OLDaily

Unequal Classrooms: Online Higher Education and Non-Cognitive Skills
Jennifer M. Morton, 2017/11/08

Jennifer Morton has won an APA prize for a series of articles along the same lines, though sadly this is the only one that is open access. This is ironic as much of her work revolves around the idea of teaching in conditions of scarcity, and it looks (for example) at the cultural transformations students from low-incomes need to undergo as a part of progression into a higher class. In the current paper she pursues similar themes, arguing "a bricks-and-mortar college education bestows not just cognitive skills and mathematical, historical, scientific knowledge, but also non-cognitive skills... for example, the social and emotional abilities required to connect and talk to people from different backgrounds, the confidence needed to have an intellectually rigorous conversation with an intimidating adult, or the resoluteness to overcome one’s shyness and be able to articulate a position in front of a group of peers." It's not that the students lack these skills, rather, the skills they have are appropriate for their previous (lower class) communities. Read more from Jennifer Morton on her web page (including, if you're wealthy, more of her articles)

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Day One
Ben Saunders, 2017/11/08

Ben Saunders is attempting the first unaided solo crossing of Antarctica by land (which makes me feel cold just typing it) and this is his ongoing blog of the expedition. This is one sort of online learning I like a lot: the sort where a real person doing something interesting shares their experiences with the world. It's not about teaching or curriculum or anything like that, it's about being open and unleashing the imagination. I've subscribed to the feed - it's hard to find but it exists here - and will be shivering along with Ben through the trip.

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Setting Up a Learner Activity Hub Like #YogaMOOC or #OpenEdMOOC
Matt Crosslin, EduGeek Journal, 2017/11/08

This is the best kind of ed tech post - something that tells you how to do something really interesting written with one foot planted in tech and the other foot firmly planted in a contemporary understanding of learning and education. We get both feet here. The method described is very similar to what I did to create the networks for the connectivism courses. The technology was different but the workflow was the same. Core to the whole process: link back to the original website; don't import it all as a wall of text. "It is pretty easy to dump all course blog posts in one place and have a never ending scroll of text. But that is hard on the eyes and a little counter productive to getting people to connect."

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Persona Non Grata
Nick Roll, Inside Higher Ed, 2017/11/08

Student journalists are barred from a hedge fund course at Duke. As a former university Board member and as a former student journalist I head this argument a lot: "we have to have meetings behind closed doors so we can speak openly and candidly." I understood exactly what that meant. It was to allow them to lie in public, secure in the knowledge that I wouldn't reveal the truth. And I have always agreed with this: "If speakers are saying things they don't think can withstand the light of public scrutiny, that's probably a pretty good signal that they're saying something indefensible." It is sad, but no surprise, to see an 'elite' institution of higher education complicit in this. They tell us no student journalist has ever been barred from this course - but why would we believe that? Image: Paste.

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How to ‘robot-proof’ students for the age of AI
Joseph Aoun, Times Higher Education, 2017/11/08

We'll probably be hearing more terminology along the lines of 'robot-proof' as educatoros search for relevance in a world of artificial intelligence. This article captures what they'll propose: first, "a new curriculum involving the integration of technical literacies... with uniquely human literacies"; second, "we must allow students to hone their uniquely human attributes"; and third, "Experiential learning transforms theory into real knowledge." It's the details that are tricky. Are the core literacies really best described as "creativity, entrepreneurship, ethics and cultural agility"? even more to the point, how accurately will we as a society be able to predict those competencies that will be most important in an age of artificial intelligence?

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