This is the presentation I gave at the National ResearchED conference, September 9 2017. The presentation is in part based on our book Urban Myths about Learning and Education and in part based on the recent article I co-wrote with Paul Kirschner published in Teaching and Teacher Education (yes the one that was mentioned in Nature).
Filed under Book, Education, Myths, On the road, Research, Review, Technology
Lately I’ve seen how mythbusting can be used as a tool to push your own opinion. I don’t like this, so let’s call it a myth. As co-author of a book in which Paul, Casper and myself try to debunk edumyths, I want to explain how we tried not to make this mistake.
First of all we use 3 categories to discuss the different items in our book:
A second thing we did is that we checked each others texts for possible biases. The three of us have opinions of our own, but our book is not about us. E.g. we have a famous scientist in our team who co-wrote a very important article about discovery learning. Still, we labelled it nuanced as this is still a discussion in educational sciences.
To me this is very important. Some of the myths we debunked actually did hurt for myself, but Urban Myths is not about me or us.
At first I didn’t want to write this post, because I know Christian Bokhove will discuss this also at length in his ResearchED-talk next week. Still I did because I saw the mythbusting-technique being used once to often to try to convince other people of their own idea. I do recommend you attend ResearchED and more specific Christian’s talk.
Urban Myths has been bringing us around the globe (both in Europe and the States). Next summer the Chinese version will be published, but February 4 the Swedish version will be released.
And… this is the cover and a bit of info in Swedish.
Filed under Book
It has been a blast, and it was truly an honor to be part of this great conference.
For the people looking for my slides, here they are:
Filed under Book, Education, Myths, On the road
I just received this infographic by the nice people of – ehm – Nice Media based on our book Urban Myths about Learning & Education, you can find & download the poster here.
Finally we can make it public that Paul (Kirschner), Casper (Hulshof) and I have great news about our book “Urban myths about learning and education”.
Today – March 16th – an article in American Educator based on one of the sections of our book, namely the section on ICT-myths is online. Go to http://www.aft.org/ae/spring2016/debruyckere-kirschner-and-hulshof
American Educator is – for professional publications in the area of education – can be compared to the Premier League. It is a professional publication intended for American teachers and has a subscription circulation of over 900,000 copies. This is not the number of teachers, administrators and policy makers (including politicians) that it reaches, just only the number of subscribers! The reach is a multiple of this; in the millions. Others who regularly publish there and whom we are honoured to join the ranks of are E. D. Hirsch Jr., Diane Ravitch, Richard W. Riley, Pasi Sahlberg, Daniel T. Willingham and William Julius Wilson.
Just a note: Apart from two articles by John Sweller, Dick Clark and Paul Kirschner, this is also the first product ever to come entirely from our little part of the world. It feels a bit unreal.
But there’s more news. In the autumn, a Swedish translation of our book will be published by Studentlitteratur. The demand for a translation came after a lecture by Pedro in London last year – ResearchED. And finally several Chinese professors are doing a Chinese translation of the book. This is the same group that translated and published Jeroen van Merriënboer and Pauls book Ten Steps to Complex Learning”. The translation should appear next spring.
Meanwhile, Paul, Casper and I are also working on the sequel where we continue to monitor various “new” myths.
Oh, btw, there is also some other great news:
“Urban Myths about Learning and Education, by Pedro De Bruyckere, Paul A. Kirschner, and Casper D. Hulshof, is published by Academic Press, an imprint of Elsevier, which is offering American Educator readers a 25 percent discount off the purchase of this book through December 2016. To order, visit Elsevier’s online store (link is external) and use discount code PBTY25 “
This is the keynote that I gave in London November 11th, 2015 for ELN. I like to thank David Didau for the 2 slides on spaced repetition.
Yesterday I discovered this one-page summary of our book by Oliver Cavigliol and it looks great (note to myself, be careful with the Coca Cola…). This is a new updated version, including my 2 co-authors Paul & Casper. Some people noticed that the link to the Daniel Willingham-video doesn’t work, check here.
If you like what you read, you can order the book here both in paper and as e-book, but you can buy also at
Today I talked about the story behind our book at the quite fantastic ResearchED in London.
I adapted the slides slightly so they could be understood a bit better for people who missed the talk.
