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OLDaily - Text Edition by Stephen Downes Dec 19, 2016


Icts In Higher Education Systems Of Arab States: Promises
And Effective Practices - A Summary Report
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Dec 19, 2016
The Regional Forum on ICTs in Higher Education Systems of
Arab States was held in Beirut, Lebanon, on November 7 and
8, 2016, with the objective to provide conceptual
clarification with respect to the usage of ICTs in Higher
Education, to take stock of existing initiatives in the
Arab Region, and to contribute to enhancing cooperation and
synergies among stakeholders. This report summarizes these
discussions, first with respect to some specific topics,
and second, with respect to overall themes and concepts.

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The SAP platform and digital transformation
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This is a good but almost impenetrable article reporting on
the fundamental shift in digital technology taking place
today. If you want the two-line version it is this: the
digital world is shifting from self-managed centralized
services to distributed cloud services, but the weight of
the platform is such that only a few very large vendors are
competitive in this market. I think both observations are
correct. As Hinchcliffe notes, "Amazon now offers over 50
separate categories of enterprise-class cloud services
http://www.zdnet.com/article/as-cloud-computing-matures-a-closer-look-at-why-amazon-dominates/"
target="_blank across the technology spectrum. Competitive
offerings have to be literally stunningly rich in features
to effectively compete in today's sophisticated and nuanced
technology landscape." Who can set up that sort of
infrastructure?
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Yes, Digital Literacy. But Which One?
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"Which information literacy do we need?" asks Michael
Caulfield. "Do we need more RADCAB Link
Do we need more CRAAP
http://libguides.library.ncat.edu/content.php?pid=53820&sid=394505?"
We can certainly agree that critical thinking has to go
beyond simplistic five-step rubrics. But here Caulfield
steers off a cliff. We need to know the background, he
argues, in order to differentiate between legitimate news
and conspiracy theorists. "Abstract skills aren’t
enough," he maintains. For example, "When I saw that big
'W' circled in that red field of a flag, for instance, my
Nazi alarm bells went off." He explains, "My point is that
recognizing any one of these things as an indicator —
FEMA, related sites, gold seizures, typography —
would have allowed students to approach this site with a
starting hypothesis." Well, yes. But how do students learn
which indicators to recognize? By being told? We know that
this is a non-starter. No, they need to learn deep and
authentic critical thinking skills. More: my essay On
Teaching Critical Thinking
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Model for the transformation of higher education in Africa
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I have my questions about former MIT Chancellor Phillip L
Clay's proposal to renew African education, but the report
he refers to is neither named nor hyperlinked, so all we
have is this column. In it, he proposes what amounts to a
recreation of the elite university system for Africans, on
condition that "governments would promise that students
from their country would receive the resources that would
otherwise be available for the best opportunities in their
countries." Also, "by closely fitting education with
industrial development, and by aggressively leveraging
global sourcing of knowledge and resources to build
first-class institutions" and "enrolments would be sized to
foster excellence (ie., small)." No mass education for
Africa. Clay should make this paper available online and be
held to account for his policy positions and advocacy.
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What Can We Learn From Countries That Effectively Teach
Math?
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This report
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accords with my own sense of the matter. "In every country,
the memorizers turned out to be the lowest achievers, and
countries with high numbers of them—the U.S. was in
the top third—also had the highest proportion of
teens doing poorly on the PISA math assessment." By turning
math lessons into rote exercises, administrators not only
weaken math scores, they also effectively increase
inequality.
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My Workflow
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I was thinking about working openly recently and decided to
document my workflow, such as it is. As you can see I need
to devise a way to make my projects and courses more
transparent. There's also a PowerPoint version of the image
with working links. No HTML version, sorry.
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Decentralized, P2P Chat in 100 lines of code
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I spent several hours this morning messing around with this
and actually created my own peer-to-peer discussion
board
Link43110/14rdv3mb7Z4vXbh5sgSxi2Mj8BEFndhhSv
as described in the article - it works, but I'm not sure
people can access it as the port is closed. You won't be
able to access it by clicking on your own browser - the
link points to a location on your own computer, and if you
need to have ZeroNet installed to read it. Ah, but ZeroNet
is an easy install, open source and free - download from
here Linkextract into a directory, and
then (on windows at least) run zeronet.cmd by
double-clicking on it in the directory. It will open in
your browser and you're on the distributed internet. What
you've done is to load a Python interpreter and personal
web server (which only you access). Here are the full
ZeroNet documents Link
I like this a lot.
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Learning Design Principles
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Michael Feldstein points
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to this report on learning design principles from Pearson.
The report (102 page PDF
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is called "Objective Design and Instructional Alignment,"
which gives you a sense of their perspective. The
recommendations are (quoted):

Explicitly specify observable knowledge, skills, or
attributes a learner will achieve in the learning
experience in objective statements.
Derive these from relevant standards.
Align all assessments and content to objectives to create
aligned learning experiences, which are essential to
effective learning experiences and Pearson's efficacy
goals.

The report itself steps through a series of design
principles, ranging from 'assessments' to 'learning object
design' to 'critical thinking', and accompanies each with a
set of rubrics for evaluating the concordant design. I like
the structure of the document, though I think the authors
could have been more discriminating in their selection of
subjects - 'grit', in particular, doesn't really belong.
There's also a blog post
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providing more background on the project.
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Copyright 2016 Stephen Downes
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License
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