OLDaily

What are the symbols in digital education/design for learning?
David T. Jones, Some assemblage required, 2021/03/29

I've spent the last couple of days working on buttons, an effort I'm sure any reasonable employer would consider a complete waste of time, but which to me is infinitely valuable. Until you actually encode a button, it is difficult to ask the questions you need ask about what a button does, what it represents, and what it says. A simple question, for example: when you push a button, does it stay down, or does it pop back up? If it's down and you push it again, does it pop back up, or does it stay down? Are there cases where, when you push it, nothing happens? All this creates a state space - a completely logical construction - and yet works within a very human socio-technological environment, which is why the colour, the shape, the shading and the behaviour of the button, the skeumorphics, matter.

That's why the questions that seem very obscure when David Jones writes about them here are to my mind solid and concrete and as practical as daylight. He points to "two shortcomings of most individual and organisational practices of 'digital' education (aka online learning etc.): few have actually grokked digital technologies, and even (fewer) recognise, let alone respond, the importance of 'the continuing and evolving entanglement' of the social, symbolic, and material of sociotechnical systems that Benbya et al (2020) identify." I think he's right, and when he asks "what are the symbols," he's not just talking about the letters, nor is he just talking about learning design elements like modules and classes, but also about everything in between. Like buttons.

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Richard Marshall
Richard Marshall, 3:16, 2021/03/29

This is Richard Marshall's interview with Zach Weber, an expert in philosophical logic, with a focus on paradoxes and non-classical logic. It is intended, and to a degree succeeds, to challenge the reader's preconceptions about logic and especially truth. There's a lot going on in this article. Part of it leverages the ambiguity of simple and very formalized propositional logic (for example: "either P implies Q, or Q implies R"), but most of it is targeted directly at the tension of truth as describing the state of affairs in the world (a.k.a. Tarski semantics) and truth as a feeling (for example, when "claims have some intuitive pull for being true". Sitting right in the middle of all that is 'true in a Model'. If you're wondering where I stand in all that (and who doesn't?) well, the way I see it, if I say 'P is true', this is a statement about me, and specifically, my attitude about P (and the same if I say 'P is true in M').

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Science & Social Values: Values in Modelling
YouTube, 2021/03/29

This is a nice series of short videos on the influence of social values on models in science (there's also a single 17-minute version that plays them all together). This content is essential for any real understanding of how science works today, how it takes into account what we think is true and what we think is important, and how these values impact what science tells us about the world. Asking questions about these values doesn't invalidate science, nor does it commit us to full-on relativism. And we need to know, when evaluating (say) education research, what counts as evidence, what counts as success, and what assumptions about research itself are being made by the authors. The videos were produced by the Peer Models Network, which "allows users to directly access models on the cloud and interact with them."

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'Free college' isn’t free
Joanne Jacobs, Linking and Thinking on Education, 2021/03/29

Joanne Jacobs comments on the EdSurge article Free college isn’t free by Rebecca Koenig. It makes the all-too-reasonable point that even if tuition and fees are covered, a student taking advantage of such a plan will still have large additional costs, such as books and materials, transportation, and living costs or lost wages. This obviously has an impact on the success of 'free college' initiatives. But it shouldn't be an argument for discontinuing them. Rather, governments and industry should be looking at other ways to lower all these other costs. A broad-based social support system covering everything from daycare to health insurance is needed to support educational outcomes, which is why countries that have these social systems perform more strongly on international education indices like PISA.

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Taming the Watchdog? Google is the Grand Patron of Europan Journalism
Mie Oehlenschlager, Data Ethics, 2021/03/29

A few days ago I said that education has historically always needed a patron, either the wealthy, a corporation, or government. To a significant degree this has been true of news media as well. Though nominally supported through advertising, we see the influence of these three throughout the history of journalism: the press barons, the media corporations, and of course, public broadcasting. This report (128 page PDF) looks at the latest chapter of that history, the patronage by Google of European journalism. Though there are no strings attached, "as any critical journalist would know – and as the the report shows – things are not that simple." Google uses the funding as part of its lobbying efforts. It tends to favour "data projects and robot journalism". And sponsorship ensures "the company always has a say in debates regarding the future of the news media."

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Freedom as Motivation for Learning
Dinant Roode, trenducation, 2021/03/29

A 'leitmotif' is "a recurrent theme throughout a musical or literary composition, associated with a particular person, idea, or situation," and that works well for this "leitmotiv for education" described as "freedom as fundamental motivation for education by exploring the meaning of taking care of oneself, and the concept of finding inner and external liberation," or in other words, to lose one's fear, to master the complexities of political struggle, and to be able to add economic value to society.  What I ask is whether these are rewordings of, or fundamentally different from, other theories (Maslow's, say) of self-motivation. Food for thought.

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Drowning in content but what we need is community
Alastair Creelman, The corridor of uncertainty, 2021/03/29

Here's the main point: "The endless production of video content is a distraction from... the need to develop more social, interactive and engaging digital spaces that can complement the campus spaces." There's no reason why you can't do both; that's how we ended up with "millions of videos, from short instructions to long lectures." Yes, academics shouldn't be editing them - but at the same time, isn't this a treasure trove of content that could be edited, maybe by real video editors, or maybe by students? Yes - it's true that "academics aren’t content creators" - but they're also not community organizers, nor even very good instructors. I argued long ago that the role of the educator needs to be unbundled. Doesn't this prove it?

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