Stephen Downes

This article offers a response to what is described as a growing trend toward rote teaching, "a form of teaching organised around tightly controlled sequences, pre-determined lessons, fixed pacing, and limited space to adapt, respond or pursue emerging inquiry. This approach shifts teaching practice away from responsiveness to learner need. It is more about following a one-size fits all prescribed script." There's a school of thought out there that suggests all students can (and need to) learn the same way (this is what justified the anti-learning-styles hysteria). "Across many education systems, standardisation is intensifying. Policymakers frame sequenced curricula, explicit lesson structures, and tightly aligned assessments as solutions to uneven outcomes, equity gaps, and workload pressures." There are good reasons to resist. "Rote approaches have long been criticised for producing narrow, surface-level learning, prioritising repetition over understanding and compliance over thinking."

Canada's 'tri-council'* funding agencies have announced a revised open access requirement for publications. "Each postsecondary institution and research hospital eligible to administer CIHR, NSERC or SSHRC funds is required to develop and publicly share an institutional OA strategy (and) retain sufficient rights and apply an open license, such as a Creative Commons (CC) license, to the Accepted Manuscript (AM) and/or Version of Record (VoR) used to comply with the Policy." In addition, they need to "ensure the peer-reviewed research article is immediately and freely available in a Canadian institutional repository or made available through a trusted Canadian platform at the time of publication, even where the article is freely available on the publisher's website." This replaces an 2015 policy that granted much more to publishers. Via Coalition Publica. (* Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)

According to Ann (no last name), "there is a weight of expectations that we all carry in eduspace, and sometimes those expectations are things we put on ourselves and not necessarily things folk have put on us realistically." the term, as the title suggests, 'pedagogical weight'. I'm sympathetic, but having worked a variety of jobs over my career, I can attest to the reality that this weight exists in every occupation, save perhaps that involve no mental preparation at all. But that's not to dismiss the fact of the weight. We all feel it, we feel it a little more when people are protesting in the streets, and we feel it in the face of war, disease, and the remaining horsemen. And while it may be that "folk just have no real interest in engaging in virtual spaces as they used to anymore, because.... there's too much weighing on them," it may also be because virtual spaces, as we know them today, don't do anything to address that weight, other than to make it heavier. (p.s. I don't know how it started as a linguistic convention, but the use of 'folk' to refer to 'people' will never not sound strange to me).

This was Neil Postman in 1985, long before Zoom - or for that matter, the internet - was really a thing. "In courtrooms, classrooms, operating rooms, board rooms, churches and even airplanes, Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, authenticity and celebrity." So while I appreciate Todd Conaway arguing here that we should be thinking of more in-person things we should be doing, I would argue that this doesn't solve the problem it's supposed to be solving. If I had to put it in a nutshell, what happened is that (with the rise of suburbia) connection became privilege. Being 'in the room' became the mark of the elite. And online media - at least from my perspective - became a way to push back against that. 

This post describes an upcoming publication, but it raised an interesting (and unintended, I'm sure) line of thought in my own mind. Colin Beer writes, "hospitals operate in complex environments where decisions involve incomplete information, changing circumstances and expertise distributed across many professional roles... healthcare organisations have developed sophisticated governance arrangements that connect information, professional judgement, coordinated action and organisational learning." By contrast, he writes, "universities have adopted some of the technologies associated with these approaches... However, we argue that they have not developed the underlying organisational capabilities needed to make these technologies genuinely effective." Now totally off topic, my train of thought: suppose AI made it so that anyone could become healthy just by using a chatbot. What would our reaction be? Would we be concerned that people still indulge in unhealthy behaviours? Would it matter any more that we can't tell when a person is 'becoming unhealthy'? Would we be concerned about the fact that people don't need hospitals any more? Something to think about.

Richard Gingras poses fifty questions posed by Richard Gingras at the Newsgeist Unconference in Hamburg, Germany. He chairs the board of Village Media and is a co-founder and board member of the global Center for News, Technology, and Innovation. My response comes from two perspectives: first, as an observer and commentator on news and new media generally, and second as a sometime journalist with my own online publication (which you're reading).