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OLDaily - Text Edition by Stephen Downes Oct 03, 2016
Student-Centered Educational Software
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This post combines results of two sets of studies. The
first suggests that students are more likely to complete
their program if they are emotionally supported and if they
take part in experiential learning. The second suggest they
are more likely to complete if they have a sense of
self-efficacy, experience a sense of belonging, and
perceive value in the curriculum. Success, writes Michael
Feldstein, means helping "campuses make the cultural
shift toward a focus on data-informed and research-grounded
teaching excellence." It makes sensed that the future of
educational technology isn't 'content delivery excellence'.
But we need to ask whether we need to cater to the five
points mentioned here, of figure out ways to surmount them.
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Sitelock Scam
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When you receive a report that your website has been
hacked, the first thing to do is not to panic. That may be
hard to do with your host provider warning that your site
might be deleted forever unless you take immediate action.
And as Jim Groom reports here, tthey may suggest that you
pay hundreds of dollars for security. But take a deep
breath, and check. It might be nothing - when Groom's site
was reported, for example, it turned out only to contain a
link to some other site that was on a Google blacklist.
"SiteLock wanted to charge me $199 to remove a link from a
blog post," he writes. Companies prey on users'
inexperience. We should be thinking about ways to counter
that.
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Book Review: 'Bourgeois Equality'
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This review of Deirdre McCloskey's Bourgeois Equality ends
too suddenly, almost in mid-thought, which is a pity. It
would have been worth reading Charles Wolf's criticism of
the 768 page tome (especially since it won't appear openly
on the internet in my lifetime - I remember when young I
could consume books voraciously, getting a stack from the
used book store or library and setting up in the park or
the pub; now, however, it would cost my salary to consume
books at that rate. My 'wealth' has increased but access to
what I need hasn't).
There are several themes in Bourgeois Eqiuality, of whch
I'll mention two: first is the idea that the increase in
the absolute wealth of the poor is more significant than
the growing gap between between the wealthy and the rest.
This is an old ideaa, popularized in an early TED talk
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and does not withstand scrutiny - if you can't buy the
things that are important (food in Venezuela, security in
Syria, an exit visa in Iran) then you are vulnerable, and
your recent rise in wealth is a chimera. The second is that
wealth is created by ideas, and the ability of all classes
to create and implement ideas is the key to prosperity. But
this argument is what Nathan Leites termed a
“self-sealer” - no matter what the development,
good or bad, the idea preceded the implementation.
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The ethical hole at the centre of ‘publish or perish’
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The abuses
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in academic publishing are well known. It has led to the
creation of what is known as Beall's list
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of predatory academic publishers. We are pursuing the wrong
metrics, argue Julius Kravjar and Marek Hladík. "The
current system of publishing scholarly papers needs a new
paradigm... Perhaps a primary argument could be that
science does not produce products so much as create ideas."
That sounds great, but in practice it would simply lead to
a system of gathering and counting ideas (and thereby, lead
to systems of producing and counting fake ideas, much like
the patent system). The problem doesn't lie in what's
counted, the problem lies in the counting.
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Postsecondary Success Advocacy Priorities
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The Gates Foundation has announced (22 page PDF
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the positions it will advocate (and presumably fund) for
2016. It's focused on the U.S. college and university
system and stresses the development of networks supporting
personal paths for students. There are three major areas of
focus:
a streamilining of data and information flows, so that
comprehensive information on every student is available to
all agencies
development of less complicated, more timely and more
effective financial and financial aid policies
student centered pathways leading directly and efficiently
to degree completion
None of these priorities is misplaced per se but the
program seems very focused on US-based students and
educational institutions, and seems to focus on working
within the traditional institutional structure. Though I
guess one could ask, what else would they do? Via EdSurge
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The digital age has destroyed the concept of ownership, and
companies are taking advantage of it
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The headline is probably not news to the people reading
this article. But to people in the movie theatres watching
the Cineplex advertising that they can "own this movie"
with a superticket
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of the limitations may come as a surprise. The fact is we
are being misled with the purchase of just about everything
today - limitations on digital copying, restrictions on
repairing our cars or our lawn mowers, constraints on
resale or exchange, no rights of satire
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and fair use - none of these would be acceptable at the
prices we pay, and yet all of them constitute deliberately
hidden limitations on our purchase rights. If I, an
ordinary citizen, tried to do this, it would be fraud. But
in the digital marketplace it's business as usual. Do
people care? No. "Before anything like that can happen
millions of users will have to, at a bare minimum,
acknowledge that huge swaths of their lives are legally
controlled by contracts they have never even read."
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Copyright 2016 Stephen Downes
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License
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