OLDaily

The trouble with government education technology initiatives
Terry Freedman, ICT & Computing in Education, 2018/10/12

I'm going to select option B, which is give at the end of the article, suggesting that Terry Freedman has  "finally turned into the archetypal cynical grumpy old man sitting in the corner of the staffroom mumbling!" Why? Well, it's that the generalization in the headline is simply false. Sure, not everything works. But most of the technology initiatives governments have funded in universities actually have worked. In this part of the world, I can cite the student support programs run both federally and provincially and the research funding councils. But if you want something that is more directly technical, I might point to things like CANARIE, the national fibre-optic backbone, or the TRIUMF particle acceleration centre, and the CAP grant program putting access to the internet to communities across the nation. The internet itself was a government program, the web came out of CERN, and things ranging from XML to LMSs to MOOCs bar the imprint of government support. The government gets a lot right, a lot more than it is recognized for, and people saying that the government always fails have (a) not really looked at the track record of business in this space, and (b) are grumpy old men sitting in the corner of the staffroom.

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$1 Billion in Savings through Open Educational Resources
Nicole Allen, SPARC, 2018/10/12

According to SPARC, Open Educational Resources (OER) have saved the academic community (that is, students, donors and governments who actually pay for the system) more thn a billion dollars over the last five years. "SPARC announced this important milestone live this morning at the 15th annual Open Education Conference in Niagara Falls, NY. Further details will be presented during a session this afternoon, and full documentation including calculations and data tables will be published on our project page in the coming weeks." As impressive as that number is (assuming it can be substantiated) it is worth keeping in mind that OER account for only a small percentage of the academic resources in use today.

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One Way to Help Students Become Knowledge Creators
Beckie Supiano, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2018/10/12

This approach should remind you of some recent online courses. "Using a project created by Robin DeRosa, a professor of interdisciplinary studies at Plymouth State University, as a model, Paige is having her students create a “resource book” for the course." Sharing is also a major component. "One benefit of the project, Paige hopes, is that students take it seriously. It makes them realize, she said, 'I’m not just writing a paper for Robin to read.'" It's a good approach; it should have been tried long before now.

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Announcing the Coalition for Diversity & Inclusion in Scholarly Communications
Alice Meadows, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2018/10/12

The new coalition defines diversity as "the composition of a group of people from any number of demographic backgrounds, identities (innate and selected), the collective strength of their experiences, beliefs, values, skills, and perspectives; and, the historical and ongoing ways in which these groups have been affected by structures of power." Alice Meadows writes, "including people with a wide range of perspectives and backgrounds at all levels — including senior leadership — improves an organization’s financial results." This is true, but it seems weird to single out senior leadership as they were the ones that have been excluded all these years. Ah, the poverty of the rich and powerful.

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Disruptive Pedagogy and the Practice of Freedom
Julie Fellmayer, Hybrid Pedagogy, 2018/10/12

Baldwin writes that "The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions…" but, "I have yet to hear any EdTech expert or 21st century education guru refer to disruption in the transgressive sense that Baldwin was evoking 54 years ago," writes Julie Fellmayer. She has not been reading the same things I'm reading, evidently. But it doesn't matter, as the article takes a hard turn into the demand that we "teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students," which works out to be something like "self-actualization", which means to "sacrifice privilege" and " to immerse yourself in the work of as many POC, feminist, activist, and academic writers, bloggers, podcasters and tweeters as possible."

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The breach that killed Google+ wasn’t a breach at all
Russell Brandom, The Verge, 2018/10/12

As Russell Brandon reports, "The bigger problem for Google isn’t the crime, but the cover-up. The vulnerability was fixed in March, but Google didn’t come clean until seven months later." As a result, " It’s hard to avoid the uncomfortable, unanswerable question: what else isn’t it telling us?" So the suggestion is that Google doesn't want to expose itself to this kind of risk again, so Google+ must die.

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