OLDaily

10 tips for better webinars
Clint Lalonde, EdTech Factotum, 2021/11/22

These are good tips, and what I like is that they don't amount to something like "you should never present anything in a webinar and should always use small group activities instead" or some such thing. here's the full presentation on SlideShare (with all the popups and come-ons reminding me exactly why I left the platform when it was sold to Scribd).

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Why Tech in Education Must Become More Accessible
Luke Smith, Emerging Education Technologies, 2021/11/22

"For it to be a truly fair and equitable system,' writes Luke Smith, "students with disabilities must have the option to study alongside their peers in the 'regular' classroom setting." I'm (mostly) inclinded to this view and find the list of supportive technologies included in this article to be useful. One question that has perplexed me over the years, however, is whether these technologies out to be a part of the same technologies others use (thus extending the classroom analogy) or whether we should support different technologies for learners of different abilities. Here, I'm (mostly) inclined to the latter.

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When Three Wrongs Might Make a Right: The Flipped Classroom
2021/11/22

Ah, there's nothing like the fervour of the convert, who finds the devil everywhere. Here we have a discussion of the flipped classroom that drives the author into glossolalia trying to explain why it all works out in the end. "We probably would have dismissed this article (on flipped learning) as a poor piece of research... based on three educational myths... In spite of this, flipping the classroom (i.e., the inverted classroom) has become an incredibly widely used and praised approach which does have a certain amount of merit." Yeah, how about that. According to the unnamed author it's because a flipped class "often ends up with much, if not all, of the class-time being a traditional class." In the trade we call this an 'epicycle' and this particular contortion 'epicycles within epicycles'.

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Use a spreadsheet for literary criticism: it's more accurate
Terry Freedman, ICT & Computing in Education, 2021/11/22

"If book blurb writers had any sense," writes Terry Freedman, "they wouldn’t put wordy descriptions on the back cover of books. They would put a graph there instead.' I'm honestly not sure whether this post is serious or satire, but it doesn't really matter, because the idea of using graphs instead of text for literary criticism is satisfying either way. "Good solid numbers, and a graph to boot. If one carried on applying this approach to the whole book, and taking into consideration more criteria, you would be able to see the shape of the entire narrative at a glance."

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Frames
Bri Alexander, HASTAC, 2021/11/22

"You see, frames center worlds and draw a specific gaze
while casting aside all other perspectives, beliefs, and ways.
So when you frame something, you are obligated to think:
'what worlds will I expand, what worlds will I shrink?'"

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Hostile Scaffolding
Ryan Timms, David Spurrett, PhilPapers, 2021/11/22

A subject that has come up a few times here is the idea of education (properly so-called) as perpetuating existing systems of power and control. This paper described a mechanism for this: hostile scaffolding. "This is scaffolding which depends on the same capacities of an agent to rely on external structure, but that undermines or exploits that agent while serving the interests of another." And like the author, I think that the possibility (if not the actuality) of hostile scaffolding is inherent in the concept of scaffolding, and may indeed be inescapable. In any case, this paper offers an extended discussion of the concept, drawing from examples such as electronic gambling machines and aspects of casino management and including 'affective scaffolding' in workplaces where "a kind of ‘mind invasion’ when it sculpts behaviour and norms in ways that are detrimental to the interests of employees."

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