OLDaily

Let's talk about feedback!
Alexandra Mihai, The Educationalist, 2021/02/15

This is a nice overview of the concept of feedback in learning, complete with a set of useful resources at the end. I think the term is being used largely as a synonym for 'assessment', especially at the beginning of the article (which describes 'formative' and 'summative' feedback) but there is a recognition that "when it comes to feedback we still tend to see it (mostly) as a teacher-led process," which is what we think of when we think of assessment, but that "feedback needs to be more like a dialogue, a partnership between teachers and students and among students" and should include things like self-assessment and peer dialogue. If it were me, I would want to say 'feedback builds' while 'assessment corrects', but I'm not sure the author would draw such a distinction.

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Education as Transformation: An Aspiration in Need of Operationalization
Joan Clifford, David Malone, Deb Reisinger, Duke Learning Innovation, 2021/02/15

Any number of institutions promote the idea of 'transformative learning' but leave it undefined as Duke does in its strategic plan, and the authors right take the document to task for its lack of specificity. "The document fails to fully answer the question 'transformative learning towards what end?'" Yet in a tango worthy of the Scholastics they assert that transformative learning is nonetheless happening, describing it as "students who arrive on campus with unexamined assumptions and limited capacity for perspective-taking (and) graduate with deeper and more nuanced ways of seeing the world and approaching social and intellectual problems." You can either say transformative learning is happening or you can say you don't know what it is - you can't say both.

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Pandemic privatization and digitalization in higher education
Ben Williamson, Anna Hogan, Code Acts in Education, 2021/02/15

The authors argue that Covid "has opened up the sector to an expanding range of education technologies, commercial companies, and private sector ambitions." Examples include the use of AI, the return of the MOOC, the rise of Online Program Management (OPM) companies, the badge infrastructure, public-private partnerships (PPP) and the 'cloud campus'. The argument is backed up by a full report (80 page PDF) describing these phenomena (I think it undermines their argument to lock it into a user-hostile surveillance site like Issuu, which is why I provide the direct AWS download link). The weakest section, I think, is the last, a discussion of 'key issues' which reads like a list of priorities for the professoriate but which may strike a wider readership as less than convincing.

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The questions we ask today will define the future we create tomorrow…
Sahana Chattopadhyay, Network Weaver, 2021/02/15

This is the second part of a longer post on the power of communities (part one here) and the gist is that as the pandemic has made clear the failings of a world based on power, priviledge and inequality, we are seeing the world being remade through a resurgence of active, open and diverse communities. The bulk of the article is devoted to describing the attributes of these communities, which Sahana Chattopadhyay lists as a sense of belonging, a crucible for generative conversations, the power in the network, embracing the liminal space, and alignment with a purpose.

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Kalaksi
Nuno Donato, Product Hunt, 2021/02/15

This is something to keep half an eye on. "Kalaksi is a new way of social network. It adds social features on top of standard RSS feeds. Create 'planets' to act as different timelines, aggregate content from several sources, and publish it all to the web via RSS." I created an account (aka a 'planet) which you can view on the site here.

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