OLDaily

CC Search to join WordPress.org
Matt Mullenweg, Unlucky in Cards, 2021/05/13

I'm not sure exactly what is meant by "join" here, other than that "Automattic has hired key members of the CC Search team and will sponsor their contributions." This is at first blush a good thing, as development had stalled, as evidenced by this frozen GitHub repository. But does "join" mean "acquired" here? Will the company (WordPress, or Automattic, or whoever is in charge) continue to support (or allow) the search API, or does it become an exclusive WordPress feature? And, for that matter, why can't Creative Commons support what seems to me to be one of its most important services?

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Blackbird Code - Overview and First Impressions from My Students
Richard Byrne, Free Technology for Teachers, 2021/05/13

Blackbird's recent marketing campaign began some time in April and if you're teaching computer science you've probably heard of it by now. The sales pitch is that it is "the world’s first educational version of JavaScript." As this article describes it, Blackbird "enables middle school students and teachers to learn real-world coding skills in a supportive, educational environment." Maybe, but it's hard to see this as a world's first anything. This genre has been around for ages and similar supportive environments for Javascript (among many other languages) are widely used by students. Like Codecademy, it consists of "lessons are arranged in progressive units." Maybe we could say it's the world's first Codecademy for Javascript, except again, it isn't. probably the most accurate bit of marketing is, as Richard Byrne observes, that it is "used by teachers who don't have any prior coding experience."

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Getting Ed-Tech Wrong Would Be a Bitter Pandemic Legacy
Frederick Hess, Education Next, 2021/05/13

There's a classic though illegitimate move in persuasive writing, and it is this: if you want to discredit an idea, associate it with an obviously bad idea. That's what's happening in this article. The obviously bad idea is 'Zoom in a room,' where students "sit in a classroom, masked and socially distanced, with Chromebooks... while the teacher instructs remotely from home." The idea being discredited by association is the four-day school week. There's nothing inherently bad in this idea, especially if it is joined with a four-day work week generally. And support for it isn't based on hygiene theatre or any such thing, it's based on the idea that maybe we don't want to spend most of our lives in an institution, either as students or workers. 

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‘We don’t need no thought control’
Joanne Jacobs, Linking and Thinking on Education, 2021/05/13

There are many moving parts in this post, which is great, though it makes teasing them apart a challenge. It begins with a reference to Greg Lukianoff's principles for “the empowering of the American mind” on the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) blog. Now there's a slant in this presentation, but bar some editing for perspective, the principles are reasonably sound. Jacobs suggests they apply in public school, which leaves open the question of parochial schooling, which is widespread in the U.S. and elsewhere. Wouldn't these principles apply?

But more: I think there's a distinction to be drawn between moral principles and social principles. The former guides a person's sense of right and wrong, and these should be freely chosen and expressed, and not imposed on a person. The latter, though, consists of principles necessary for free and peaceful coexistence, and apply to all regardless of their beliefs. Teaching social principles is not the same as teaching moral principles; teaching them is not 'indoctrination' or any such thing, and is in effect no different than teaching people the highway traffic act.

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A Typology of Educators Using Open Educational Resources for Teaching
Wilfried Admiraal, International Journal on Studies in Education, 2021/05/13

Educational researchers love a taxonomy, and this paper (24 page PDF) offers one categorizing types of OER users. based on an open survey dataset described as "responses to surveys conducted by the Hewlett-funded OER Research Hub Project during 2013-2014 exploring key questions around OER use and attitudes." It would be interesting to see other work based on the same dataset but I was unable to find any reference to it. The paper fits into the long tradition of studying people use (or don't use) OER, as in for example the OER Adoption Pyramid (from Cox & Trotter, 2017) (pictured).

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