OLDaily

Five Themes for Centering Student Equity
Sorenson Impact Cente, University of Utah, 2021/02/19

This is a white from the University of Utah's Sorenson Impact Center (12 page PDF). According to the paper, "Student-equity-centric best captures the idea of centering around students as leaders and centering around equitable outcomes." Most of the five themes are readily apparent, such as the need to include as input the "lived experiences" of students, or designing for "post-traditional students" as the new norm. I had to look up what was meant by "employ an assets-based view of students" - it means to focus on the strengths of the student population, and not to just treat them as though they need to be saved. I also understand the sense in which the report asserts that Covid "has underscored the role of institutions of higher education as anchor institutions," since students have numerous needs: access to healthy food, high-quality child care, affordable healthcare, high-speed internet, reliable transportation. But I would say, so do other people, and to the extent that a university focuses on providing these only for students, that is the extent to which they are undermining the community generally. Via Campus Technology.

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Google Renames G Suite for Ed, Adds Pile of New Features
Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology, 2021/02/19

As Campus Technology Reports, "G Suite for Education has been renamed. Starting today, it's known as Google Workspace for Education. There will be four editions available, one free, three paid." You can view the announcement on Google in this 99-minute video. (it might be available only to 'registered users'). Google also announced that Google Classroom "will soon enable teachers to add their favorite third-party edtech tools to a common folder so students can access multiple tools with a single log-in." You can read more in a series of articles on the Google Blog. My own experience with G Suite just generally is that it's driving users more and more into a single-institution experience; this is what facilitates a single sign-on, but also what forces people to have a Google sign on and 'be a member' of the institution.

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What Makes Action Research Special?
Christine Woywod Veettil, The Art of Education, 2021/02/19

This is a light overview providing a quick outline of some aspects of action research. What makes it different, writes Christine Woywod Veettil, is that it is not top-down and that it allows teachers and practitioners to function as experts in their own domain. She also argues that it's constructivist, based on a particular context, and practical. Most of my own research could be classified as action research. Though I have my own theoretical perspective, I don't impose it as a 'lens' through which to interpret phenomena, and I don't use it as a framework for 'experimental design'. Rather, I try things (or read things) and see where they fit, if anywhere.

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Metalearning: The Essential First Step of Learning That Nobody Taught You
Abhishek Chakraborty, Coffee & Junk, 2021/02/19

I admit that I was drawn to this article by the stylized map of Paris that accompanies it on the site home page, but is entirely missing from the article itself, which is too bad, because talking about different ways of learning about a city would have been more useful than the content on metalearning we're actually provided. "Metalearning creates a map of the territory we are about to venture into," writes Abhishek Chakraborty. No. This is wrong. Metalearning is the knowledge of how to use maps (and other tools) to learn about the territory.

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Stunning research on inequities of access to online learning in the USA
Tony Bates, Online learning and distance education resources, 2021/02/19

As Tony Bates suyggests, you should read the report yourself. It says that " COVID-19 may be further exacerbating existing gaps in schooling" along social and racial lines. It argues, "remote learning during COVID-19 must be examined in an intersectional fashion" ands that "future studies should examine how racial/ethnic and social class differences also may vary by geography, potentially reflecting the diversity of educational approaches taken by municipal and state government." Bates comments, correctly, that there should have been a way to access raw data from the study; "It is one thing to draw conclusions from 100 students to drawing them from 100,000 students." He also wonders "how does access play out in the in-school system?" After all, these inequalities are not caused by Covid or online learning, and returning to the pre-Covid educational system may simply be entrenching existing radcial and social inequities, when in fact we should be doing something better.

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Short-term anti-racist training is not enough to counter systemic racism in Canadian education
Jerome Cranston, Academic Matters, 2021/02/19

I see this article as a natural follow-up to yesterday's post on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Racism isn't the sort of thing you can address simplky with some training courses. There needs to be a whole-of organization or whole-of society commitment. "We must dismantle systemic racism by restructuring the systems like education that allow it to be perpetuated," writes the University of Regina's Jerome Cranston. That means that we need to "understand how systemic racism is enmeshed in organizational structures, policies and practices," that "more needs to be done to attract Indigenous, Black and racialized individuals," and that "curriculum and recommended learning resources reflect the lives of Indigenous and Black students and students of colour."

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20 years of orange cones: The history of VLC
Janko Roettgers, Protocol, 2021/02/19

If you're not familiar with VLC, it's a video media player that often works when your other video players won't work. I've been using it for, well, decades. It's the default video player on my desktop. This article is a history of VLC and is interesting because it recounts the patent lawsuits that have been thrown at it ("No one is checking whether these patents are valid," Kempf said. "It's a complete mafia; it's protection money.") and proposed monetization strategies ("These kinds of bundles were at the time popular with file-sharing apps and other freeware, which often relied on users not reading the fine print during the installation process.").

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