OLDaily

Post-Soviet Higher Education
Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates, 2018/06/15

I think there's a really important insight buried in this look at post-Soviet educational institutions: " a market-driven system does not necessarily lead to a differentiated system; in fact, it may be the opposite... Though subject to market competition, in all countries institutions became more homogenous." Once enterprises reach a certain size (larger than a family business but smaller than a college) specialization makes them vulnerable to competition. And "specialized institutions may not be very resilient in the face of economic shocks.  Avoiding specialization is thus a hedge against uncertainty in future demand."

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Advocates are becoming journalists. Is that a good thing?
Mathew Ingram, Columbia Journalism Review, 2018/06/15

The way to read this post is to replace the word 'journalists' with the word 'educators'. So. Would it be a good thing if advocates became educators? Fopr example, consider a potential educational program about Amazon’s marketing of a controversial facial recognition software product to US law enforcement as provided to schools by the American Civil Liberties Union. Is this OK? What if the funding agency were the Koch brothers. Matthew Ingram argues "the world of journalism and the world as a whole are probably better off now that there are activist organizations that are trying to use the tools of modern media to tell stories." But the line between education and journalism and propaganda is a thin one.

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Does Higher Education need blockchain?
Chris Fellingham, Medium, 2018/06/15

As the Class Central report suggests, this article reminds us of Audrey Watters's outline of blockchain in education dating from April of 2016 (where she wrote "One Bitcoin is currently worth about $415" - heh). "Decentralised trust systems may well be the future but I don’t see that it solves a core problem," writes Chris Fellingham. "Edtech...  does not have a problem of trust in its credentials — it has a problem of credibility in its courses." It may be that the decentralization blockchain enables might be valuable, he writes, but it may come with a cost, just as decentralization of news media brought with it the scourge of fake news.

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Propositional Content in Signals
Jeffrey A. Barrett, Brian Skyrms, UCI School of Social Sciences, 2018/06/15

I cut my teeth on Choice and Chance by Bryan Skyrms, so I was naturally interested in this article on information and meaning. It's nice and clear and will give the reader a good sense of some of the issues involved in determining the informational content of a signal (and especially the informational content of a signal when the signaler is lying or deceiving). Personally, I don't think signals have informational content (that puts me very much in the minority). Or, if I had to say it a different way, I'd say the information is the signal. How can you say an animal crying a false warning in 'intending' to deceive? The signal is just what it does; the effect is to scatter the rest of the animals, allowing the animal access to the food. We don't need a parallel information-theoretic account to describe or explain what happened.

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The Existential Question: Why Do We Measure?
David Vance, Chief Learning Officer, 2018/06/15

My interest in measuring things is pretty minimal, but that's probably because my interest in the six reasons outlined in this article is pretty minimal. The six reasons are: 1) to answer questions, 2) to show results, 3) to demonstrate value, 4) to justify our budget (or existence), 5) to identify opportunities for improvement and 6) to manage results. I don't focus on questions, I focus on discovery. My results are of the "it works or it doesn't" variety. Value is in the eye of the beholder, not a number. Budget (and price, for that matter) is based on willingness to pay, not value. I focus on improving affordances, not filling gaps. And I'm not a management person. That doesn't mean we should never measure. It just means it is vastly overrated.

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Cryptocurrencies Make Their Way to Campus, Bringing Flexibility and Risks
Erin Brereton, EdTech, 2018/06/15

The headline pretty much says it all. The big risk (aside from wildly fluctuating currency values) is currency-mining malware. "If ransomware was the scourge of 2017, cryptocurrency mining could be the problem to watch this year — especially in higher education. In a recent Vectra analysis of the five industries showing cryptocurrency mining attacks, higher education had the majority of activity by far (85 percent)."

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Educational and Occupational Credentials should be in schema.org
Phil Barker, GitHub, 2018/06/15

The current effort to match credentials to competencies, and digitize credentials, is ongoing. This is a discussion thread on GitHib addressing the question in the title. Of note is the most recent post in which Phil Barker outlines recent work done in the field by a W3C Community Group . There's also an earlier posts that lists a number of websites showing various educational and occupations credentials. Barker adds, "There is a draft on appspot with more details of the changes we would make, i.e. term definitions, ranges etc."

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Free MOOCs Face the Music
Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed, 2018/06/15

Inside Higher Ed reports very sympathetically on the new EdX subscription fee (covered here yesterday). It interviews Adam Medrox, edX COO and president, who says " here is a lot of evidence showing that having some ‘skin in the game’ is beneficial in online learning." It also interviews Phil Hill, who "doesn’t think edX will have a problem finding students to pay the support fee." And it quotes Class Central's Dhawal Shah writing that "the announcement was the latest in a phenomenon he termed “the shrinking of free.'"

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