OLDaily

Anthology and Blackboard Merging to Create Massive Ed Tech Ecosystem
Rhea Kelly, Campus Technology, 2021/09/13

The story is that "Anthology and Blackboard have announced a merger, pairing the former's enterprise software for enrollment management... with the latter's learning management software." It feels more like an acquisition, because "the new company will be led by Jim Milton, current chairman and chief executive officer of Anthology." It's funny, though - the more these companies grow and the wider their enterprise capabilities become, the less relevant they feel, to me at least, to educational technology and online learning. They may as well be SAP or some such thing. But I guess they're making a difference, hm?

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Microsoft is introducing a Teams feature that may cause a lot of cursing
Chris Matyszczyk, ZDNet, 2021/09/13

This will be of direct relevance to the many institutions that use MS Teams: "Making a sudden appearance in the company's 365 roadmap, this new feature has a harsh title: 'Microsoft Teams: Chat supervisors can delete messages.'" What I find noteworthy is the perspective offered in the article. Exercising control over the discussion is deemed to be bad. "Who will decide what is inappropriate, off-topic or even 'other'? Are we really speaking of the speech-police here?" Now I'm willing to go to some lengths to defend free speech - but not on other people's websites. What to say something controversial? Build or buy your own website and say it there, like I do. Too much 'freedom of speech' debate is about the right to leverage someone else's good name and hard work to publicize your views. Universities don't have to 'balance' their curriculum with your political views, and publications don't have to cater to every perspective that exists in society.

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Run or pass? In this football league, the fans decide.
John Terhune, Experience, 2021/09/13

I think this is a fascinating concept. This football league is composed essentially of groups of fans competing against each other in a game where they define the rules, create the teams, and even call the plays. The action in the game is performed by real humans following their instructions, as though they were coaches. What's interesting is the changing definition of 'success' in the game, and the way the players, managers and audience manage their authority to take 'randomness' out of the play selection. The league struggles with the same sort of issues student-managed learning does.

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Announcing Argos Education
Michael Feldstein, e-Literate, 2021/09/13

It was a striking moment of cognitive dissonance for me. I was at a conference and saw David Wiley - well known as a scholar and professor - sitting behind a booth in the trade show. And I realized there's a perspective where the transition from academic to entrepreneur is an advancement in career. I will probably never understand this way of thinking, but in the Land of Opportunity south of the Canadian border, apparently it holds true.

I say all this by way of introducing Michael Feldstein's announcement of Argos Education (the website is still in 'coming soon' mode). "I walked away from a very comfortable consulting practice during my peak earning years to take on a level of risk and hard work that frankly don’t make sense at this stage in my life," he writes, believing " I have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make an impact." As I say, it's hard for me to comprehend a perspective where you need VC funding in order to make an impact.

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Teaching Machines
Matthias Melcher, x28's New Blog, 2021/09/13

This is a review of Audrey Watters's book Teaching Machines. It's worth noting that the title refers not only to 'machines that teach' but also 'the process of teaching to machines'. This adds depth to comments like this: "despite all the talk of teaching machines enabling the individualization of education, programmed instruction was more apt to strip away student agency and selfhood.” The use of machines, historically, has reduced students to machines (as an aside, this is the perspective you should be reading a lot of education 'reform' efforts, including arguments against learning preferences, arguments against critical thinking, standardization of outcomes, etc.). "Wandering through the wealth of interesting details," writes Matthias Melcher, "the reader gets inspired to ask themselves what it is that makes these machines now appear so alienating, even ridiculous and embarrassing?"

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The Classroom in Crisis
Victoria Baena, Boston Review, 2021/09/13

For those of you with money to spend on books, the two reviewed in this article (The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study by Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan, and Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching by Jarvis R. Givens) might be useful reading alongside Audrey Watters's Teaching Machines. They form a nice contrast by looking at the struggles that take place inside the very human classroom. Best line of the review: "the only justifiable relation to the university today is to be 'in but not of' it: 'one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can.'"

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