OLDaily

Interview with Education Financial Analyst Trace Urdan
Mitch Weisburgh, PILOTed, 2017/05/01

Interview with education stock analyst Trace Urdan who, as I mentioned last week, has left Credit Suisse. Interesting stuff. For example, Urdan says, "There is no question that education is a public good and a public responsibility. We haven’t seen any indication that governments have been very good at investing and innovating in education. That’s something that private capital has been very good at, which the public sector can then adapt. I’m going to be provocative and say that anything that has been ground breaking and innovative in education, K12 and higher ed, has been capitalized and driven by private businesses. The kinks get worked out and then you see it migrating to the public sector and accruing to the benefit of everyone."

[Link] [Comment]

The next gewneration of jobs won't be made up of professions
Alina Dizik, BBC News, 2017/05/01

The sumamry says this: "To prepare for the future, we need to shift from thinking about jobs and careers to thinking about challenges and problems, reports Alina Dizik.... prepare the next generation for a career in the future, which for many will be made up of numerous micro-jobs aimed at well-paid skilled workers, and not a single boss and company." This seems right to me, but there's a caveat. We need to replace the security of jobs and careers with something if we're going to shift our focus to challenegs and problems. Nobody wants to survive hand-to-mouth depending on the next problem to pay the bills. We could be must more focused (and productive) as an economy, but not at the cost of becoming an underpaid zero-benefit gig economy.

[Link] [Comment]

Student privacy experts poke holes in Electronic Frontier Foundation report
Corinne Lestch, EdScoop, 2017/05/01

I reviewed the criticisms (there are two authors) and think that they are more like 'chipping around the edges' than they are 'poking holes'. The first, Jim Siegl, a technology architect for Fairfax County Public Schools and co-chair of CoSN's Privacy Toolkit, complains that he found 126 privacy policies, not the 118 found in the EFF report, and that more applications than stated use encryption, based on a survey of https URLs. The second,  Amelia Vance, policy counsel for education privacy at the Future of Privacy Forum, cites the first and adds "the report only mentions three of the 106 student privacy laws passed in 39 states since 2013." I think Siegl is worth reading on this, though I think it adds up to far less than a refutation of EFF.

[Link] [Comment]

Reassembling Scholarly Communications: An Evaluation of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Monograph Initiative
Alessandra Bordini, John W. Maxwell, Katie Shamash, The Journal of Electronic Publishing, 2017/05/01

This is an engaging review of an NYU project to enhance open access monographs. "The close intertwining of scholarly communication, career advancement, and traditional publishing logic make for a powerful status quo that has, as note, managed to resist both the opportunities of digital media and the challenges posed by various apparent crises" What would have been interesting would have been to see NYU partner with Canada's Public Knowledge Project (PKP) to extract the best value from its funding. This is because PKP's Open Monograph Press has been up and running for years now, is widely use, and makes its source freely available on GitHub. Could it be improved? Of course, and that's where this collaboration could really help. And it makes a lot more sense than building a new system from scratch, and NYU press could do much more than to merely "enrich a corpus of books with semantic tags of critical concepts, names, and geographic locations." Maybe, as suggested by Adrian Hodge in an email, this: "an intelligent .zip file of sorts that the learner unpacks someplace, locally / networked that then pulls in the base set of relevant papers, journals, OERs, AND the individuals who are active or central to the area being studied."

[Link] [Comment]

Report questions effectiveness of New Brunswick's tuition access bursary
Jordan Gill, CBC News, 2017/05/01

New Brunswick's free tuition program for low-income families was only launched last year, but the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS) is already criticizing it for not improving completion rates. It's just the latest in a series of unwarranted attacks on the program, including private schools demanding equal subsidies, allegations it reaches too few students (only 5100 of 7000 eligible), the obligatory attack from Irving's media arm, and even a constitutional challenge. The common thread to all this, though, is best summarized by Robert Burroughs, the executive director of the New Brunswick Student Alliance. "What I'm hearing is ... New Brunswicker taxpayers shouldn't be subsidising poor kids to go to school," said Burroughs. "That's the underlying message that I'm hearing here, which is fundamentally problematic."

[Link] [Comment]