OLDaily

ISTE to Acquire EdSurge, in Move to Nonprofit
Jeffrey R. Young, Stephen Noonoo, EdSurge, 2019/11/06

According to this article, "the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) announced that it has agreed to acquire EdSurge." Why? Why? "(ISTE) had no outlet for real-time news reporting, and no strong focus on higher education." It's unlikely EdSurge investors made back their millions of dollars of investments. "The ISTE acquisition was certainly fortuitous, although it did not come with a huge price tag." But that said, terms were not announced, and the VCs may have an interest in future earnings from funding available exclusively for non-profits, such as foundations. That, of course, is just speculation.

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Subscription Friction
Tim Bray, Ongoing, 2019/11/06

Tim Bray's main point here is that the practice of charging subscriptions for every single web resource won't scale. After all, how many $5 subscriptions can we sustain before this becomes an issue? Ten? Twenty? How many $15 subscriptions? He suggests this: " a standardized little popup saying 'Ten cents to read this', with several options: Yes or no on this piece, and Always-yes or Always-no for this publication." Which is (ahem) what I proposed fifteen years ago. With pictures. Bray cites Ted Nelson in Literary Machines in 1981, but I imagine he didn't provide code.

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Bee study supports differentiated learning
Education Central, 2019/11/06

I suppose testing for learning outcomes (whatever they are in this context) wouldn't show much difference, but I would still imagine that having each person contribute their own unique talent to the project resulted in a better learning experience. "I think these were developed because of the focus on strengths each learner brought to the collaboration. Students were identified for particular roles based on strengths – we had sound engineers, lyricists, singers/rappers, videographers, photographers,” she says.

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Different Goals, Different Strategies
David Wiley, iterating toward openness, 2019/11/06

David Wiley offers his take on Michael Feldstein's recent post on the 'crumbling of the open education coalition'. I think he is correct to say we have different goals and strategies, though I wouldn't exactly agree with his enumeration of that list - is it really fair to say that some of us are most interested in "bringing retribution to publishers?" But it's not the goals that divide us - it's in the selection of strategies where the division "gets real". And even this wouldn't matter - after all, we aren't actually a single coalition, and never have been - except where these strategies come into conflict with each other. And yes, "Much will depend on how we navigate these conflicts."

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Student tracking, secret scores: How college admissions offices rank prospects before they apply
Douglas MacMillan, Nick Anderson, Washington Post, 2019/11/06

The story here is that "Colleges are collecting more data about prospective students than ever before — part of an effort, administrators say, to make better predictions about which students are the most likely to apply, accept an offer and enroll." The results are not surprising. "The practices may raise a hidden barrier to a college education for underprivileged students... the latest tools let administrators build rich profiles on individual students and quickly determine whether they have enough family income to help the school meet revenue goals." Because of course.

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