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OLDaily - Text Edition by Stephen Downes Feb 17, 2017


Maybe College Isn't the Great Equalizer
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Two things have held up through decades of research on
education and its impact. First, socio-economic background
is the single best predictor of educational outcomes. And
second, education is a necessary but not sufficient
precursor to increased socio-economic outcomes. These are
the findings that are rediscovered in the current
study published
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in the journal Social Forces. But Facebook devotes a
substantial portion of this article repeating criticism
from an outlier study
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/01/19/rich-students-flock-elite-colleges-study-finds-graduating-college-levels-playing"
target="_blank (more here
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that college is in fact the great equalizer." According to
that outlier critics, "students who graduate from the same
Ivy League college -- or any college -- tend to earn
similar amounts of money in their adult lives." Well sure -
if you ignore selection bias, graduation rates, and the
fact that income at age 30 is not an educational outcome,
you get similar results. I would caution against making
this study the basis of criticism of future studies.
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Building Global Community
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg released a manifesto yesterday
afternoon stressing the importance of community and
Facebook's role in developing it. It is worth noting that I
quit Facebook last September because, in my view, Facebook
was subverting community, and replacing it with
advertising. Zuckerberg emphasizes, "the most important
thing we at Facebook can do is develop the social
infrastructure to give people the power to build a global
community that works for all of us." I think, though, that
there is am important distinction to be drawn between the
concept of infrastructure that is owned by, and operated
for, the benefit of a community, and a privately owned
platform managed for private interests. Zuckerberg believes
he is building society, without realizing that society can
only be built by all of us.
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Distance Education Price and Cost Report
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It's no surprise to anybody that distance and online
courses cost students more (a least, when they're offered
by traditional educational institutions). But more
controversial in this WECT report (79 page PDF
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is the contention that they cost more to produce. This
result is based on 197 responses (from an unknown number of
institutions) to an email survey sent to WCET members.
Reading the results, the main reason distance education
costs more seems to be "distance education costs more"
(p.48). Every category of expense was higher for distance
education. The main costs are faculty support and
development (52%), tech (37%), and student support (28%).
The report also makes the point that lowering cost isn't
seen as part of the mandate by many institutions. Via
Inside Higher Ed
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Working together for critical thinking in schools
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The focus of this article is critical thinking in the South
African context, and in particular the recent Curriculum
and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS
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and Thinking Schools South Africa (TSSA
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organisation encouraging and resourcing the teaching of
effective thinking in schools." One of the unsung
advantages of critical thinking, writes Peter Ellerton, is
that it creates resilience, promoting the development of
"students who have an ability to think their way through
problems, a confidence in their ability to do so, and who
can apply critical thinking skills to understand their
circumstances and explore options open to them."
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Copyright 2017 Stephen Downes
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License
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