OLDaily

Scholarly communications shouldn’t just be open, but non-profit too
Jefferson Pooley, LSE Impact Blog, London School of Economics, 2017/08/21

The considerations in this post addressed to scholarly publishing could also be applied to open educational resources. "The profit motive is fundamentally misaligned with core values of academic life, potentially corroding ideals like unfettered inquiry, knowledge-sharing, and cooperative progress," argues Jefferson Pooley. It's a rich link-filled argument. "We have to convince our colleagues that a non-profit future for scholarly communication is within reach and worth fighting for. This means, among other things, encouraging boycotts, calling out the venture-funded startups, and promoting the alternatives. We need to make the case, in short, for a digital future that is not just open, but non-profit too."

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Let’s Retire #MTBoS
Dan Meyer, dy/dan, 2017/08/21

This story is amusing from a distance and in retrospect, but I'm sure it was less funny for those involved at the time. MTBos - which stands for "Math Twitter BlogoSphere" - was set up as a hashtag and web site in order to welcome math teachers to the online community. It was not well received. People didn't know what it meant. People thought it was elitist. Were people 'qualified' to be a member of MTBos? It probably didn't help that it was set up with a limited list of tweeters. Anyhow, in this post Dan Meyer suggests that the term be retired. I'm not sure #iteachmath is the best replacement - I would have chosen something simpler, like #teachmath or even #mathK12. But the story does illustrate just what is in a name. And it's funny how passive people are - why would you need permission to use a hashtag? Nobody can own a hashtag, not even if they set up a Twitter identity and lay claim to it.

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Dunce’s App
Audrey Watters, The Baffler, 2017/08/21

I think it's important to distinguish between 'behaviourism' - the theory that mental states are essentially equivalent to behaviours or (Ryle) dispositions to behave - and 'behaviour management' - methods and tools to encourage correct behaviour. Hero K12, described by Audrey Watters in this post, focuses on the latter. It's a bit like an in-school policing system, automating things like tardy slips, warnings and the like. It also seeks to identify and reward good behaviour - the "heroes" of our story. Watters says "that has always been the underpinning of behaviorism—an emphasis on positive reinforcement techniques in order to more effectively encourage 'correct behavior.'" True, but that doesn't make them behaviourists. Like the police, they may focus on encouraging correct behaviour, but the moment they start talking about cognitive phenomena, such as motivations, socialization, mental models, expectations, and the like, they cease to be behavioursists, and are just run-of-the mill product vendors interested in behaviour.

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How to Engage in Pseudoscience With Real Data: A Criticism of John Hattie's Arguments in Visible Learning from the Perspective of a Statistician
Pierre-Jérôme Bergeron, McGill Journal of Education, 2017/08/21

This post is everything a proper refutation of education pseudoscience should be.It is a mistake to use Hattie's analysis as the basis for educational policy or instructional design, as this paper makes clear. Some context: in 2008 John Hattie published Visible Learning, which is essentially a meta-analysis of some 800 studies related to student achievement. The result was the Hattie Ranking of effect sizes. The work has been subject to numerous criticisms over the years, including this post noting "the Common Language Effect (CLE) is meant to be a probability, yet Hattie has it at values between -49% and 219%" , yet Hattie has continued to maintain his work is valid. He shouldn't. As this current post makes clear, the underlying presumption of the book is misguided. "Basically, Hattie computes averages that do not make any sense. A classic example of this type of average is: if my head is in the oven and my feet are in the freezer, on average, I’m comfortably warm."

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