OLDaily

My words have meaning, your parrot’s do not. Wittgenstein explains
Stephen Law, Psyche, 2021/06/03

For me the key message of Wittegenstein's slogan 'meaning is use' is that the meaning of a word or sentence is not inherent in the word or sentence, but rather depends entirely on how the reader or listener regards, interprets or recognizes that word or phrase. We might say, defining this externally, that meaning is determined by context or community agreement. This is the approach taken in this article. And there's an element of truth to that. But there is also an element of infinite regress; at some point we have to ask what a word means for me and at that point the externally defined criteria must give way to a story about experience and recognition..

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C-RAC Statement on Proposed Distance Education Guidelines
Council of Regional Accrediting Commissions, 2021/06/03

This is a set of guidelines released earlier this year and open for comment until August by the National Council for State Authorization Reciprocity Agreements (NC-SARA) in the United States. According to the document (9 page PDF) " the 21st Century Guidelines are designed to inform, but not limit, accreditors and states in their judgment of satisfactory levels of quality in the offering of programs through distance education." The standards address such things as institutional capacity, transparency, support for students, program review and academic integrity. Worth noting is the provision that contracts with online program management (OPM) companies "are reviewed to ensure that the institution retains appropriate authority and responsibility for the academic program and student privacy." More information here (and apologies if I haven't correctly interpreted the alphabet soup of agencies involved).

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#JuneEdTechChallenge
ALT, Twitter, 2021/06/03

It's just a bit of fun to end the academic year in North America. It's only three days in so you have plenty of time to join the #JuneEdTechChallenge. Some people have been writing blog posts, which IMO is the best way to participate, but the simple and easy way to play is via one-word answers in Twitter. The first three for me: VLE in my life is Google, RSS is my most used EdTech acronym, and I never go to a conference without my computer.

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“Reconsider use of global rankings with conflicts of interest”, sector told
Callan Quinn, The PIE News, 2021/06/03

As I have said in the past, "rankings are actually lobbying devices - organizations rank universities based on their priorities, and universities line up (for some unknown reason) to do their bidding." Here's some evidence. "Two studies published over the last few months have discovered 'statistically significant' correlations between the use of services offered by rankings companies and an institutions’ subsequent performance in their rankings." Nobody should be surprised.

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An Origin Story for Agile Learning Design
Tim Klapdor, Heart // Soul // Machine, 2021/06/03

This post describes Tim Klapdor's turn to agile learning design. In more traditional designs, everything is planned ahead of time and then the project is built. This makes it difficult to respond to changes without extra labour and cost. By designing iteratively, however, changes are less of an ordeal. "Things didn’t fall in a heap. The project never went off the rails, we just pivoted and moved on. When we got crunched for time, we had a way to reduce the work required to get us across the line."

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