OLDaily

Cognitive Privilege
Darren Miller, Linking and Thinking on Education, 2017/08/04

This post offers a clear example of how the argument around privelege is (deliberately?) misrepresented. It discusses the concept of 'cognitive privilege', which writers purport to have discovered: "Daily Iowan author Dan Williams argues, people have no control over how smart they are… 'Consequently, you have nothing to be proud of for being smart.'" Darren Miller rejoinds, "I guess Olympians and professional athletes have nothing to be proud of, either." Now I'm not an Olympic athlete, but I am one of the cognitively privileged. And I know (and have been very clear about) not only the years of work and practice it took me over the years to achieve this position, but also the very good fortune I had to be born in Canada, raised with good nutrition and mental stimulation, and educated by one of the best systems in the world. These advantages are not a source of pride for me, but rather, and quite properly, a reason for humility. People with an IQ of 86 are just as important as the ones with an IQ of 166.

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Vermont Medical School Says Goodbye To Lectures
Audie Cornish, Sam Gringlas, NPR, 2017/08/04

Short video segment plus transcript on why Vermont medical School is employing active learning rather than lectures in the future. "When you do a comparison between lectures and other methods of learning — typically called "active learning" methods — that lectures are not as efficient or not as successful in allowing students to accumulate knowledge in the same amount of time." I like the use of the example of pharmacokinetics in tghe middle of the article. "Those are the types of things where you're expecting the student to know the knowledge in order to use the knowledge. And then they don't forget it."

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The digital native is a myth
Nature, 2017/08/04

People have been disproving the 'digital native' theory for more than a decade now. Here is my 2007 coverage of the denouement of the debate. The behaviours attributed to being 'digital native' are caused not by age or generation, but by use of the technology. So why is it the subject of a Nature editorial in 2017 that "the younger generation uses technology in the same ways as older people?" And why are Kirschner and Bruyckere getting the celebrity treatment for a 2017 paper on the subject? Yes, "education policy is particularly vulnerable to political whims, fads and untested assumptions." But this editorial does nothing to address that; it merely contributes to it, offering a poorly researched and superficial commentary on an issue that does not appear to have been studied by the authors.

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Teaching by Algorithm
Tim Stahmer, Assorted Stuff, 2017/08/04

Tim Stahmer critiques a BBC segment on learning technology. "A BBC video starts by asking 'Could computer algorithms upgrade education?'" he writes. "It just gets worse from there." The video describes Alt School, a chain of private schools partially funded by Mark Zuckerberg. "The philosophy behind Alt School is very much driven by coding and data," writes Stahmer, "something that makes the video’s note about the diminishing influence of teachers leading to a decline in good people entering the profession even more likely." 

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Canadian Telcos Take Aim At Kodi Addon Site With Shocking Search: True Purpose to “Destroy Livelihood of the Defendant”
Michael Geist, 2017/08/04

I am as alarmed as Michael Geist about the extraordinary and excessive behaviour of some Canadian Telcos in their efforts to limit competition to cabe television subscriptions. They are fighting "the sale and distribution of Android set-top boxes and websites that facilitate distribution of addons for Kodi software." Kodi is a free media player designed to look good on large screen TVs. Bell, Videotron, and Rogers argue "that the pre-loaded software on set-top boxes makes it easy to access infringing streaming content." To this point it's a simple dispute that could be settled in court. But the Telcos went far beyond that to target TVAddons, a Canadian-controlled website that supports Kodi and other software.

They "used a civil search warrant (known as an Anton Pillar order) to access the home of Adam Lackman, a Montreal man who owns the site, as well as the copyright issues in the case. Their actions are documented by TorrentFreak, the CBC, and the National Post, which chronicle abusive conduct that included hours of interrogations without the ability to consult a lawyer." The purpose, concluded a judge, "was to destroy the livelihood of the Defendant, deny him the financial resources to finance a defence to the claim made against him, and to provide an opportunity for discovery of the Defendant in circumstances where none of the procedural safeguards of our civil justice system could be engaged." 

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Wait, Will Anyone Investigate Legacy Admissions?
Eric Hoover, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2017/08/04

A lot of what enables Americcan universties to discriminate against the disadvanged would persist even if they were to eliminate legacy admissions, writes Eric Hoover. But it nnetheless strikes the reader as odd that there is opposition to selection by race while admission by parentage remains largely unopposed.  "We don’t see challenges to legacies because the vast majority of legacies are wealthy whites," says Marybeth Gasman, a professor of education at the University of Pennsylvania. "They benefit and won’t challenge the system." This of course speaks to the core purpose of the institution: to protect, and not disrupt, privilege.

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