence on how constructivist inspired teaching techniques (like active learning, inquiry le…
Comment linking /2007/12/26/an-argument-for-knols-over-wikipedia-and-citizendium/
on “Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work (2006) [pdf]”Submitted What’s the “problem” with MOOCs? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionCognitive load theory is unfalsifiable and has numerous conceptual and methodological problems: https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/cognitive-load-th...
Comment linking /2009/11/16/cognitive-load-theory-failure/
on “Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work (2006) [pdf]”In my humble opinion, blackboard and the like (moodle, sakai...) are mainly useful for core classes that have a lot of students taking quizzes or writing papers or doing readings. Faculty and instructors, I think, sometimes forget when they have academic freedom to teach their course whatever way they see best (sometimes they really don't have this choice though, like for much government/military/corporate training)…
Comment linking /2009/08/31/50-examples-of-the-need-to-improve-college-teaching/
on “I develop free software because of CUNY and Blackboard”There's a multiple choice quiz in which the questions and answers are all basically gibberish yet you can work out the answers based on "test wiseness": https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2007/10/11/test-wiseness-wri...
Comment linking /2007/10/11/test-wiseness-writing-better-multiple-choice-quiz-questions/
on “How Asian test-prep companies swiftly exposed the brand-new SAT”This problem probably won't be solved by Apple, but it will be solved by others who are working on browser-based IDEs right now. There are several browser-based programming sites such as http://www.playmycode.com/ , cloud9, http://jsdo.it , jsfiddle, etc. Even Eclipse is coming out with a browser-based version soon (project orion). Now, some of these don't work on mobile or tablet devices yet (broken contenteditable…
Comment linking /2011/03/03/contentnoteditable-what-the-death-of-the-mouse-and-keyboard-mean-for-content-creators/
on “The iPad Falls Short as a Creation Tool Without Coding Apps”Yeah there's a 'hard science' crowd among educational (psychology) researchers, that only accepts quantitative, experimental, randomized studies, but even that form of research has serious flaws when applied to education. They ignore biases that can affect results (most often experimenter expectancy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer-expectancy_effect ), and they ignore ecological validity (many findings 'from th…
Comment linking /2010/03/17/need-more-d-in-education-r-and-d/
on “Why Science Requires Theories”