OLDaily

Troubling “Technologies”: Exploring the Global Learning XPRIZE Using the Frameworks of Skinner and Foucault
Tanya Elias, Current Issues in Emerging eLearning, 2020/02/04

The Global Learning Xprize "challenges teams from around the world to develop open source and scalable software… the prize purse will be objectively awarded to the team that generates the best international standardized test scores within the group of participating children." Tanya Elias finds "many articles from news outlets celebrating this contest" but only one (from Audrey Watters) questioning it. "What happens," asks Elias, "when software engineers begin to believe that they can solve complex social problems about which they have neither background nor context? What happens to us, to our world, when we start to believe that they can do so?"

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What is complex learning in the workplace?
Mirjam Neelen, Paul A. Kirschner, 3-Star Learning Experiences, 2020/02/04

There's actually quite a bit to this post, including some stuff I agree with, and it's a bit unfair to pick on one thing, but I'm going to do it anyway. The thing I'm picking up on is the image of a dog and of some dog parts (a leg, a head, a tail, etc) with the caption "Emergence: is a whole dog made up of the sum of its parts?" What they're trying to show is that complex skills "can be decomposed into more specific “constituent skills and the interrelationships between them." Their point is to emphasize the interrelationships, and that's the part I agree with, with some reservations.

But the thing with emergence is that it does not arise out of "constituent parts". What they are talking about is composition, not emergence (like the way a wall is composed of bricks, but does not 'emerge' from the collectioin of bricks). So in the case of the dog parts, you can only make a dog out of them, not a cat. But if we're talking about pixels, the same pixels could be used to make an image of either a cat or a dog - the organization matters, but the compositionality doesn't. I think this confusion underlies a lot of the conceptual errors in Neelen and Kirschner's work.

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OER by Discipline Guide: McMaster University
Joanne Kehoe, Olga Perkovic, McMaster University, 2020/02/04

This is "an Open Education reference of OER listed by subject area and disciplines with McMaster academic programming... an in-progress (open creation) that lists a broad range of open educational resources organized by disciplines at McMaster University." To read, click 'Read this Book', then click on the "Contents' tab (iupper left) to get the list of contents to drop down (it's a bit unintuitive). The listings are a bit spaarse (but it's still early days for OER books generally), the selection is a bit idiosyncratic, and access to things like reader stats, reviews or endorsements would be really helpful.

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Phyllis W. Jordan column: What free public college means for Virginia's small private colleges
Education Next, 2020/02/04

This short post points to an opinion article in the Richmond Times-Dispatch that makes clear some of the dynamics of a mixed public-private education environment. At issue is the free college tuition being offered in Virginia. Columnist Phyllis W. Jordan says private colleges "are already in direct competition with public colleges and universities" and are at risk of cloising. This is bad, she argues, because "private, liberal arts colleges are essential to sustaining small town and rural economies." So, she argues, "if the General Assembly agrees to make community colleges free, it could pair it with expanded grants for students who stay in state for private colleges." And that's how private college for rich people drains the public system while not providing the benefit - free tuition - desired by lawmakers.

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Guest Post: A Plea for Fairer Sharing of the True Costs of Publication
Mariëlle Prevoo, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2020/02/04

Mariëlle Prevoo makes the point that because many submissions are rejected by journals (or withdrawn by authors), the article processing fees (APF) paid by authors are unfairly distributed. The recommendation is to charge separate fees at the submission, peer review, and publishing stage. I can see the merit of this proposal, assuming that you want to keep the existing system of submission and blind peer review intact. And such a model would put publishing in line with other prize-based systems, where you have to pay to be considered for an award. But maybe people should just publish (for free!) on their own institutional repositories or preprint exchanges, and let the community as a whole decide on the merit of these articles? Certainly that's what we do for most open content.

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Three Things We Learned at Khan Academy Over the Last Decade
Sal Khan, EdSurge, 2020/02/04

From where I sit this article looks like Sal Khan returning to educational orthodoxy after a ten-year journey in the wilderness. Here are the 'three things' he has 'learned' (quoted):

• Teachers are the unwavering center of schooling and we should continue to learn from them every day
• Students need exposure to rigorous grade-level curriculum and they need to work at their learning edge
• Our public schools are an abiding institution that is making important progress despite many challenges

I guess if you spend ten years working in schools with teachers then these are the conclusions you are going to reach. But on the other hand, you could be forgiven for reading this and concluding "the changes we proposed at Khan Academy did not catch on in schools."

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