OLDaily

You are a network
Kathleen Wallace, Aeon, 2021/05/26

This discussion in this article is a bit loose, but it works well to put a number of considerations - ranging from intersectionality to self-identity to change and personal history - into context. "Rather than an underlying, unchanging substance that acquires and loses properties, we’re making a paradigm shift to seeing the self as a process, as a cumulative network with a changeable integrity.... Think of this constancy and structure as stages of the self overlapping with, or mapping on to, one another." Also (significantly), "What philosophers call ‘4E views’ of cognition – for embodied, embedded, enactive and extended cognition – are also a move in the direction of a more relational, less ‘container’, view of the self."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

The Time for Action is Now: Get Ready For Careers of the Future
Corey Mohn, Gregg Brown, Getting Smart, 2021/05/26

This article is a guest post which may or may not be a paid placement in Getting Smart providing marketing for the Center for Advanced Professional Studies (CAPS) series on what they're calling 'profession-based learning' (Pro-BL). The third module of the series leads educators gently toward this model, playing old standards like Kolb's model and Bloom's taxonomy before leading them to AWS Educate and 'preparing students for the real world' (which involves crucially an "entrepreneurial mindset". You'll find the upsell on page 46. It's all beautifully designed and packaged, but while it feels persuasive, and presents itself as revolutionary, it seems to me more like a grab-bag of edu-speak components leading readers to develop corporate partnerships and adopt an employer-friendly set of curricular resources and services.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Support > Illumination
Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates, 2021/05/26

I do enjoy reading Alex Usher, and as usual he's on point through much of this article, but he seems to have a bugbear about arguments for tuition reduction that leads him away from the realm of sound reasoning. In this post, for example, he challenges the assertion that tuition tax credits are regressive. He writes, "any aid delivered via tax credits is exactly as progressive as a reduction in tuition." To a degree that's true. But it applies only if you owe taxes. Low-income students don't make enough money to pay taxes. So they don't benefit from the tax credit. But they would benefit from a decrease in tuition fees. And that's why tax credits, as opposed to fee decreases, are regressive. Now Usher should know this, and it bothers me that he writes about this issue as though he doesn't. Also: writing that the gap between rich and poor in terms of access is not increasing is all very well, but it's still a problem that the top quintile is at almost 80% while the lowest quintile is less than 50%, and it's apologist arguments like this that keep that unacceptable disparity in place.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

VR in universities a welcome addition, but not yet 'plug-and-play'
Ryan Johnston, EdScoop, 2021/05/26

This is pretty much my view as well: virtual reality is "unlikely to be more than a complementary teaching tool for the foreseeable future." That said, "some of the biggest barriers to adoption that survey respondents listed — the prohibitive cost of VR headsets and compatible computer hardware, along with a lack of awareness about virtual learning — have since broken down." That's true - to an extent. But limitations to the modality haven't changed. And that's why (I think) this article focuses on pedagogical affordances. For example: Stanford's Jeremy Bailenson writes, "My avatar … can outperform me as a face-to-face teacher any day. It can pay perfect attention to every student in a class of all 200 or more." Well - no it can't. Nor is it like the illustration for this article. So, beware the oversell of VR and related technologies.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Learning Analytics to Reveal Links Between Learning Design and Self-Regulated Learning
Yizhou Fan, Wannisa Matcha, Nora’ayu Ahmad Uzir, Qiong Wang, Dragan Gašević, International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 2021/05/26

This is quite a good paper offered as part of a "festschrift dedicated to celebrating the research and life of Jim Greer (more)." The authors conduct an analysis of the learning tactics and strategies used by students in courses, and especially MOOCs, association with their success in those courses, and with the learning design employed by those courses. In a nutshell (and I'm skipping a lot here) some learning tactics are more conducive to success, and course design can influence the selection of those tactics. My feeling though is that a lot of the work in this paper is devoted to identifying and classifying learning tactics and related phenomena. So any statement about the relation between learning tactics, success and design depends crucially on these classifications. But it's hard to shake the feeling that the classifications are arbitrary - for example, choosing between "watching the video" and "taking the test" may seem to genuinely classify learning tactics, but these are tactics that wouldn't exist outside the structure of a previously defined course. Still, don't miss this paper.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Planning for a Blended Future: A Research-Driven Guide for Educators
Tanya Joosten, Nicole Weber, Margaret Baker, Abigail Schletzbaum, Abby McGuire, Online Learning Consortium, 2021/05/26

This report (43 page PDF) is designed to help "guide strategic planning for blended learning courses and programs." By 'blended learning' we generally mean learning opportunities that incorporate both online and in-person (or 'onsite') activities. The idea is to use the onsite environment for activirties that depend on being there in person, for example, "wet labs" or role-plays. The paper introduces "four dialecticals of blended learning" (think of a 'dialectical' as a scale that runes from 'all' to 'none') and defines different approaches to blended learning in terms of these four elements: technological, temporal, spatial and pedagogical. The report recommends a generally active learning approach as greater student agency and flexibility is scaffolded over time. Overall, this is a good report, and my only real criticism is to suggest that this is a process that should begin much earlier in a student's career, so they arrive at the post-secondary level prepared to make the most of limited face-to-face opportunities.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]