OLDaily

Sure, follow the money but think first
Carly Sawatzki, Jill Brown, EduResearch Matters, 2021/06/28

This is one of those article that raises many more questions than it answers. Here's the gist: not that banks are no longer allowed to provide financial education for students in Australia, numerous other players, like the Barefoot Investor, have stepped into the gap, but we need education that doesn't merely describe how the financial system works, but also helps students engage in discussion about the need for reform. It makes me want to follow all the rebbit-holes, like: why did banks take the opportunity to use financial education as advertising? How are financial influencers (finfluencers) able to get into the education system? But there's more. This article was funded by the Ecstra Foundation, which we read "is a grant making charitable organisation committed to building the financial wellbeing of all Australians within a fair financial system," which sounds great, but "is funded by Community Benefit Payments made under the terms of ASIC’s Enforceable undertakings actions," or in other words, court-ordered actions. So there's a lot going on behind the scenes here.

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LinkedIn’s job-matching AI was biased. The company’s solution? More AI.
MIT Technology Review, 2021/06/28

This is one of those stupid 'you have two free articles left' pages, but if you're blocked you can find most of it reprinted here or here. The hook is that LinkedIn's recruitment AI was biased (cue the moral panic) but the main lesson people should be taking away from this article (and the reason why it's worth reading) is that it describes how AI is used for recruiting. "ZipRecruiter, CareerBuilder, LinkedIn—most of the world’s biggest job search sites use AI to match people with job openings." Why is this important? Because when this effort succeeds (and it will) then we will have no particular need for degrees, certificates and credentials. And when that happens, the historical monopoly education institutions have over recognition and assessment will end, which disrupts one of their core value propositions. When the university degree is no longer relevant, it's hard to imagine people paying tens of thousands of dollars to obtain one. Oh, and the AI bias? Even at its worst, I would say, it's far less than the historical bias found in academic institutions.

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What newsrooms still don’t understand about the internet
Charlie Warzel, Nieman Lab, 2021/06/28

This article discusses how social media is manipulate to direct coordinated attacks on people and institutions, and suggests that news managers haven't sufficiently recognized this reality. News managers, writes Charlie Warzel, believe they can still report on issues objectively, without becoming part of the conflict, not realizing how their coverage is weaponized and used in different contexts. And this is why, for example, they fail to defend their staff when they're caught up in Twitter campaigns. I think there are lessons here for educational institutions here as well. We need to understand what we teach and how we teach it not just within the context of individual subjects or lessons, but within the wider context of social and political change, not with the intent of 'avoiding controversy', but rather, of more intentional engagement.

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Embodied Cognition
Lawrence Shapiro, Shannon Spaulding, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2021/06/28

I mentioned embodied cognition in a short blog post today and it has been touted as the thing that replaces theories of cognition based exclusively on the brain. This article appeared just this week, though of course the idea has been around at least since Francisco Varela was talking about it (covered here) two decades ago. And there's a lot to like about it, including one feature I've long advocated as a part of connectivism: "The array of computationally-inspired concepts, including symbol, representation, and inference, on which traditional cognitive science has drawn must be abandoned." Embodied cognition also recognizes the central role of perception in consciousness: "differently embodied organisms would understand their environments differently." Also, something else I've endorsed in the past: "Embodied moral cognition takes moral sentimentalism as a starting point. Moral sentimentalism is the view that our emotions and desires are, in some way, fundamental to morality." There's a lot more to talk about, and this article is quite a good introduction. Image: Milkowski and Nowakowski, Is embodied cognition a unifying perspective?

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Proximity bias is real. Returning to the office could make it worse.
Megan Rose Dickey, 2021/06/28

This is why we should not employ a 'hybrid' system of learning where some people are in the classroom and some people are at a distance, either online or connected by video. I experienced this personally while working at a 'remote' location in New Brunswick connecting to meetings based in Ottawa. It's like you're not there during the meeting. Moreover, the meeting continues informally after the connection is closed. People who are proximate to decision-makers have an outsized influence on them. Their interests automatically become more significant, their requests more urgent. "If you have two playing fields to administer, they are inequitable by design."

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Can non-formal learning be measured?
Lisa MD Owens, Chief Learning Officer, 2021/06/28

The answer, of course, is going to be "yes". "Non-formal learning, sometimes called informal intentional learning, takes place with guidance, but outside the formal learning environment and without being governed by an assessment or accreditation." It produces identifiable benefits, such as knowledge retention and workplace performance. And these benefits, characterized as "a strategic performance objective (SPO)", can be measured. "The SPO establishes our focus, aligns our multiple learning assets to observable on-the-job behavior change, and prompts us to build in measures that demonstrate how the learning cluster delivers employee and business success." See also: Validation of non-formal and informal learning.

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