OLDaily

Where Did All These Teen Activists Come From?
Katrina Schwartz, Mind/Shift, 2019/10/30

It seems odd to read stories that pretend that environmental activism is new. I remember being in high school in the 1970s helping build a paper deposit box that we installed at the corner of Victoria and Albert in Metcalfe (there's a small park there now) and picking up the paper to be recycled. We did a bunch of other things too. People have been working for a long time to support the environment, but even more people have been working to extract more resources, emit more waste, and pass on the costs to the next generation. I hope the protesters are successful, and if there's anything I can do to help them, I will.

As a post-script, I sincerely doubt that the protesters learned their message nor their tactics in school. Nor did they get it from the traditional media, which (like this story) tends to belittle both them and their effort. They've had to work counter to both their education and to their media. Their self-organization is a credit to them.

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Openness in Whose Interest?
Maha Bali, Reflecting Allowed, 2019/10/30

I agree with the general; thrust of Maha Bali's argument here: "Permissions are paternalistic. To focus on openness as permissions is paternalistic." Now Bali places this argument in the context of colonialism. "In the end, in whose interest is there act of being open? it ends up reproducing Western hegemony over knowledge again." I would not that the argument is sound whether or not we reference (or agree with) the argument from colonialism (I'm not saying the argument from colonialism is wrong, just that it's not needed here). "Someone gives permission. But the entire discipline and industry have been gatekeeping and withholding for so long. They choose what to share and what to keep. They still control the permission." Exactly. As I've pointed out in the past, the use of permissions and licensing preserve and entrench the attitude that ideas are property, that culture is property, and this should be resisted.

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Text Editing Hates You Too
Robert Lord, Lord I/O, 2019/10/30

This article begins by referencing Alexis Beingessner’s Text Rendering Hates You, posted a month ago, and well worth the read. It picks up where Beingessener left off. Both article study the nuances of rendering text in a web browser (or digital screen generally) and make it pretty clear why it's so complex. As Robert Lord writes, "it’s a miracle of the simplicity of modern programming that we’re able to just slap down a textarea on a web page and instantly provide a text input for every internet user around the globe.

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The Imperative for Preparing for the Future of Work
Harvard Business Review, Microsoft, 2019/10/30

Harvard Business Review "surveyed more than 600 business and IT decision makers from a wide number of industries around the world about how they see work evolving between now and 2040." The results are unsurprisingly conservative: they predict that machines will adapt to serve the way we work now. Despite this never having happened previously in history. They also predict that more jobs, not fewer, will be created. Perhaps, but how many of those will be McJobs, designed as make-work? They also suggest that “when everyone has fingertip access to information, work becomes more democratic.” They don't mention that they will do everything in their power to prevent that. That's why employers (not employees, (as predicted in the paper) will turn to talent networks.

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Evaluating Agency in Literacy Using the Student Agency Profile
Margaret Vaughn, Joshua Premo, Vera V. Sotirovska, Danielle Erickson, The Reading Teacher, 2019/10/30

This article argues that the Student Agency Profile (StAP) "can be a valuable tool for teachers to understand how students feel about their sense of agency in literacy." I read it for the discussion of what agency is and how it is measured. Agency, write the authors, "typically includes three dimensions: dispositional, focusing on how individuals possess intentions, confidence, and interest in dynamic learning spaces; motivational, focusing on how individuals persist, self‐regulate, and engage in the learning process; and Positional, focusing on how individuals position themselves (and are positioned) in learning context."

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The rise of immersive learning
Samson Tan, Journal of Applied Learning & Teaching, 2019/10/30

Overview of immersive learning with an eye to countering some of the more enthusiastic coverage in recent years. "The science behind the effectiveness of immersive learning," writes Samson Tan, "is two-pronged – the sense of presence and cognitive embodiment." The first "enables the person to be 'fully' and 'deeply' absorbed in the virtual environment." The second "is the representation of knowledge and concepts through bodily activity" (I don't think I'd use the term 'representation' here - 'enaction' might be a better term). Learning design in immersive environment works through three factors: multiple perspectives, situated learning, and transfer (ie., the application of a principle learned in one activity to a novel activity).

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