OLDaily

“I’m not a person that reads”: Identity Work, Adult Learners, and Educational (Dis)engagement
Scott McLean, Jaya Dixit, Canadian Journal of Education, 2019/01/10

This paper (27 page PDF) uses the frame of 'identity work' described by Snow and Anderson to interpret identity statements made by interviewees describing their experience with self-help books. Snow and Anderson identified four activities common to the practice of identity work including "verbal construction and assertion of personal identities." This activity has two modes, 'distancing' and 'embracement', and many of the responses to the survey were found to fit neatly into one of the other of these modes. The authors write that these results should suggest to us that "learning is more than the straightforward reception of content; the reception of content is influenced by one’s positioning of oneself as a subject vis-à-vis the content, the person or people communicating that content, the media through which that content is being communicated, and other recipients of that content."  Image: SWSCmedia.

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Community of Inquiry on Facebook in a Formal Learning Setting in Higher Education
Masood Nazir, Natasa Brouwer, Education Sciences, 2019/01/10

This article (23 page PDF) studies "an application of Facebook for higher education in science (STEM)," performing a content analysis on Facebook pots, and argues that the "results show that an integral Community of Inquiry (CoI) was formed on Facebook within the regular online course, encompassing all relevant CoI interactions leading to a powerful educational experience." That said, the results of the study show minimal social presence, with a preponderance of cognitive and (especially) teaching presence.

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Open Science in Canada's 2018-2020 Open Government Plan
Richard Ackerman, Science Library Pad, 2019/01/10

As you know, I've been a long-standing proponent of open science within our government agencies. I'm also on a committee working toward open science (though I haven't really done much with it yet). So I celebrate the recent announcement, covered by Richard Ackerman today, of Canada's newest commitment to open science, part of the newest release of the National Action Plan on Open Government. The plan includes pledges to "develop a Canada Open Science Roadmap to provide a plan for greater openness in federal science and research activities" and "provide a platform for Canadians to find and access open access publications from federal scientists."

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Blockchain’s Occam problem
Matt Higginson, Marie-Claude Nadeau, Kausik Rajgopal, McKinsey, 2019/01/10

The Occam problem is this: unless and until blockchain becomes the simplest and most effective technology to do a job (any job) it will not be widely adopted. Yet despite huge investments, blockchain has yet to meet this challenge. We shouldn't be surprised. "It is an infant technology that is relatively unstable, expensive, and complex. It is also unregulated and selectively distrusted." As I commented to a colleague today, the applications of blockchain will not be the obvious ones (like, for example, registering credentials) but rather the rhizomatic ones (where, for example, some underlying technology (like, say, merkle trees) spreads from industry to industry in a generally underground manner.

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‘Neuromyth’ or Helpful Model?
Greg Toppo, Inside Higher Ed, 2019/01/10

The original (and more accurate) title of this article was "In learning styles debate, it's instructors vs. psychologists." The focus is on science writer Ulrich Boser. He looked at the subject recently and found the debate alive and well. Where the two sides begin to converge, according to the article, is in the concern that "catering to learning styles in the classroom can actually foster a fixed mind-set, not a growth mind-set." As an overview this is a pretty good article - with its original title. Boser, meanwhile, has coincidentally just started a consultancy called 'The Learning Agency'.

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