OLDaily

Barcelona Blueprint
Open EdTech Global, Google Docs, 2019/11/27

The Open EdTech conference has released "12 guiding principles, developed by the educational technologists who came together at our first conference in Barcelona." Signatories come from organizations like Moodle, Androgogic, Mahara, and the Open Education Consortium. Following is a set of six discussion areas presented in terms of principles, actions and reflections. This document should be regarded as a draft. In many ways it's very shallow, and represents an educator-centric perspective of the subject. Could this evolve into a really strong statement? I'm not sure this community has the follow-through.

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A manifesto for the 21st century university
Mary Stuart, Liz Shutt, Wonkhe, 2019/11/27

The authors are a Vice-Chancellor and Director of Policy at the University of Lincoln. The core for their short manifesto is  that "permeability should be the new lens which reframes the historic, core activities of universities; across organisational and national boundaries, between different groups and communities, technologies, and disciplines." I think that 'permeability' is a great work to represent the concept of being able to say that the university is open and interactive, without it really being so. And I'm afraid that the manifesto doesn't reach far beyond the existing conception of the university (after all, what can be said of a call to "slow things down" and "partnerships between policy makers, societal interest groups and researchers."

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School apps track students from classroom to bathroom, and parents are struggling to keep up
Heather Kelly, Washington Post, 2019/11/27

We all agree (I hope) that it would be inappropriate to have video cameras in the bathrooms at school. But what about tracking software? Somehow this is deemed appropriate. To use the bathroom, a student issues "a special request on his school-issued Chromebook computer. A teacher approves it pending any red flags in the system, such as another student he should avoid out in the hall at the same time, then logs him back in on his return. If he were out of class for more than a set amount of time, the application would summon an administrator to check on him." Creepy.

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Facial recognition technology in schools: critical questions and concerns
Mark Andrejevic, Neil Selwyn, Learning, Media and Technology, 2019/11/27

Good article that looks at the use of facial recognition technology in schools and raises a set of specific concerns regarding its use:

• The dehumanising nature of facially focused schooling
• The foregrounding of students’ gender and race
• The inescapable nature of school-based facial recognition
• The elimination of obscurity
• The increased authoritarian nature of schooling
• The cascading logic of automation (ie., it gets used for more and more things)
• The future oppression of marginalised groups within schools

The authors note that students are not in a good position to refuse facial recognition technology, since they are already enrolled in an authoritarian system, and so would be likely to respond with "the deployment of improvised and opportunistic ‘tactics’" such as face-masking and defacement (like asymmetrical haircuts, etc).

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A review of the types of mobile activities in mobile inquiry-based learning
Ángel Suárez, Marcus Specht, Fleur Prinsen, Marco Kalz, Stefaan Ternier, Computers & Education, 2019/11/27

I saw this image in a post by Juan Farnos and tracked it back to its source in this article on varieties of mobile activities analyzed through six dimensions of student agency (which in turn is a meta-study reviewing a number of earlier studies). You have to look closely, but each agency is characterized by two section, more (+) and less (-). The article was a reference in this workshop presentation on learner agency in inquiry-based learning activities (and so I guess it goes without saying that most mobile learning activities will be inquiry-base, right?). This is all good stuff, which is why I wanted to dig through the sources. "The dimensions consisted of 1) learners' control over the goals, 2) learners' control over the content, 3) learners' control over the actions, 4) learners' control over the strategies, 5) learners' opportunities for reflection and 6) learners' opportunities for monitoring their own learning progress."

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TACCLE4 - Continuous Professional Development
Erasmus+, 2019/11/27

TACCLE stands for 'Teaching Aids on Creating Content for Learning Environments' (it took me quite a bit of searching to find this out). One of the project outcomes is an e-learning handbook for classroom teachers (132 page PDF). "Technology is not enough," says the website. "The creation of high quality content is essential if the potential of ‘e-learning’ is to be realised in a way that stimulates and fosters Life Long Learning. It is important to train teachers how to design and develop their own content and generate learning materials that can help their own students and can also be freely exchanged with others." The main site isn't active any more but TACCLE4-CPD is current and active. Via Pontydysgu.

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4 Mind Mapping Tools Students Can Use on Their Chromebooks
Med Kharbach, Educational Technology and Mobile Learning, 2019/11/27

What drew me to this post (first posted in 2017 and just reposted) was the really nice image of a graph (view it here) created by the first of the four tools listed, Lucidchart. Notice how the illustration of a process diagram is not just a fancy way to create a hierarchy (like this, this, and this, maps from the other three tools mentioned in the article), but actually shows a web of connections and flows. Such illustrations do a lot more to enhance understanding than do taxonomies or categorizations (despite the prevalance of taxonomies and categorizations in educational research). If you're on a Chromebook, get Lucidchart here. It works fine on other systems through a browser window, and might become a staple in my repertoire.

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