OLDaily

Tender Notice: Next Generation Digital Learning Experience Solution
Buyandsell.gc.ca, 2019/08/27

I can't really resist posting this: the Canada School of Public Service has issued a call for proposals for "a Next Generation Digital Learning Environment (NGDLE)... delivered via the Software as a Service (SaaS) model, hosted as a Protected B, Medium Integrity, Medium Availability (PBMM) cloud-based solution." I am not involved in this in any way, neither as a bidder or an evaluator. But it is still with interest, given my previous work with CSPS, that I observe the results.

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Whose Knowledge?
Adele Vrana, Siko Bouterse, YouTube, Creative Commons, 2019/08/27

This is a video from the recent Creative Commons summit in Portugal. The two speakers talk about their fathers and about their family history from the perspective of colonialism and the slave trade. It takes a while to get to the point, but be patient, because the background puts it into context. One question they ask us to ask is, "whose knowledge is missing?" and "what knowledge do we not have, or choose not to know?" about the past. And they directly question whether the colonizer's mentality continues to exist in places like Wikipedia, where in order to be included a Brazilian author must consent to licensing terms that allow her image to be used to sell breakfast cereal without her knowledge or consent. And what are you doing to help those without a voice to be heard (without being exploited in the process)?

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How to Make Smart Choices About Tech for Your Course
Michelle D. Miller, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2019/08/27

I still think my old Nine Rules for Good Technology is the best guide for making technology decisions. The contrast to that approach, though, is this guide. What's the difference? This guide is thoroughly entrenched in existing practice - your selection of technology will be directly based on what you already do and what you already know (or think you know). Anything else - like, say, science - is merely "the lens" through which you make your decision. My Nine Rules, by contrast, focus on selecting technologies according to their affordances, and will result in a certain amount of serendipity and new discovery. As new technologies should.

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How socioeconomic background makes a difference in education outcomes
Lien Pham, EduResearch Matters, 2019/08/27

Good well-reasoned article interpreting PISA testing results in the light of differences in socio-economic status. The reasoning, and the conclusions, are in line with my own thinking. Lien Pham writes,  "Resources are important, but just because a school has a wide variety of resources doesn’t mean all of its students will benefit from those equally... policy attention to improve educational inequality should place student agency and diversity at the forefront, rather than focussing on resources with the assumption that all students will be able to access them in similar ways with similar outcomes."

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The partisan divide widens over American higher education, and it may cost us
Bryan Alexander, 2019/08/27

The original purpose of higher education was to equip the ruling class to continue being the ruling class. This requires promulgating a set of beliefs and institutions that are anathema to an open and democratic society. Today, those beliefs and institutions are being called into question, and rightly so. This may cause higher education to become less popular in some quarters. If so, too bad.

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Survival: the first 3.8 billion years
Lisa Feldman Barrett, Nature, 2019/08/27

This is a review of Joseph LeDoux's The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains. I haven't read this, but his Synaptic Self is high on my recommended list. This review isn't as kind as it could be, suggesting that LeDoux is going beyond his area of expertise. The book offers "a natural history of brains as they developed the capacity to create the elements of the human mind, focusing mainly on the emergence of emotions, memory and consciousness." If LeDoux isn't qualified to offer such an account, I don't know who is.

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