OLDaily

Illusions of learning - the problem with student evaluations
Alastair Creelman, The corridor of uncertainty, 2020/02/24

This post summarizes a paywalled article. Don't bother with the paywall; the summary works fine. The researchers "discovered that students tend to give positive reviews to teachers who are enthusiastic and provide easily digested material that helps them pass the tests; an understandably pragmatic approach." This leads teachers to follow that practise, even if it is not pedagogically effective. "Sadly there is no easy solution to this problem except widening the scope of evaluations to include multiple perspectives and helping students to make more informed evaluations of their learning." Or, if I may add, maybe fixing the incentives students face so they don't priorize 'passing the test'.

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Evidence is the new catchword in education, but it requires some scrutiny
Phil Lambert, Sydney Morning Herald, 2020/02/24

This is a solid opinion piece from the Sydney Morning Herald. While we all want evidence to support our education policies, "evidence is not as straightforward as some might imply. Like all knowledge, evidence is socially constructed, context dependent and highly contested. Too often 'evidence-based' policy has involved limiting rather than broadening alternatives, privileging particular forms of evidence over others, and narrowing consultative processes. It is more about whose evidence is valued, and for what underlying purpose, than employing an 'evidence-based' approach to policy making."

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Ethics in Silicon Valley
Signe Agerskov, Data Ethics, 2020/02/24

Signe Agerskov summarizes Owning Ethics: Corporate Logics, Silicon Valley, and the Institutionalization of Ethics by Jacob Metcalf, Emanuel Moss and Danah Boyd (14 page PDF). This paper, which is quite good and well worth reading in its own right, argues that the technology industry views ethics as a technological problem. As Agerskov summarizes. "ethics is seen by many tech workers as something that arises from imperfect products and is not understood in a social context as something that structures social life. For tech people the apparent solution to ethical problems is therefore technology in the form of improved products, not changes of fundamental structures in the organization or industry." This is not the first time this has happened; as the authors argue, business ethics is designed the same way. "Business ethics literatures typically index normative concerns to the need for coordination between individual behavior and organizational goals."

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Digital mudlarking
Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, 2020/02/24

So Martin Weller tells us that "A mudlark is someone who scavenges in river mud for items of value." Or, in other words, he says, an education technology reseracher. "One of the elements about ed tech that makes the idea of a discipline an ill fit is that it does not have the foundations of other disciplines. People come into it from different fields, what it actually is may not be clearly defined, and there is no shared sense of history." Well, maybe, but from where I sit there is a foundation and a history, one well established in philosophy and science and technology. But because so much of education as a discipline has always set itself apart, it is not able to tap into this shared history, and what appears to us to be core elements of a science of knowledge, appears to them as mere flostam.

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Money, money, money
Terry Freedman, ICT & Computing in Education, 2020/02/24

I've seen versions of this argument over the years. Terry Freedman writes that people shouldn't expect him to work for free. As one person he cites says, "asking me to work for you without offering to pay me is at best in bad taste, at worst extremely insulting." I can see Freedman's point - after all, I can't live on air either. But there's a difference between me and him - I have a day job, while he works as a consultant. He has to think of everything he does as work. But for me, once I'm done my working day, the rest of my time - and my work - is mine to give away for free. And this allows me to be a part of the wider non-commercial community that works because it wants to. If you don't want to work for free, that's fine. But most people don't work that way.

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