OLDaily

Offline networked learning
Gráinne Conole, e4innovation, 2019/10/02

Gráinne Conole previews her contribution to the Open University's 2019 Innovating Pedagogy report looking at networked learning beyond the internet. This feels like a return to open learning of the 1970s, but even today, "there are many places where Internet access is unavailable and phone networks are limited or too expensive to use." But technology can still play a role, for example, there's "the MAZI project developed a web-based set of tools running on a Raspberry Pi computer" that has been used in rural Zambia and also in Guyana. Or there's the case of the Personal Inquiry Project where " enabled school students to walk together in groups across a town, gathering data about urban pollution and loading into a netbook running a webserver based on an inquiry learning framework."

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The Harvard Ruling Misses the Point
Richard Ford, Boston Review, 2019/10/02

As much as I am loathe to delve into U.S. education politics, I think it's important to highlight the nugget of wisdom in this post. While people tend to think of higher education as a 'social leveler' - "anyone, we are told, can ascend an ever-steepening social and economic hierarchy". But, "of course, it isn’t. The result is that class stratification, cutthroat capitalist competition, and racial resentment collide in university admissions." And this continues to exist even if you open up admissions to the lower classes. "The children of the elite must always predominate if the school is to remain elite. A truly elite school admits the most talented student body it can while still ensuring that most of the student body is drawn from the upper class."

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How to Blog Like Shakespeare
Ryan Brock, The Blog Herald, 2019/10/02

Maybe don't 'blog like Shakespeare'. At least, not as described here. Here's what we're told: "Content starts writing itself once a rubric of format is produced, and Shakespeare nailed his format down well with the sonnet."  I can think of any number of education bloggers who phone one in once a day or whatever, with each post following more or less the same format. I'm pretty sure Shakespeare put more effort into his sonnets. Content that 'writes itself' is probably not worth writing. There needs to be some risk, some effort and some insight in each piece of writing.

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Ant Colonies and the Art of Managing Universities
Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates, 2019/10/02

Sometimes Alex Usher sounds like Donald Trump when he asserts that "Nobody knows..." something and then proceeds to describe something we all knew about all along. In this case, it's the observation that academics belong to "learned societies that preside over standards for entrance and performance, for instance." The point he is trying to make is that all academics are "obedient" to these standards, and that "governments are barely aware of the superorganism." Which of course is horse-swaggle, all of it. Yes, there is a lot of nuance to the governance of academia. Yes there are academic societies (but they don't actually govern anything, much less expect obedience). And simplifying it as a "superorganism": that nobody understands serves no useful purpose. Image: Greenbiz.

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Implementing a holistic approach to lifelong learning: Community Lifelong Learning Centres as a gateway to multidisciplinary support teams
Brikena Xhomaqi, Irene Psifidou, Paul Downes, Cedefop, 2019/10/02

This is quite a good short report (16 page PDF) outlining the objectives of a lifelong learning programme, and the role played by community learning centres in promoting lifelong learning. It amounts to a large degree to an action plan and business model for these centres. "The aim of such centres would be to create a place where education and social life are closely intertwined with the neighborhood and the wider world, wherein school or any other institution is seen as a learning space of  shared  responsibility  for  professional educators,  other  professionals,  students, parents,  municipalities  and  civil  society organisations (volunteer / youth and solidarity organisations etc).

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An Author of ‘Academically Adrift’ Strikes Again
Goldie Blumenstyk, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2019/10/02

In 2011 the book Academically Adrift "documented how little time students were actually spending on their college coursework — and how little they were learning." It was criticized at the time for drawing sweeping conclusions from limited data. Now one of the authors wants to expand that research and standardize the measurement of learning. A sceptical Goldie Blumenstyk notes that this idea has been around since the pre-internet days but never successfully implemented. She also argues that such an effort would have to dislodge existing learning analytics systems. But they measure different things, says one of the book's authors. But that - in my view - is kind of the point. The content is a McGuffin in academia, and it doesn't really matter whether you learn it.

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