Higher education is a luxury that’s not available to everyone, or, at least, it is a luxury that is more available to some than others. And although financial limitation is certainly an inhibitor, it is not the only one. Think, for example, of the cultural acclimation an international student might experience if they were to relocate to, say, Montreal for their post-secondary studies.
The recent publication of a New York Times article brought a bit more light into this well-known feeling that lingers through some of these days: Languishing. According to the author Adam Grant, "languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you're muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield. And it might be the dominant emotion of 2021."
Occasionally, that’s what this pandemic-inspired solitude feels like: a punishment. And what’s more upsetting than a punishment for a crime you did not commit? Such are the conditions that many students and educators have endured for almost a year. It is easy to think of remote learning—specifically, remote learning that is not “voluntary”—as something of a relegation into unfamiliar educational territory.
Disruptive, challenging, or from some perspectives even terrifying are just a few of the labels that can easily be attached to last year's impact on our society. First and foremost, hit by what it still is a health crisis, 2020 has proven to be a problematic year with wide-ranging repercussions on many levels of our daily lives.
In a previous article, we discussed the Pygmalion effect, a cognitive bias that can interfere with the teacher-learner relationship and have significant effects on learning. However, of the 250 or so cognitive biases known to date, it is not the only one that deserves special attention in education. Here are three other formidable ones: the bias blind spot, the halo effect and the curse of knowledge.
Many of the judgments we make daily, although they may seem sensible to us, are, in fact, far from rational and can lead us to make bad decisions. These erroneous judgments are called cognitive biases, and some 250 different ones are known to date.
We are all quite familiar with the phenomenon of optical illusions, but less so with the phenomenon of cognitive biases. However, these perceptual distortions that are to our mind what optical illusions are to our visual system lead us to make wrong judgments or bad decisions daily
In a workplace where routine tasks are increasingly performed by machines equipped with artificial intelligence (AI), the skills most valued by human beings are those that allow them to perform tasks for which the solution is not known in advance.
Although we often manage to pretend it doesn't exist, uncertainty is an integral part of our lives. With the collective crisis we are experiencing at the moment, it is even more apparent, and in the education community, this is true for learners and teachers alike.
In its Innovative Learning Environments project, the OECD has identified seven principles that should be integrated into any learning environment to ensure that it is truly effective and relevant to the needs of 21st-century learners.
