OLDaily

Pedagogy of Care - Caring for Teachers
Maha Bali, Reflecting Allowed, 2021/04/13

As the title suggests, this post considers caring for teachers, and is presented through the theory of caring offered by bell hooks. Three types of caring are considered: that of teachers for each other, of students for teachers, and of institutions for teachers. I think there's a bit of tension in the idea of teaching as an act of service (as in hooks: "a practice of giving that eschews the notion of reward") and the idea of teachers requiring care from those they serve, especially (as Bali notes) in recent circumstances where burn-out is an issue. I think I would be more comfortable with an ethics of caring that applies generally (for example, not demanding people push themselves too far or endanger themselves) rather than the creation of a specific responsibility to care that accrues when someone cares for you (which, would in effect, make caring necessarily reciprocal, and hence, transactional).

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Online learning will never be a substitute for face-to-face
Andrew Norton, EduResearch Matters, 2021/04/13

I can easily imagine the exact same argument being used to proclaim that "cinema will never be a substitute for live theatre" a century ago. After all, the results from a theatre-goer experience survey (much like today's Student Experience Survey (SES)) would seem to confirm this conclusion. Just as "Students who enrolled for on-campus education led the decline in satisfaction," so also, it would say "theatre-goers led the decline in satisfaction" with movies and television. But it would be a pretty poor conclusion, wouldn't it? If you surveyed people who had no access to theatre, they would rank movies and television as a vastly superior alternative. The same with online learning. For many people, and in many contexts, it will be vastly superior to gathering people into a room to talk to them all at once. But yeah, sometimes when the time is right and we have money to burn, Broadway's pretty cool too.

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A Test for the Test Makers
Jon Marcus, Education Next, 2021/04/13

This article points to the difficulties standardized testing companies like the College Board and ACT are having in the U.S. as people question the results, reliability and fairness of tests like the SATs. At the same time it describes the College Board's efforts to expand into international markets, and most notably, India, and the ACT's efforts to diversify. To be clear, while these are both tax-exempt nonprofits, they "continue to maneuver in sophisticated ways usually more typical of private companies. Their balance sheets also resemble those of for-profit enterprises. In the years preceding the pandemic, the College Board and ACT had annual revenues of a combined $1.5 billion." There's a lot of insider talk in this article, but the main message seems to be that this is a market ripe for disruption.

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Cheap Talk, Reinforcement Learning and the Emergence of Cooperation
J. McKenzie Alexander, London School of Economics and Political Science, 2021/04/13

One way of supporting cooperation is to increase the cost of communication, making dishonesty more risky. This paper discusses an alternative whereby we can decrease the cost of communication by making dishonesty less profitable. That, at least, is my take on what I'm reading here. There's a lot of jargon in this paper (14 page PDF) from the world of games and decision theory. Essentially, communication becomes less risky. In more structured systems, "signals must be costly in order to ensure that they are reliable, or honest, for otherwise such signals could be easily forged by opportunistic agents." By contrast, 'cheap talk', combined with a 'discounting function', allows agents to get past an early period of betrayal and mistrust to emerge into a cooperative association. This is important because it allows us an alternative to 'expensive talk' systems like blockchain that are specifically designed to prevent dishonesty, and it suggests that open cooperative systems are less risky than supposed.

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Changing Paths, Changing Priorities
Derek Turner, BCcampus, 2021/04/13

One thing of note here is the disclaimer, which is the first of its kind I've seen. Derek Turner in this post describes how the pandemic has shifted his perspective on his research data. For example, "As interesting as comparing changes in affective learning between traditional field trips and online field trips is, it didn’t seem to be as important in a world where in-person field trips weren’t even possible." Even more, "should be less about how online field trips affected student learning compared to in-person trips and more about why some students preferred online field trips in the first place." This is a good point.

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