OLDaily

Emoji Are Ruining Grasp of English, Says Dumbest Language Story of the Week
Geoffrey Pullum, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2018/04/25

To put Geoffrey Pullum's cogent argument into a nutshell: " Haven’t these hyperbole-mongers noticed that young people today write to each other more than young people have ever done in all of human history? Their texting, tweeting, WhatsApping, Snapchatting, Facebooking, and Instagramming may have psychological downsides (like cyber-bullying), but dropping the occasional pictographs into their prose is not going to strip them of the capacity to form sentences. Anyone who believes emoji are having even the slightest effect on English syntax is an utter 🤡." Also worth nothing, because this dumb headline came to us courtesy of traditional print media: "it’s survey-takers working for a company that just happens to host thousands of brush-up-your-grammar videos!" Ah, the incorruptible press.

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The State of Innovation in Higher Education: A Survey of Academic Administrators
Andrew J. Magda, Jill Buban, Online Learning Consortium, The Learning House, Inc., 2018/04/25

I'm not sure administrators are the best people to ask about innovation at educational institutions, and they'll say typical things like "Administrators often discuss a top-down approach — the president and provost setting the tone and directive for innovation at the institution — as creating the most success in innovation" (I find that consultants say this sort of thing as well, maybe because they are marketing their services to administrators). But the survey also recognizes "this approach must be carefully balanced and include a bottom-up component in which faculty, staff, and other constituents can drive the innovation process on their own." (44 page PDF)

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In “EdTech”, “Ed” comes before “Tech”: A National Louis University/Acrobatiq Case Study
Michael Feldstein, e-Literate, 2018/04/25

Updated with correct link. I'm sure that the series this article introduces will be valuable, but my purpose here is to be a bit pedantic, but in so doing, allow me to illustrate the difference between my perspective and Michael Feldsteins. The pedantic point is that you can draw inferences about what ought to be done on the basis of quirks of language. Yes, 'Ed' comes before 'Tech'. But there isn't some 'Tech Ed' which is about the use of technology first in education. Rather, 'Tech Ed' means something completely different. So it means nothing that 'Ed' comes before 'Tech'.

But it's significant in the sense that the article points out that the university "modeled what universities need to do before they select courseware, from designing a business/sustainability model that enables them to provide appropriate cost of an education to thinking about educational goals to figuring out where courseware does and doesn't fit into that overall model." They did the 'Ed', then they did the 'Tech'. But I see it very differently. I look at 'Tech' and imagine what 'Ed' could be. I don't start with the presumptions of a university. And not surprisingly, where I end up looks very little like one.

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