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OLDaily - Text Edition by Stephen Downes Feb 01, 2017


Loving It
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Just a day or so after authoring a good article Alex Usher
comes out with this piece defending the agreement made
between McDonald's and Colleges Ontario to recognize part
of the corporation's training program as equivalent to
college credit. There are probably good argument that could
be made to defend the deal but Usher instead
misrepresents the OSPEU response
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knee-jerk anti-corporate reaction, which it most certainly
is not. Nowhere does the OSPEU even suggest that
"McDonald’s is a big evil corporation," as Usher
says, though it does criticize the company's business
practices, "tax-evasion schemes, anti-union tactics, and a
reliance on a precarious low-wage workforce,” all of
which are well-substantiated. The OSPEU response is
eminently reasonable and boils down to two major points:
first, the McDonald's curriculum is not transparent, and
second, corporate training is probably not equivalent to a
college education. For example, "it is difficult to see how
principles of macroeconomics, involving such issues as
interest rates and national productivity, are learned
hands-on or in two weeks of classes over three years."
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Top Fears Shutting the Door on Open Education
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Some people say fear is the reason professors don't want to
open up classrooms, but I agree with MERLOT's Gerry Hanley:
""I think it's really a workload issue. Open educational
resources don't often have the full package of supplemental
material that publishers provide, and so it often means
faculty have to pull together additional assignments,
homework assignments, what might be lecture materials
— things along those lines." People forget that many
if not most university professors see teaching as a burden,
not a profession. They want to do research not recitations.
I know we live in the era where fear prevails and
everybody's afraid, but I still think fear is cited far too
frequently, and that most people are guided by much more
pragmatic emotions.
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Inspirational teaching in higher education: What does it
look, sound and feel like?
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In a paper tht could have used a good edit James G.
Derounian identifies factors associated with inspirational
teaching in the literature and then validates the findings
through a study of actual practice. "Three clear elements
of inspirational undergraduate teaching emerge: First and
foremost, undergraduates believe it to be motivating;
second, and related – inspirational teaching is
deemed encouraging and third such teaching flows from
teachers’ passion for their subject." Deemed? Like I
said, a good edit. In conclusion, "a simple formula:
Inspirational teaching → Aspiration →
Transformation."
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The University and Student Learning: A System in Conflict?
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According to this article, the globalization of the
education system "creates tepid universities all doing the
same thing and producing similar results." This results
from the primacy of the market-driven economic model at the
core of globalization, which eliminates specialization and
favours standardization and commodification. "Streamlining
such a complex system means courses need to be compatible
both across, as well as up and down the system. Systems
need to be simple to achieve vertical and horizontal
alignment."
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Is ‘fake news’ a fake problem?
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Not to keep harping on this, but I wonder whether the
failure of traditional news to come to terms with fake news
is a failure to understand what fake news is. I turn to the
venerable Columbia Journalism Review, which has just posted
this highly questionable study about the amount of time
people spend on fake news sites, as compared to 'real news"
sites. But you can't judge news as fake or not based on
where it was published. Not a week earlier, the same
Columbia Journalism review published an "open letter
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to Trump from the US press corps," and signed at the bottom
"The Press Corps" which turns out later
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to be the work of a single writer. Classic fake news, from
the Columbia Journalism Review. Don't suspend disbelief
just because the source is authoritative.
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on academic travel
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D'Arcy Norman is reconsidering academic travel, especially
to the United States. I know many other academics are
thinking the same thing, and I've been asked a couple of
times about my position. I won't be changing any plans nor
refusing invitations. This is not because I endorse the
current administration. I do not. It's because I'd have to
boycott a lot of countries if I applied a similar standard
worldwide. And I'm not willing to do that. People aren't
perfect, governments aren't perfect, and I'd rather be an
activist by setting a good example rather than passing
judgement on the bad. As for the carbon footprint - well, I
spent years trying to get by with public transit in New
Brunswick, and that should buy me a lifetime pass on carbon
emissions.
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Copyright 2017 Stephen Downes
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License
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