Knowledge as Recognition
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, 2014/12/04

This is a short essay I wrote as a contribution to Philosophy 12, a high school philosophy class. I tried to structure the paper according to the requirements of the assignment (keeping in mind that I haven't studied any of the lessons in the class and can only guess what authors and theories they covered). The assignment was to "state and support a proposition of personal knowledge" and in my case the proposition I wished to support was the idea that 'knowledge' is not some sort of propositional attitude, that is, not a justified and true opinion or belief, but rather, the result of what Hume would call 'custom and habit'. This is a view I have advanced in the past, but never in this exact form, so I thought it was worth sharing.

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The TIPS Framework Version-2.0 : Quality Assurance Guidelines for Teachers as Creators of Open Educational Resources
Paul Kawachi, Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia (CEMCA), 2014/12/04

I'm not so happy with this resource as I am with some of the other resources produced by the Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia (CEMCA). The quality framework the author employs is based on the concept of 'fit for purpose', which is fair enough, but the purpose emphasized is use by educators and publishers. So before even discussing the quality framework there is a long discussion of licensing which repeats the fallacious argument "for public funding and international philanthropic funding to create the OER initially and then allow private enterprise to localise OER and deliver afterwards." The term 'private enterprise' in this is a codeword for 'charge the user'. But if government can pay producers to produce the resource, why can't it pay translators and distributors to distribute the resource? How does it make sense to shift the cost of this to people who have little or no money?

The remainder of the assessment framework is equally trite. For example, we have the dubious assertion that "All the known learning objectives can be categorised into one of the five domains: the Cognitive, the Affective, the Metacognitive, the Environment, and the Management Domain." Similarly, we have the "38 criteria... presented here as the 2014 TIPS Framework version 2.0." These criteria include "You should clearly state the reason and purpose of the OER, its relevance and importance," "Stimulate the intrinsic motivation to learn, eg through arousing curiosity with surprising anecdotes," "Try to offer learning support." This tells me most of all that the author doesn't understand the meaning of the word "criteria". And we have the mis-applied content validity ratio, from Lawse (1975). 40 page PDF.

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