OLDaily

Custom Search Engines: One of my very favorite tools
Marshall Kirkpatrick, 2021/01/13

This is a knowledge-worker pro tip: custom search engines (CSE). The idea is that you collect a number of authoritative sites on a subject - Climate change, Indigenous news and resources, or Knowledge Management, say - and then set up a Google search only on those sites. " Check it out at https://cse.google.com/ and make your own," advises Marshall Kirkpatrick. Now that said, I don't use CSE at all. But then again, I have the rich resource of RSS to feed me all the knowledge I need (or can handle).

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Make a MOOC
Alan Levine, GitHub, 2021/01/13

This does not make MOOCs, it makes what could be Twitter comments about non-existent MOOCs. It doesn't make the Twitter comments either, but they could be. It's all done with Alan Levine's sharp sense of humour and cynicism toward tech pundit triumphalism. Anyhow, it's definitely worth a look and a chuckle. Via Aaron Davis.

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Reskilling China: Transforming the world’s largest workforce into lifelong learners
McKinsey, 2021/01/13

This is from McKinsey so it's going to have a certain US-centric perspective (prioritizing, for example, measures like GDP and test scores), but that said, it remains true that China faces the same issue the rest of us face, and specifically, the need to address the (relatively new) fact that learning does not stop once your education stops. Offering adult and workplace learning comes with challenges; you can't assume everyone is at the same level, and you have to take their background knowledge into context, and adults typically expect more control over their learning (especially if they're doing it on their own time and at their own expense). So while McKinsey is focused on what China has to do, the really interesting question is in how they're going to do it.

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Why messaging app Signal is surging in popularity right now
Clare Duffy, CNN, 2021/01/13

The short answer is: because nobody trusts Facebook, which owns the popular messaging platform WhatsApp. Recent "confusion over an updated terms of service notification from Facebook" hasn't helped either. "Many users expressed concerns about a section of WhatsApp's privacy policy that details what user data is collected and shared with parent company Facebook, which has a troubled reputation when it comes to protecting user data." Readers may recall that I stopped using all Facebook produces two or three years ago.

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Why open educational resources are failing to widen access to education
Irina Rets, BERA Blog, 2021/01/13

This blog post summarizes the research in 'Accessibility of Open Educational Resources: how well are they suited for English learners?', but unfortunately that's as close as you'll get to it, since the paper by Irina Rets, Tim Coughlan, Ursula Stickler and Lluisa Astruc is locked behind a paywall inthe ironically named journal Open Learning. Seriously, if you're writing about open education, don't contribute it to a closed journal! Anyhow, the argument offered is that paying attention to text complexity and learning levels in OERs would make them more useful to people, and address the problem of "universal accessibility and use." While I think it's a fair point, I doubt very much that it's even close to the whole solution, and would have preferred to see it presented in a context with other initiatives designed to promote access and use. Image: Educause.

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Colleges Share the Blame for Assault on Democracy
Patricia McGuire, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2021/01/13

There has been a spate of articles recently linking the unrest in the United States to failures of the education system. I'm leading with this article from the Chronicle, but you can find similar views expressed by (for example) Forbes (here and here), Inside Higher Ed, and the Chronicle Herald. Obviously it's not that simple. It's not a matter of Americans not knowing what year the U.S. Constitution was written, or even of their learning ethics or critical thinking (though those would certainly). It's not, in other words, the content. It's not the 'effectiveness' of teaching. I think the greatest failing is the very clear statement higher education makes, not just in the U.S. but around the world, about who matters. When the education system is inequitable, when the primary determinates of admission to the system and the benefits it provides are things like race and wealth and family connections, people (no matter what their political beliefs) lose their trust in democracy, and turn to the rule of the street.

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