OLDaily

Can people be pushed into mandatory learning? Old myths in new mantras
Inge de Waard, Ignatia, 2019/06/25

This post wanders a bit, but it ultimately makes a good point: "Whether we say learners must self-direct, or self-regulate or self-determine their learning, inevitably this means we are talking about learners that are willing to learn, and are capable of learning." Which is pretty much to opposite of mandatory training.

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6 Great Features in Windows 10’s New Game Bar
Chris Hoffman, How-To Geek, 2019/06/25

I know it's just a think for gaming, but under the hood the Windows Game Bar has a lot more potential, as explained in this article. "While this tool is focused on gameplay, it also makes an excellent desktop screen recorder. Open the game bar, click the record button, and it will record whatever application is on your screen—complete with microphone input, which you can toggle on or off from the panel." You can also chat on Xbox Live - something that would be great if it weren't limited to Xbox. So pretty much any Windows 10 user is a couple of clicks away from being able to produce their own live learning content.

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The Robots are Writing: Will Machine-Generated Books Accelerate our Consumption of Scholarly Literature?
Lettie Y. Conrad, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2019/06/25

We've seen a number of automated content generation services previously in these pages. This article raises the question: who will read what they write? In some cases (such as the auto-written Washington Post articles) they will be read by people who don't know and don't care whether their news is written by a robot. But what about things like learning resources or reserach reports? This article focuses on the question of whether students will have the cognitive tools to counter algorithmic bias (which is totally the wrong question, since humans are also biased, yes, even professors). The real question is: how much better will robot texts be than human-authored texts? And will it matter that they are better at all?

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Hey! This isn't what I signed up for!
Apostolos K., Multilitteratus Incognitus, 2019/06/25

I often read articles saying professors should be required to take classes in digital pedagogy and similar subjects, so they'll be better teachers. Typically, though, this isn't what someone who spent (say) an academic career studying physics wants to do. As one professor wrote (quoted in this article), "I got into academia because I love creating and sharing knowledge. As I sit here working through my day, I can't help but wonder how I turned into a website administrator and customer service agent." Any reasonable reform to higher education, I think, is going to be one that enables professors to focus on their discipline (and which allows the rest of us to follow along).

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Answer Sheet: A Report that Detailed up to $1 Billion in Wasted Federal Funds on Bad Charter Schools May Have Underestimated the Problem
Valerie Strauss, Carol C. Burris, National Education Policy Center, 2019/06/25

One of the problems with privatized public services is that you have to set up a separate agency to watch over the private services, because otherwise they take advantage of the system for their own gain. This is true whether it's construction, education, or urban planning. So it's no real surprise to read of this report that documents, as the article says, "waste and fraud" in the charter school system. For example, "In Michigan, we found 63 charter schools, nearly all of which received grants of $100,000 or more, that never opened." And for example, "Cases of self-dealing between federal grant recipient charter school CEOs and their companies (and sometimes churches) are not infrequent among Charter Schools Program grant recipients." When private enterprise enters public service, we should not be fooled by false economies offered in the sales pitch, and we should be ready for the inevitable drift from public service to private interest. Originally from the Washington Post.

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Fostering Openness in Education: Considerations for Sustainable Policy-Making
Javiera Atenas, Leo Havemann, Fabio Nascimbeni, Daniel Villar-Onrubia, Davor Orlic, Open Praxis, 2019/06/25

This is a wordy paper that lacks cohesion but it underlines the need for policy development around open educational practices and it makes the good point that "OE does not occur in a vacuum; ergo, policies aimed at fostering sustainable growth of OEP must acknowledge that such practices sit within a wider landscape of social, economic and educational ecosystems." The context of the post is a series of policy-development workshops framed by three issues: "use of data in education and educational policy; IP licensing, copyright and copyright reform; and unbundling and open learning accreditation." It would have been better to see the paper focus less on the background and more on the actual results of the workshops themselves.

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