OLDaily

Diversity, Justice, and Democratization in Open Education and #opened17
George Veletsianos, 2017/08/07

The ripples from OpenEd17 continue to spread. This post looks at some controversy surrounding the opening keynote as the organization associated with the keynote is opposed to gays and lesbians (LGBTQ) as noted here. It raises the question of what 'open' in 'open education' means. My experience is that most societies (including my own) are usually intolerant of some thing or another. I'm really open and unequivocally in favour of LGBTQ rights. But I'm not going to stop talking to (or listening to) people because their sense of openness differs from mine, because if I did that, I would have to stop listening to most people in the world. Openness is a qualify we should expect of ourselves rather than a hammer we will use to judge others.

[Link] [Comment]

The sea was never blue
Maria Michela Sassi, Aeon, 2017/08/07

I saw this in Doug Belshaw's email and I wish he had commented rather than just listing it. The idea of this article is that the list of co,lours used by the ancient Greeks was very different from what we use today. "Goethe was right. In trying to see the world through Greek eyes, the Newtonian view is only somewhat useful. We need to supplement it with the Greeks’ own colour theories, and to examine the way in which they actually tried to describe their world." We see the same things as the ancient Greeks, but we experience them very differently.

[Link] [Comment]

This is how you build the library of the future
Karen Connors, eSchool News, 2017/08/07

Short article asserting that "The 4 C’s (collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and creativity) will drive our pioneering approach to developing the libraries of the future." I know librarians want to continue collecting books and such, but I think doubling as maker spaces offers a much brighter future. Because (I would hope) collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and creativity are not unique to libraries.

[Link] [Comment]

Global Arbitrage and the Productivity Puzzle
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, 2017/08/07

The 'innovation dilemma' has driven a lot of education and labour policy over the last few years with legislators trying out how to wring more productivity out of an increasingly unprepared labour force. But what if the issue of productivity has nothing to do with labour, or technology, at all? That's the argument considered here. Irving Wladawsky-Berger suggests that instead of taking advantage of freer trade and technological progress, companies and their managers are focusing on arbitrage to increase productivity, creating illusory short term gains with long term consequences. "By a misguided policy of suppressing wages and thus throttling mass consumption, unchecked managerial elites may inadvertently cripple the technology-driven productivity growth responsible for their rise," he writes.

[Link] [Comment]

On Ditching the (Dangerous) Dichotomy Between Content Knowledge and Creativity
Amy Burvall, AmusED, 2017/08/07

The core of this post is based on the slogan, attributed to Picasso, "Learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist." But what are the rules? Do they tell you what to paint? Of course not. The 'rules' are a syntax. When Amy Burvall writes "Virtually every piece of media we are confronted with (from pop songs to poetry, from TV shows to classic texts), makes assumptions that the audience knows certain references" she refers not to 'content knowledge' but rather to the way culture has transformed content into language, taking specific reference and turning them into syntax. It's important to understand the difference. Otherwise you'll think that memorizing Shakespeare is the same as getting an education, when the real learning consists in how to use Shakespeare - or anything else - to make your own voice heard.

[Link] [Comment]