OLDaily

We still need to unlock the web
Ben Werdmuller, 2020/09/24

The question I have on reading this article is to ask whether what we need to "unlock" the web is another subscription-pay service. I mean, I like this article because it explores some of the new approaches being tried, linking us to new content like Casey Newton's Platformer and Ben Thompson's Stratechery, to services like Substack, which has, he says, "made starting and subscribing to paid newsletters incredibly easy," and to the recent of email newsletters in readers like NewsBlur, Feedbin and Feedly. But we know what happens, right? These content and service providers are acquired by larger companies or accept VC funding and find that their values begin to change when confronted with business imperatives. We saw it with the initial wave of e-zines like Slate and ZDNet and C|Net. We're seeing it now with enclosure of podcasting. Why would this be any different?

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The Role of SoTL in the Academy: Upon the 25th Anniversary of Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered
Beth Kern, Gwendolyn Mettetal, Marcia D. Dixson, Robin K. Morgan, Journal of the Scholarship for Teaching and Learning, ResearchGate, 2020/09/24

This article pays a central role in Dianne Conrad's series of posts, and though it's a few years old, I felt it was worth its own link. It looks back at Ernest L. Boyer's Scholarship Reconsidered and surveys some of the taxonomies of the field created since (because there's nothing education researchers love more than a taxonomy). To these we could also add (as Conrad does) Zane Berge's four modes necessary for successful computer mediated communication (CMC): the cognitive mode, the technical mode, the social mode, and the managerial mode. This article presents another taxonomy, the Dimensions of Activities Related to Teaching (DART) model and applies it to Boyer's "inclusive view of scholarship... 'that knowledge is acquired through research, through synthesis, through practice, and through teaching.'"

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“Mind the gap”: Critical insights on the urgent transition to online learning in a time of crisis
Dianne Conrad, Academic Matters, 2020/09/24

This is a three part article (part one, part two, part three) that considers "not only the logistics of making this shift, but also issues of culture, language, and, of course, pedagogy." The first part looks at the creation of the term 'remote learning' as the term of choice, noting that "using the term 'remote' defeats the entire purpose and spirit of online learning." It depicts online learning as a temporary accommodation rather than as a transition to something new. The second part looks at the enormity of change, adding that for teachers with no real experience in the online world, "the fear factor potential is very large and very real." In this light the article considers how scholarship itself is changing, and how academics teaching amidst the pandemic "find themselves in a challenging position that is quite different from what might be considered a normal transition." Maybe so, I would say, but the evidence is that they were never going to transition regardless of the many criticisms of traditional pedagogy. We await part three.

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