OLDaily

Toward a Better Internet: Building Prosocial Behavior into the Commons
Jane Park, Creative Commons, 2017/06/16

This is a longish post devoted to the idea that the license isn't everything in reuse (Alan Levine has been making this point for a dog's age). OIn this post, prosocial behaviours are contrasted with "negative behaviors that occur with online content sharing more generally." For example: using bots to remix and repost CC-licensed designs; harassment of marginalized groups; not respecting people’s desires and expectations about how content will be used; claiming CC0 public domain works as their own and monetizing them; and more. These are all allowed under the license, but are genuinely anti-social behaviours. What to do? Suggestions included a prosocial behaviour toolkit, tools that make prosocial behaviour easier, or reputational algorithms. But the very concept of 'prosocial' cannot be applied to amoral actors, or to those who follow a different morality: businesses and individuals, for example, who see the making of money as the only moral virtue. The only way to inhibit them is to create risk for anti-social behaviour. But this may require Creative Commons to take a sharply more political stance than I think it is willing to take.

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Open University jobs at risk in £100m 'root and branch' overhaul
Sally Weale, The Guardian, 2017/06/16

I'm sorry to read this. I'm taking it to reflect the impact of the transition from more traditional approaches to digital delivery (maybe with a bit of FutureLearn thrown in). And this: "The OU’s finances have been hit particularly hard by the significant decline in the number of part-time students since the introduction of tuition fees, losing a third of students in the past decade." And of course the impact of policies that view education as a commodity to be sold rather than as a public services as core as fire departments, police servcies, roads and rail. The projected saving amount to about a quarter of the Open University's budget and there's no way the university will be the same again.

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A Guide for Resisting EdTech: The Case Against Turnitin
Sean Michael Morris, Jesse Stommel, Digital Pedagogy Lab, 2017/06/16

"While students who use Turnitin are discouraged from copying other work," write the authors, "the company itself can strip mine and sell student work for profit." This has been true for some time, and has been tested in court. But the point of this article is to argue that, in general, "we participate in a digital culture owned and operated by others who have come to understand how easily they can harvest our intellectual property, data, and the minute details of our lives." We need to be aware of this and address this, but enacting agency, as Tim Amidon writes, iscomplex work "… [that] requires an increasingly sophisticated array of multiliteracies." The auithors offer a short rubric for evaluating these technologies, looking at who owns the tool, what data we have to provide to use the tool, and how the tool mediates pedagogy. And it is on these grounds - not merely legal grounds - where Tuirnitin is found wanting. They: “undermine students’ authority over their own work; place students in a role of needing to be policed; create a hostile environment; supplant good teaching with the use of inferior technology; and violate student privacy."

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Introduction to ePortfolios and Mahara
Kerry Johnson, KerryJ's Neotenous Tech, 2017/06/16

This post is an overview of e-portfolios and Mahara. It's basically a first-person video demo of the software, useful for people who don't want to download and install Mahara in order to see how it works.

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Traditional assessment rewards the wrong behaviors-here’s why
Alan November, eSchool News, 2017/06/16

"Students as young as first grade can learn to solve complex linear equations—an algebraic concept that generally isn’t taught until the seventh or eighth grade." How's that for a lede? This article (and accompanying podcast) are the result of marketing from Enlern, "a next-generation personalized learning platform built on the understanding that all learning is contextual and shaped by complex interactions between a student, teachers, curricula, peers, and other interdependent variables in the learning ecosystem." It would be good to see a more sceptical stance from this (and other) articles, but that would require analyzing the research, which would require a rather more in-depth analysis than these authors (or me, for that matter) to complete. But we can approximate. This paper, for example, reduces the problem of solving linear equations to a set of rule-selection patterns (I've seen this approach in logic as well). Compare with Kirschener, who would say the process of 'discovering' the correct rule to apply is unnecessary overhead. This paper likens rule selection to matrix problem-solving (it reminds me of my categroical converter). So is that what this is? Does that approach really generalize?  Does the author talk with anyone else about this approach to learning? Sadly, no. 

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Reading the Word and the World: A Critical Literary and Autoethnographic Analysis of Educational Renovation in Vietnam
Hien Dang Ta , University of Arizona, 2017/06/16

This is a lovely PhD thesis (197 page PDF) that explores aspects of Vietnamese education from the perspective of critical pedagogy and critical literacy.   Critical literacy is "about much more than learning to read the 'word'; a learner must learn to understand the political and social practices that constitute their reality before she/ he can make sense of the written words that describe that reality." Conversely (from Olsen and Friere), "what is making them (famous people and intellectuals) cultural illiterates . . . is their prejudice against race, against class, against the nation.” The author focuses on the process of 'educational renovation' where we see that "students reject a class-based conception in favor of a more humanistic conception of the human being" based on "their experiences or interactions with books published outside the classrooms." But the emancipatory perspective of critical pedagogy was not integrated into he educational process. There's a contrast between "the seeming conformity, obedience, and resignation that many present in formal settings, and the torrents of 'critical literacy' when they express themselves at the cafeteria." Image: Vietnamnet.

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