OLDaily

Professors Worry About the Cost of Textbooks, but Free Alternatives Pose Their Own Problems
Beth McMurtrie, 2019/01/09

The results of this Babson Research Group survey Freeing the Textbook: Educational Resources in U.S. Higher Education, 2018 (48 page PDF) are not entirely consistent (professors claim to be deeply concerned about the price of textbooks, but most of them use commercial textbooks, with 98 percent of the texts used 'copyrighted' (ie., all rights reserved). But the suggestion that the survey finds 'problems' and 'issues with quality' in OER is a misrepresentation of what the study actually says; neither of these show up in the results at all (with the exception of one short comment on page 31).

The more serious result of this survey that should have been reported are these (quoted):

• Faculty are clearly already making extensive use of Revise and Remix, even with the current copyrighted textbooks.
• Given the sometimes vague understanding of the OER... we have to assume that there is some level of over-reporting in these figures of OER use.

I think these results underline a view I have expressed in the past: faculty don't care about open educational resources, and even if they say they have concerns about textbook prices, they don't care enough to do anything about them.

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The Social Epistemology of Consensus and Dissent
Boaz Miller, Zefat Academic College, 2019/01/09

This is a good paper that feels like it ends halfway through its topic. In the E-Learning 3.0 course (I'll have more on that Friday) we discussed the ideas that community is consensus - not the results of consensus, necessarily, but a shared process of consensus. This article looks at the relation between epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge) and consensus, looking at different models of consensus-formation, and then (briefly) the role of dissent, and (even more briefly) consensus-building algorithms. Worth noting: while on the one hand "dissent is not a temporary glitch to be overcome, and consensus is not the end of inquiry" it remains true that "dissent may be epistemically detrimental, especially dissent stemming from manufactured uncertainty or doubt mongering." Image: IPWatch.
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The 5 Technologies that will Change Networking in 2019
Anand Oswal, Cisco Blogs, 2019/01/09

The five innovations are: WiFi 6, 5G, digitized spaces, SD-WAN, and machine learening. The fourth is of most ibnterest to me at the moment. "Traditionally, corporate networks have been based around centralized control, routing, and security... That model still exists but it is breaking down. Designing networks primarily around branch-to-data-center connections doesn’t make sense when so many business applications are now run out of the cloud, and so many end users rely on the open Internet for connection when they’re not in a company office." Amen.

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Jisc presents to MPs on education’s role in Industry 4.0
Rosie Niven, JISC, 2019/01/09

This article covers the first half of this two hour panel session with participants giving responses to questions posed by the British Parliament's Education Committee. The full session is interesting viewing. The panel was sometimes more about industry's role in education than the converse. It also looked at the role of AI in learning technology. And there was a good discussion of the role of technology in supporting students with disadvantages. The most interesting point came from Priya Lakhani as she described the disconnect between the speed of agile technology development and the lag created by randomized control testing.

She also hits the mark (at 10:48) when she lists the things students need that we don't test for: "The education system today is just not fit for purpose... we're forcing our amazing talented teachers to actually teach children into specific mold for tests. If we're going to test, that's all right, but we don't test for adaptability, we don't test for creativity, we don't test for learning agility, we don't test for empathy. With all the issues we know that social media is creating and all the well-being issues that our children are going to face, we don't actually test for any of that... There's so much pressure on teachers to deliver something that no employer is going to sit there and say 'thank you very much, you've memorized all of that, that's what we're employing for today'." Here presentation as a whole is a tour de force and worth taking seriously.

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