Curios of the week #6

Clippings, endnotes and reaping the Twitter harvest

Image by AI

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Last week’s curios ended on the news that Twitter had stopped allowing Substack to embed Tweets into posts. It didn’t end there. Elon Musk escalated. He never quite reached the point of preventing the posting of links to Substack on Twitter, but they were labelled ‘unsafe’ and users had to click through a warning to reach them. Other Twitter users could also no longer reply to or retweet links to Substack.

Most of that has stopped, except that I still cannot embed tweets. Instead, I will post screenshots and if you click on one of these screenshots, you will be taken to the Twitter thread.

What to make of it all? I don’t know. I’ve just seen some commentary on the BBC about an interview Musk did with that broadcaster where the commentator was scornfully critical of Musk’s antics. The thing is, I don’t think I agree with her either. At one point, Musk spoke about free speech issues and she was too dismissive of Musk’s quite reasonable question: Who gets to decide what is misinformation?

Amidst this noise and perhaps as a cause of some of it, Substack Notes launched. We shall see how that turns out. At present, it seems to be a much more civilised space than Twitter. Nevertheless, I am told there was a time when Twitter was civilised so perhaps the meatheads just haven’t arrived yet.

This week’s curio’s include some interesting nitpickery, evidence for core knowledge, a new paper on maths teaching, Professor Jo Boaler strikes back and more.

Maths education paper of the week

An open-access review article in the International Electronic Journal of Mathematics Education by JudithAnn Hartman and colleagues — including the great Paul Kirschner — argues that efforts to reform mathematics teaching in the U.S. are completely misguided.

Hartman et al. conclude:

“Science has discovered that when the brain tries to reason with not-well-memorized information, stringent limits apply. In publications for educators, the importance of automaticity to work around WM limits has been noted since 1996 (Hirsch, 1996). Yet since that time in most states, key K-12 standards have continued to require young students to solve math problems by reasoning in ways science says their brains simply cannot manage.”

This is a great article that succinctly reviews a wide body of evidence. It does not simply refer to cognitive load theory but also discusses overlearning, retrieval practice and other relevant research.

I will be returning to this paper regularly in the future.