OLDaily

Analysis: Clash of Cultures, Clash of Privilege — What Happened When 30 Low-Income Students of Color Were Admitted to Elite Prep Schools
Jessica Herrera Chaidez, The 74, 2021/10/04

Jessica Herrera Chaidez describes her research into "the experiences of socioeconomically disadvantaged students of color who are suddenly afforded the opportunity to study at elite prep schools." The result, she says, is "a sense of twoness" that "emerged in every facet of their lives, both on and off campus." Specifically, they had to travel further, struggled with curriculum that presumed a certain background, were isolated from their friends back home, and felt they no longer belonged in their community. "Despite their well-publicized initiatives, the prep schools in these programs focus on a few examples of exceptionalism to claim a “diversity” that thrives on a subscription to whiteness, which they perniciously perpetuate."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Jonna Vance: Vicious Perceptual Expertise
Daniel Burnston, The Brains Blog, 2021/10/04

This post offers a commentary on the final few chapters of Jonna Vance's Thinking and Perceiving in which she expands on the concept of perceptual expertise as "an enhanced capacity for perceptual recognition or discrimination with respect to some feature or category." For example, "one can be a perceptually expert recognizer or discriminator of bird species, cars, or tumors depicted in X-rays." The question here is whether perceptual expertise is always virtuous. Daniel Burnston offers the opinion that it is not: "there is no guarantee that perceptual expertise will have a net positive contribution to the proportion of true beliefs or knowledge." And this raises interesting questions about the ethics of recognition. For example, "are privileged epistemic agents subject to different epistemic obligations than marginalized or oppressed epistemic agents are?"

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

The Myth of the Pedagogically Neutral LMS
Ian McNaught, eLearn, 2021/10/04

When Moodle was first launched it was a bit of a departure not only in that it was an open course learning management system (LMS) but also in that it was explicitly designed for a constructivist pedagogy. But still, as Ian McNaught writes, there is this widespread desire to depict the technology as pedagogically neutral, as in statements like "It’s not about the technology, it’s the pedagogy that matters, the technology just enables us." This view is mistaken. "A system as complex and all encompassing as an LMS is not simply taking you from A to B, it defines how you work, it creates opportunities and also imposes limits." There's a term for this in the industry: "opinionated software". The suggestion here (and I agree) is that all software is opinionated software. And it's incumbent on the user to learn what those opinions are. Image: Enterprise Web Library.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

An Analysis of Peer-Reviewed Publications on Open Educational Practices (OEP) from 2007 to 2020: A Bibliometric Mapping Analysis
Ahmed Tlili, Daniel Burgos, Ronghuai Huang, Sanjaya Mishra, Ramesh Chander Sharma, Aras Bozkurt, Sustainability, 2021/10/04

Some interesting results here (15 page PDF). While it's true that "research has shifted from content-centred approaches that focus on educational resources (creation, sharing, etc.) to more practice-centred approaches that foster collaboration between learners and teachers for better learning outcomes... current Open Educational Practices (OEP) trends covered only open pedagogy and open collaboration, suggesting a need for more research on other trends, such as open assessment, open data, and open science." This was based on a literature review of 156 peer reviewed studies on OEP. I note that the journal Sustainability seems like an odd place to publish this study.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Rethinking Digital Strategy for the Post-Pandemic Era
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, 2021/10/04

This post summarizes a recent McKinsey report, The new digital edge: Rethinking strategy for the postpandemic era (17 page PDF) based on a survey of C-level executives, business unit heads and senior managers conducted online last January. Unsurprisingly, we find "the pandemic has sped up the adoption of digital technologies by several years." What set companies apart was how much significance they had placed on digital innovation prior to the pandemic and how quickly they adapted as it progressed. "The importance of digital poses a challenge for company leaders: few are used to engaging with technology, even as it is transforming the requirements of nearly every role and becoming part of everyone’s job. … Yet according to the survey, the majority of current leaders lack the knowledge or experience to pioneer ways to apply new technologies or consistently identify how new technologies can transform their business." This sounds like a lot of opportunity for people working in education and technology.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Setting the Stage for Current and Future Learner Success
Eric Sheninger, A Principal's Reflections, 2021/10/04

I have often asked, "what constitutes success in learning?" If not grades, then what? If not satisfying employer demands or getting jobs, then what? Eric Sheninger offers a list: "When designing lessons, projects, or assessments, consider whether or not they empower learners to:

• Engage in problem-solving
• Collaborate with peers
• Think critically and creatively 
• Communicate clearly and accurately 
• Develop open-mindedness 
• Make real-world applications
• Reflect on learning
• Analyze, reason, and evaluate."

Now we could ask how we measure or evaluate these, and whether they are different in different contexts. But surely, if these are markers of success, then how we evaluate the success of learning technology would be rather different than, say, PISA test scores.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

On the Internet, We’re Always Famous
Chris Hayes, The New Yorker, 2021/10/04

This is more of a longish Sunday read than a quick review at the desk Monday morning, so maybe save it for that. Author Chris Hayes tries to put his finger on why the internet has become dystopian. He suggests that what has changed is that each of us could now become famous - defined as 'known by strangers' - and that this changes our behaviour as we begin to watch for and even crave that feedback. "The combination of mass fame and mass surveillance increasingly channels our most basic impulses—toward loving and being loved, caring for and being cared for, getting the people we know to laugh at our jokes—into the project of impressing strangers, a project that cannot, by definition, sate our desires." I think there's a lot to disagree with here, but this is definitely a good read.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]