OLDaily

The State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada
Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates, 2018/08/28

There's a lot of value in this report (62 page PDF) but there are weaknesses as well, and the report should be read in that light. In his blog post announcing the report, Alex Usher writes that "although government funding has been falling, students have made up the difference," though he notes that international students have seen higher fee increases. But this isn't what jumps out as you read the 62 pages; the tone of the report (and many of the evaluative comments) paint a picture of adequate funding, reasonable (sometimes even "trifling") tuition, and the idea that complaints about the system constantly overstate the problem or miss the point. Although the report is written in a generally neutral tone, readers will see a lot of evaluation, assessment, and ad hoc explanations for the data displayed in its pages.

More importantly, though the data is drawn largely from Statistics Canada, much of the data presented are the author's own calculations, raising questions about why the data are presented this way. Additionally, this is a purely economical look at the state of post secondary education - there is virtually nothing written about what was studied (much less researched), what wealth (if any?) was generated by this investment, what contributions the post-secondary system makes to industry, culture and society as a whole. By depicting the system in its entirety as nothing but an expense - borne either by students or by governments - the study misrepresents in an important way the point of having a higher education system.

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How I got blocked by Tom Peters - you must bow to the cult of Leadership or be rejected as an apostate
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, 2018/08/28

Donald Clark reports on his spat with Tom Peters that erupted after he posted a thousand words on Why these best selling books on 'Leadership' got it disastrously wrong featuring Peters in a leading role. "BusinessWeek claimed he had ‘faked’ the data. Chapman even wrote a book called In Search of Stupidity, showing that his list of ‘excellent’ companies were actually poor to indifferent." Though, as Clark notes, at least they tried to use data; many business books are filled with nothing but cherry-picked anecdotes. More to the point, though, " We have fetishised 'Leadership'. You're a leader, I'm a leader, we're all leaders now - rendering the very meaning of the word useless." I think Clark is right, I think Peters helped start this trend, and I think the concept of 'leadership' has become empty and meaningless.

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As newspapers cut, grassroots solutions fuel a resurgence of local journalism
Matt DeRienzo, Poynter, 2018/08/28

I've long said that the future of education will follow that of media and journalism. These haven't been good days for media and journalism. But maybe this paints a way forward for local news, and correspondingly, local education. "Replacing what’s been lost will be up to individual communities taking responsibility for their own news and information needs, and supporting locally and independently owned and operated, grassroots solutions." As an example, a newspaper in northern California is turning readers into shareholders. In other places, the cooperative model has taken hold.

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How to Incorporate Self-Directed Learning in Your Online Course
Laura Lynch, LearnDash, 2018/08/28

This article is introductory but it's good advice and offers a good starting point for generating your own ideas about creating self-directed learning. The two most important principles, I think, as as follows: "Turn over the keys... one of the hallmarks of self-directed learning is that it requires instructors to turn control of the learning experience over to the learners themselves"; and "Give them a challenge," especially a community challenge. "The more your learners can see fellow learners working toward the same goal, the stronger their motivation will be to keep up." Like I said: pretty basic advice, but useful.

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The Time for Open and Interoperable Annotation is Now
Alexander Naydenov, Heather Staines, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2018/08/28

I've resisted covering the recent buzz around the hypothes.is annotation service on the ground that most of it seemed like marketing buzz.I still do. This article introduces annotation as an ancient scholarly trend. I view annotation as an ancient technology trend; I was covering it more than a decade ago - here's Annotea, here's Wikalong, and there's more. Annotation is a hard problem, and the web is littered with failures. Hard because it requires so much cooperation between vendors. Hard because it allows strangers to comment on your web site. Hard because a billion web users can create a deluge of content. But hey - there's a W3C standard for annotations, and the idea just won't go away.

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