OLDaily

When We Talk about Grades, We Are Talking about People
Sean Michael Morris, 2021/06/10

I like this post a lot and to a large degree it reflects my own attitudes about grading (namely, that I have no time for it because it's artificial and arbitrary). 'Ungrading', though, isn't just ther practice of not using grades. You can't simply stop grading; it's tied into your whole approach to learning and teaching. It is at the centre of a pedagogy of care, suggests Sean Michael Morris, and is supportive of an approach to education in which there are no 'participation points' or standardized text and which "permitted an individualized relationship to quality." Just one thing bothers me - at a certain point he writes, "These letters formed the backbone of their final grade for the term." Which sort of suggests that he does use grades. But to me that simply shows how difficult it is to separate the practice of grading from the practice of teaching at an institution.

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Becoming a More Critical Consumer of Information
Marcus Buckingham, Harvard Business Review, 2021/06/10

The fun and useful part of this article is the first third as the author introduces us to the term for a thing that Weakens Our Relationship to the Truth (WORT). "A wort is anything that deliberately tries to blur the line between what is true and what is not," writes Marcus Buckingham, and your life is filled with worts: "The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fast Company, and Fortune all have sections of content which have been paid for by the writer." I encounter worts a lot in all kinds of publications as I do my research in EdTech. Now at this point it would have been a far more interesting and useful article had Buckingham looked at how worts erode trust in the publications where they appear, about the impact of fooling people by saying things like 'The Wall Street Journal says...' or 'a Harvard study says...' But instead it tails off into a general discussion on some critical thinking strategies, useful to a point, but far from satisfying overall. Of course, I suppose there's only so far Harvard Business Review could go in its discussion and exposure of worts before it runs the risk of being burned by its own coverage.

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GCshare
Canada School of Public Service, 2021/06/10

This is a really interesting project on several levels. At first glance, it's a way for government departments to share learning resources with each other. But then I found that it's openly accessible to the world (I tested) and that the resources are also open (I found instances of public domain, CC-by, and CC-by-NC). Astute readers will also note thast the URL provided is under the eCampus Ontario domain, which suggests what could be a really fruitful partnership. What's available now launched at the beginning of the month and is just a beta version, and there are only 29 items available, and a lot of questions remain unanswered (for example, about content curation, about open APIs, about federation, about commercial course providers using OERs as advertising, etc). But overall I'm just delighted; it represents a sea-change at the Canada School of Public Services since I worked with them on a couple of projects a few years ago. Here's a backgrounder from last year.

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The Middle Leader Manifesto
Ewan McIntosh, notosh, Medium, 2021/06/10

I don't know why writers are so obsessed with the concept of 'leadership'. Honestly, terms like 'productivity', 'innovation', 'cooperation' or 'quality' could be plugged into this article in place of 'leadership' and it would say essentially the same thing. The tips aren't so much bad (I follow many of them myself) as they are generic. Having goals, being ambitious, listening to others, finding a braintrust, etc., all form the core of a certain mindset that's popular today. Ultimately the really interesting thing would be a discussion of the differences between different types of sociality, one that (say) focuses more on listening versus another than focuses more on goals. But it's hard to have a reasoned discussion and to write a manifesto in the same post. Image: Niall Brennan, The characteristics of a great middle leader.

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Social Modeling and i*
Eric S. Yu, University of Toronto, 2021/06/10

This paper (23 page PDF) is just the tip of a very large iceberg known as i* (pronounced i-star).. "The i* modeling framework [ 122][ 123] was an attempt to introduce some aspects of social modeling and reasoning into information system engineering methods, especially at the requirements level." In particular, "i* recognizes the primacy of social actors. Actors are viewed as being intentional, i.e., they have goals, beliefs, abilities, and commitments." Since its introduction ten years ago i* has been standardized as as ITU-T Recommendation Z.151 (250 page PDF). It can of course be applied to learning technology; Enric Mayol provides an example of an i* model for an academic tutoring system.

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