OLDaily

What I learned from a year on Substack
Casey Newton, Nieman Lab, 2021/09/20

Looking ahead a few years I will be able to retire from NRC and live and work more or less independently. But what will that look like? This article gives me some indication of what to expect if I focus on OLDaily and the work as a journalist I have done over the years. Previous experience suggests that I should not expect a lot from voluntary donations; Casey Newton reports that only five percent of his readership chose a paid subscription, and I imagine the rate is even lower if you don't have to pay. Buy it's possible to create incentives with things like live Discord sessions and such. In terms of content, the article convinces me not to focus on interviews, to keep things fresh (and opinionated), and to take advantage of my flexibility to run sideprojects.

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Online classes 'would not justify high university fees'
Malu Cursino, Sean Coughlan, BBC, 2021/09/20

I'm not sure why he would single out the U.K., but OECD Director for Education and Skill Andreas Schleicher "suggested that students at English universities will expect to have much more than online lessons for such high fees." What's interesting is the depiction of what students get in person that they don't get online: "Students go to university to meet great professors, to watch with colleagues, to experience a social life," he said. This tells me that the value proposition has a lot to do with networking opportunities. Universities act (on this model) as a social filter, giving those who can afford the fees the opportunity to get to know each other. That's what those studying online miss out on.

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Defining the skills citizens will need in the future world of work
Marco Dondi, Julia Klier, Frédéric Panier, Jörg Schubert, McKinsey, 2021/09/20

This is quite an interesting article because of the way it reframes what we should expect from an education. I can imagine the content-knowledge people protesting because of the need to (as they might say) know facts in order to think critically or set goals. And they're right, but where I part ways with them is in asserting that there's no specific set of facts that people need to learn. Pretty much any set of facts will do. What this document does is to try to identify the set of skills and abilities needed that underlie the facts, and allow a person to navigate from one set of facts to the next. Now we can argue about the details of this list, as I certainly would (why focus only on 'work' and not life? what do we mean by the oft-used term 'literacy'? why call it 'entrepreneurship' instead of the much more neutral 'initiative'?) but I don't think the overall orientation is wrong. Via Daniel Christian.

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Why essay assignments suck
Lisa M Lane, 2021/09/20

This article concludes with three very good suggestions for creating better essay assignments (quoted or paraphrased): ask students to develop their own thesis or argument based on a defined set of resources; provide a specific structure (and) samples for reference; and have students who want feedback to request feedback.

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Exclusive Data: An Inside Look at the Spy Tech That Followed Kids Home for Remote Learning — and Now Won’t Leave
Mark Keierleber, The 74, 2021/09/20

The story is essentially in the headline, though it's hardly an exclusive (though this particular study may be). "Through artificial intelligence and a team of content moderators, Gaggle tracks the online behaviors of millions of students across the U.S. every day." The intentions are (in some cases) noble: trying to identify student mental health issues leading to suicide and self-harm, But flagging a student for reading a story that included the word 'underwear' isn't the way to do it. "District officials acknowledged that Gaggle had captured student assignments and other personal files, an issue that civil rights groups have long been warning about." And it's not clear that massive surveillance helps. "Effective interventions are rarely going to be built on that, you know, ‘I saw what you were typing into a Google search last night’"

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MAG replacement update: meet OpenAlex!
OpenAlex, 2021/09/20

Steve McCarty write to remind me that "Microsoft Academic is closing at the end of the year but OpenAlex plans to carry similar work on." Why is Microsoft Academic shutting down? The site explains, MAS was developed to address "inequality in accessing large datasets presented a significant obstacle" and now "this research project has achieved its objective." That's a matter of debate; what happens to access after the doors close? OpenAlex will step in, but it won't replicate everything MAS was doing, losing most abstracts and full coverage of DOI-unassigned works. Still, the objective of creating "a truly comprehensive map of the global scholarly conversation" is worthwhile and should be supported.

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