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OLDaily - Text Edition by Stephen Downes Feb 27, 2017


Professors and Politics: What the Research Says
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Long discussion of the argument that the professoriate (in
the United States) leans left. I have little patience for
such discussions because I'm of the view (also expressed in
this article) that people on the left self-select into
academic positions (just as people on the right self-select
into business positions). I also think the disparity is
exaggerated by the general right-wing tilt of American
society as a whole (what they call "moderate" I call "hard
right"). I also see (again as expressed in this article)
little to no evidence of any resulting bias in grading or
promotion. Finally, if people are serious about encouraging
more right-wing participation in academia or in education
generally, the solution is simple: make these the highest
paid positions in society, and require people in management
and finance to work on a teaching salary.
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15 Things We Can Do To Stand Up For Science!
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I don't think this is a bad list of things, though I would
have been more reluctant to recommend specific products and
services the way this article does (or, maybe, would have
recommend more than one in each category). But to be sure,
much of the fault with the recent mistrust of science lies
not with researchers themselves (even though they are the
audience for this article) but external agencies who have
sought to monetize research output. The discussion in the
comments on this is pretty good.
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Top down implementation of social learning doesn’t work
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Jane Hart taps into what I think is a fairly common
tendency in enterprise social learning: "it is seen in
terms of imposing social and collaboration tools on the
workforce, compelling them to share and collaborate, and
then controlling  and tracking what they do share."
This doesn't work because those that are already sharing
resist attempts to have them change tools or submit to
monitoring and control, while those who don't share resist
the pressure to share. She recommends (and I agree) "a
supportive bottom-up approach, which is more about
supporting those individuals who already are sharing and
collaborating with one another and encouraging others to
experience the benefits."
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Can Ottawa Do Innovation?
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This post discusses a National Post article which asserts
that Canada has failed at innovation for 100 years and
questions whether Trudeau can fix that (presumably via
financial transfers to industry, which was the previous
government's strategy). I question the original assertion
that Canada is not innovative. Alex Usher says Canada
copies U.S. innovations, but in fact, the opposite is the
case; American companies are more likely to copy Canadian
innovations. The measures cited are mostly based on private
sector spending (on R&D, on software). We've seen that
giving the private sector more money won't actually
increased their R&D spending. Innovation simply doesn't
happen in branch plants.
In Canada most innovation is created by new companies and
based on homegrown R&D from the ground up, and these
are usually spin-offs from public sector investment like
government and universities. Usher suggests that the locus
of innovation should be the provinces, and not the federal
government. But innovation is currently based both in the
provinces (for universities) and the federal government
(through military, through federal science, and through
procurement). Of these, only federal science could be
relocated to the provinces, but only four provinces have
the resources to sustain them, which would actually create
more, not less, centralization.
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EdX To Retire Foundational 6.002x Platform
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I guess the students who built it have all graduated. We
used it for the Personal Learning MOOC. It had some nice
features but it definitely did not promote interaction,
creativity or discussion. The platform did support limited
embedding, which enabled (as described in this article) an
interactive circuit diagram tool and a textbook to be
embedded.
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Against Expressive Social Media
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The early days of the internet split into two major
categories: talk, and work. Talk took place on Usenet, work
took place everywhere else. I was a work person;  I
didn't have much time for Usenet. Work eventually won out,
and with the invention of the Web - a work thing -
creativity flourished. Those days are over. As Mike
Caulfield says, "The hyperlinked vision of the web was
replaced by Usenet plus surveillance." We fritter out time
away with expressive social media, he says. Instead, "We
need to start asking the real question, which is how do we
teach our students to collaborate and communicate.' Well -
no. I mean, yes, but we should have done that by the time
they were out of, I don't know, grade 5 or so. Image:
Wesley Fryer
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Copyright 2017 Stephen Downes
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