OLDaily

Higher Ed 2.0 (What We Got Right/Wrong)
Scott Galloway, No Mercy / No Malice, 2021/04/30

This is basically an argument that many institutions of higher education in the United States will close - they may survive the pandemic, but only as the walking dead. It's overstated, perhaps, but not wrong. The end will come the instant the university degree ceases to be valid and exclusive currency. "This is bad news for schools without the global brand equity of the elites. They are being unbundled, piece by piece, just as newspapers were dissected (classifieds, movie listings, news, sports) and sold for parts to benign billionaires... (but) As bad as this looks for America’s second-tier, four-year colleges, it may be great news for America... We need to find ways to invest in the non-college bound, and create on-ramps into the corporate economy without the ritual of a $200,000 college education." Well, it will take more than that. Free college and taxing the rich are a start, but these will not by themselves address the inequalities that threaten to undermine the foundations of U.S. society.

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Imre Lakatos
Alan Musgrave, Charles Pigden, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2021/04/30

This is quite a good biography and overview of Imre Lakatos, a Hungarian philosopher of mathematics and science who fled to Britain in 1956 and landed at the London School of Economics. There is complexity upon complexity in Lakatos's life and philosophy, so to say that he sought to find the ground between Kuhn's theory of scientific paradigms and Popper's theory of falsification is at once accurate but overstated. What he developed was a theory of research programmes, which are more organized and rational than paradigms, but less rigid and unreal than falsification. Lakatos also shared (and disputed) common ground with Paul Feyerabend on the idea of scientific method. A study of Lakatos not only helps the reader understand why traditional models of scientific method (eg., hypothesis and deduction) are wrong, but also what science has developed over time as a reasonable (if messy) alternative. Take some time over the weekend to give this article a nice slow read and then, perhaps, have a look at Lakatos's Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Pogrammes. Image: Wikipedia.

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‘Silence’, the invisible tool of a dialogically extended mind: An email experience of a Kuwaiti tutor in higher education
Khadija Al-Ali, Studies in Technology Enhanced Learning, 2021/04/30

This post looks at silence in a new light. "Feminists’ construction of voice and silence is trapped in an opposition, creating a dualism of voice, seen as always powerful, and silence, seen as always powerless," writes Khadija Al-Ali.  But "It is simply erroneous to restrict silence to a reductionist meaning, which evades the complexity and the interrelatedness of silence and voice." Silence can be empowered. I can understand this conceptually, but it seems to me that there needs to be something like a pre-existing shared understanding to know that, for example, silence on the part of the professor means refusal of a request, and not simply a faulty spam blocker - in other words, a "dialogically extended mind, discussed earlier, refers to the integration of individuals’ minds into one system in which participants become each other’s cognitive extensions." I don't know that this is possible.

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Rethinking the assumptions of our financial education
Jack Goldingham Newsom, Education Central, 2021/04/30

I like this article because it shows how some kinds of education are entrenched in a reality that no longer exists (if, indeed, it ever did). For example: "why are we still doing ‘Buy a Car’ worksheets which often don’t put emphasis on the emissions of these cars, or the option to not participate and take public transport instead?" Why, indeed? Financial education, argues the author, should be redesigned to accommodate changes to people’s current financial situations and financial prospects, changes to our understanding of the importance of ecological and social factors, the role of cultural factors in access to financial products, and developments in our knowledge of how we make decisions. I think that people are losing patience with the idea that being 'rational' means thinking only about money, without respect to social, ethical and cultural values.

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New National Centre will ‘unleash the power of AI’ in education
JISC, 2021/04/30

The U.K.'s Jisc is leading an initiative to launch a new National Centre for Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Tertiary Education. The centre "will identify effective AI solutions, measuring them against its ethical framework, and testing how they improve learner experiences... Its main aim is to ensure AI is used in ways that augment teachers’ skills and supports human-led education by developing staff skills and confidence in using AI tools." Put this way, it sounds almost as though the purpose is to contol and limit the use of AI in education, not to 'unleash the power'. See also this additional article from Andy McGregor, Jisc's Director of edtech, 'Putting ethical artificial intelligence at the heart of tertiary education'.

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Information search behavior in fragile and conflict-affected learning contexts
Alaa AlDahdouh, The Internet and Higher Education, 2021/04/30

This paper examines information search behavior (ISB) by students in fragile and conflict-affected contexts (FCACs). The results show that they use the methodology commonly described in connectivism (aggregate - remix - repurpose - feed forward) but also observes that participants for the most part merely copied and pasted images and text into their own context with no real appreciation of what it actually said. Interesting, Alaa AlDahdouh writes "Overall, these cases present evidence in support of the connectivist proposal that students need to be confronted by unsolved and real life problems." True, but the paper as a whole raises interesting questions about the relation between the learner and the content they're working with, and makes clear to me at least that we need to be more precise about what it means to remix and repurpose, what would motivate people to do this, and what sort of sills they need to be able to benefit from this activity.

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Do Brain Implants Change Your Identity?
Christine Kenneally, The New Yorker, 2021/04/30

This article takes a long time to get to the point; being a magazine article it fills us in with a lot of the background stories of the people involved. And the question isn't exactly "do brain implants change your identity?" but rather "how?" For example, they might change the way we think, but they might create change simply by curing an illness around which the subjects had built their existing identity. Still, the changes reported seem real, and given the way the implants and the brains learn from each other, the story of identity change is plausible. This does indeed raise a series of ethical questions (questions educators should also ask) about the nature of identity, continuity, and what makes life worth living. (Note: the New Yorker allows a few free reads and then throws up a paywall; I use Firefox with a uBlock Origin plugin which counters this).

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Repurpose & Reshare Your Talks on Social Media
Ian O'Byrne, 2021/04/30

Some readers may not know that I've shared hundreds of my talks online. Each has its own presentation page usually containing slides, audio, video and, more recently, transcript. My approach and purpose is different from Ian O'Byrne's. His suggestions are mostly about repurposing and sharing the talk on social media, promoting his presentations. Mine are more about having a record of the talk. I let people know they're there, but that's the extent of it.

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