OLDaily

The Knowledge Exchange Concordat commits the sector to service
David Sweeney, Wonkhe, 2020/10/27

A concordat was historically an agreement between the Vatican and a sovereign state defining the relationship between them. More recently the term also describes the relations between the government of the United Kingdom and the devolved Scottish and Welsh governments. So the use of the term here expresses some pretty high ambitions for the U.K. higher education sector (extending almost to self-government). The WonkHE headline suggests that the Knowledge Exchange Concordat commits the higher education sector to service, but as I read the document (20 page PDF) it seems more to commit the sector to bringing greater profits to business and industry. How else would you interpret "a set of activities, processes and skills that enable close collaboration between universities and partner organisations to deliver commercial, environmental, cultural and place-based benefits, opportunities for students and increased prosperity?"

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Fake ‘grammar’ shows apes get language basics
U. Zurich, Futurity, 2020/10/27

It was David Hume who remarked that "infants, nay even brute beasts-improve by experience." The inference here is that they do not reason their way to an understanding of, say, causality, but rather through a natural process of association. So what, then, are we to say of the suggestion here that apes can learn grammar. I doubt that it is by some innate grasp of the concept of infinity, nor some mechanism for decoding and following rules. No, it is going to be again the same sort of associative process described today by neural networks and connectionism.

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Inclusive Design and Design Justice: Strategies to Shape Our Classes and Communities
Amy Collier, EDUCAUSE Review, 2020/10/27

"Design shapes students' ability to access, participate in, and contribute to meaningful, transformative learning," writes Amy Collier, focusing on two concepts: Inclusive design, which is "design that considers the full range of human diversity with respect to ability, language, culture, gender, age, and other forms of human difference", and Design justice, which is "design work that centers and prioritizes people who have been marginalized by design." The article looks at some examples of these practices, including the Open CoLab's ACE Framework, the DiscoTechs CryptoParties, and the the Right to Learn Undergraduate Research Collective (R2L).

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The 60-Year Curriculum: A Strategic Response to a Crisis
John Richards, Chris Dede, EDUCAUSE Review, 2020/10/27

Being just over 60, the idea of the 60-year curriculum appeals to me. After all, I'm still devoting a good part of every day to learning, some of which I convey in this newsletter. But I don't exactly see it as a 'strategic response to a crisis' (unless you're dealing with a very long crisis). I'm not exactly enthused by the model of 'Global Network,' that envisions "multiple careers and many 'gigs' within each career reflect the shift from centralized to distributed organizations, from predefined to ad hoc work, and from a role-based to a consultant model of agency." I get why they're proposing this; the world is too complex to manage any other way. But the response - while I'll characterize as "always be hustling" - is disjointed. Not everybody wants to live contract-to-contract, especially in those nations where the social safety net is broken and tattered. Talk about your 60 year crisis! We need stable network structures, not unstable chaos.

I also want to address the skills required. The authors write, "Students need to develop and apply general-purpose knowledge and skills that can transfer to novel situations." I think there are underlying skills, but they aren't the higher-level skills described here where "the model of the student's mind is an agile network of data and processes. Learning takes place just in time, depends on underlying transferable skills." This is reflected in the list of 'cognitive skills', which if you look at it, just repeats the same thing over and over using different words: cognitive processes, critical thinking, reasoning, information literacy, etc.

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