OLDaily

OECD Learning Compass 2030 Provides Teachers, Students, and Employers with Milestones for Workforce Success
David Ross, Getting Smart, 2019/06/11

This article summarizes elements of the OECD Learning Compass 2030 (which catches my eye partially because of its discussion of agency). David Ross highlights three ”transformative competencies” targeted for 2030:

• The ability to create new value;
• The ability to reconcile tensions and dilemmas; and
• The ability to take responsibility for one’s own actions.

Taken together, he says, these amount to: “To act, rather than be acted upon.” This is an interesting inversion of the Kantian dictum that people should be treated as ends, not means, but it places the onus on the people being so treated rather than the people who would treat them one way or another.

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Reflecting on the Impact of the Open Education Movement
Grainne Conole, Mark Brown, Journal of Learning for Development, 2019/06/11

This paper (17 page PDF) is for the most part a very standard presentation of three types of open educational resources: Open Educational Resources (OER) as defined by UNESCO, e-Textbooks, and MOOCs; and of three design frameworks: the 7Cs of Learning Design framework, the SAMR model and the ICAP framework. These are useful background, but don't really contribute to the main discussion, which occupies the latter third of the paper. It's essentially a critique of open educational resources. "Despite the potential, in reality OER are not being used extensively by students or teachers, and there is still a concern that MOOCs are predominantly being taken by those who are already educated... inertia still exists in many traditional educational structures and a hesitance to engage in new open practices is more common than we typically like to admit." We've heard all this before. What's needed isn't yet another 12-dimensional scale, but rather, a refocus from education (and educational institutions) and toward learning outside the institution, which is where all the genuinely free learning resources are really being created and used. Image: Hewlett (2007)

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Amazon Personalize is Now Generally Available
Julien Simon, AWS News Blog, 2019/06/11

According to this article, " Amazon Personalize is a fully-managed service that allows you to create private, customized personalization recommendations for your applications." This isn't something the average consumer would use. Rather, application developers who want to use recommendations add a service connected to AWS. So, for example, if I wanted to, I could connect this newsletter to AWS and have it provide perosnal recommendations for readers (based, say, on their demographics or reading history - whatever data I've collected). I'm not going to do that, though - we're still waiting for decent recommenders, and this is probably not going to start out as one.

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MoodleNet non-technical overview (June 2019)
Doug Belshaw, MoodleNet, 2019/06/11

Quick slide deck overviewing the latest developments in MoodleNet. They're at an interesting juncture right now - setting up communication between instances of MoodleNet (which will work as a federated social network, with no central hub) using protocols like ActivityPub (which is used in services like Mastodon). You can contribute ideas via the Changemap, an issues board at GitLab and source code also at GitLab.

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‘The Great Shame of Our Profession’
Kevin Birmingham, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2019/06/11

It takes a few paragraphs before this talk gets to its main point: "Universities rely upon a revolving door of new Ph.D.s who work temporarily for unsustainable wages before giving up and being replaced by next year’s surplus doctorates. Adjuncts now do most university teaching and grading at a fraction of the price, so that the ladder faculty have the time and resources to write. We take the love that young people have for literature and use it to support the research of a tiny elite.

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