OLDaily

Not Everyone Hates Remote Learning. For These Students, It’s a Blessing.
Elizabeth A. Harris, New York Times, 2020/05/20

I'm linking to this item just to point out that there are people in this category. “At home, it seems to be a bit easier to focus on all the work,” said one eighth grader who was struggling in school. “Everything in general is easier.” That's my experience as well. I hated being in school. And I feel for these kids. "Some of those kids are really liking it at home because they’re not dealing with the social anxiety of being quote-unquote different,” he said.

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Highlights from Coursera Partners Conference 2020
Dhawal Shah, Class Central, 2020/05/20

Some of the numbers from this report are notable. For example: "10.3 million enrollments in 30 days, 644% up compared to last year." Also: "1.6 million enrollments in 2020 in Yale’s The Science of Well-Being." That's a lot. The summary also included information about data and machine learning in the learning experience, though as Shah says, "as a Coursera learner since 2012, I haven’t seen much benefit from these 'data innovations'." There's also new information (illustrated) on new certificates and stackable credentials. Like many others, I have my criticisms of Coursera. But I would never dismiss them as inconsequential or insignificant.

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Cultivating Change Amidst Collapse
Lindley Mease, David Ehrlichman, Stanford Social Innovation Review, 2020/05/20

This is a good article that addresses some of the structural changes we will need to make in society in order address not only the current pandemic but also ongoing issues such as inequality and climate change (notice how different it is in tone and approach from the digital morality post from Selwyn and Aagaard). The authors write, "to meet the magnitude of this moment we must work collaboratively in ways that promote decentralization over top-down hierarchies, relationships over transactions, and emergence over control." I'd want to word it a bit differently, with a slight shift in emphasis, uring the word 'cooperatively' instead of 'collaborative;y', and 'engagement' instead of 'relationships'. But having said that, this article touches on themes that have been revisited many times in this newsletter.

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Glint And LinkedIn Learning Get Married: What A Great Couple
Josh Bersin, 2020/05/20

Leaving aside the title, this is quite a good article about how Glint (acquired two years ago by LinkedIn) and LinkedIn Learning are now working together. Glint is a performance metrics tool, that is, a "dashboard for people success" that incorporates "analytics, natural language processing, manager dashboards, and ability to cross-correlate surveys through the employee lifecycle." The output of all of this is an action plan, and as a part of this, "the platform suggests specially curated learning modules (for free, taken out of Linkedin Learning) right there on a column in your screen" (let's be clear; LinkedIn Learning is not free, but in a model like this, the employer pays for the courses, making them free for the learner). Now - keep in mind that all of this is a part of Microsoft, and imagine if you will how this could be integrated with products like Teams and Microsoft's Office applications.

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Rethinking the ‘digital’ curriculum: What else should we be aiming for?
Neil Selwyn, Jesper Aagaard, BERA Blog, 2020/05/20

I think part of the reason why I'm suspicious of content-based approaches to learning is that it is not a large leap from that to a theory of education that tells students what to believe and what to think, and that such approaches often benefit other people, and not the students in question. So too when I read this article and read "above all, however, is the need to focus on the issue of content," my suspicions are raised. The authors list three content priorities: awareness of surveillance capitalism, the morals and ethics of technology production, and "how our society-wide dependence on digital technologies is contributing to the ongoing climate crisis." These all have a flavour of "we want you to be involved in digital technology but don't you dare do it wrong." And I have to ask, is this really the ideal focus of a digital curriculum? Are these even the right ethics? And, for that matter, are the forms of digital morality raised here even a content problem? Because there's only one way to teach ethics, and that is to live ethically.

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How to Develop Culturally Responsive Teaching for Distance Learning
Amielle Major, Mind/Shift, 2020/05/20

This is a good brief article summarizing the work of Zaretta Hammond, author of Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain. As I read it, 'culturally responsive teaching' blends some aspects of instructivist approaches focusing on content knowledge along with constructivist approaches supporting student agency. The idea is to supplement the gaps in traditionally marginalized students' background knowledge by helping them connect new things they're learning to the perspective that comes from their home, their community, and their interests. This approach doesn't depend on standardized content, but rather on "thinking about what a student needs in order to have agency over their learning in any situation." There's more on her approach in her webinar.

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