OLDaily

Knowlege, Skill and Virtue Epistemology
Duncan Pritchard, Handbook of Skill and Expertise, 2019/01/21

This is just one bit of Duncan Pritchard's voluminous output. It makes me think about the relation between knowledge, on the one hand, and the skill or virtues needed to produce knowledge on the other, in other words, between cognitive success and cognitive agency. "there is a way of thinking about knowledge that takes the idea that knowledge involves cognitive skill or ability as primary," writes Pritchard. To put the question this way: can an unskilled person ever know something? Pritchard writes, "knowledge is to be understood as a safe (non-lucky) cognitive success which is significantly attributable to one’s manifestation of relevant cognitive skill (and thus one’s cognitive agency)." Image: CivBeyondEarth.

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OER Survey and Adoption Growth: It pays to check source material
Phil Hill, e-Literate, 2019/01/21

I had my own issues with the accuracy of a recent Chronicle's report on an OER study, and Phil Hill does a little fact-checking of his own and finds more problems. "The second paragraph shows a potential drop in adoption over the next three years for all faculty," he writes. "That would be major news showing that the OER movement hit an inflection point." But the study says nothing of the sort. "This survey asks faculty members who are not current users of open educational resources whether they expect to be using OER in the next three years." In fact, he says, "the percentage of faculty who used required OER material in any of their courses more than doubled this year."

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'It's all about controlling students': researchers slam popular app
Henrietta Cook, Sydney Morning Herald, 2019/01/21

Used in more than half of Australian primary schools, according to this article, Class Dojo is nonetheless being "slammed" by researchers from the University of South Australia who say it "promotes an archaic approach to discipline and likens it to China's social credit system." This article (17 page PDF) appears at the same time the Guardian posts a report entitled Welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism. Surveillance capitalism, writes Shoshana Zuboff in a new book, "unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data" in order to create "behavioural futures markets" predicting, and ultimately controlling, human behaviour. And that's what Class Dojo does, according to the study. "They both rely heavily on surveillance, rewards and punishments to reinforce behaviour and convert behaviour data into a score. Those scores are being used to determine what happens to students or citizens."

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Institutional Innovation - I Have a Dream
John Hagel, Edge Perspectives, 2019/01/21

I'm not sure how appropriate it is to use Martin Luther King day in the service of institutional innovation. In any case, the transformation Hagel describes involves something called 'scalable learning ' - "learning in the form of creating new knowledge through action and reflection on results – it’s not about sharing existing knowledge or just coming up with new ideas." Fair enough, though not exactly new or novel. Hagel outlines the process in terms of motivation (away from the financial, toward passion and need), practices (from static and routine, to dynamic and challenging) and environment (from departments and hierarchies, to workgroups and networks). Image: eBay.

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