OLDaily

Open Textbooks for Social Work Education
Matthew DeCarlo, Anne Marie Gruber, 2021/12/03

Matt DeCarlo writes that he and Anne Marie Gruber have curated a library of open textbooks and scholarly books for social work. It seems to me these would be easy enough to map to a curriculum (indeed, the topic listing already suggests a curriculum). And I wonder how complete an education based on these and the reference books relevant to social education would constitute a full social work programme. I can imagine writing an application (that would probably depend on AI to some extent) to take the contents of these and design a learning programme consisting of theory and practical work. It could even automate the work of finding placements for a practicum. How far are we from this, I wonder. See also DeCarlo's teaching note on adopting, adapting and creating open textbooks. See more on the Open Social Work website. Here's their newsletter.

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Citations and the Ethics of Credit
Justin Weinberg, Daily Nous, 2021/12/03

This article focuses mostly on what people do wrong when citing (or not citing) sources, shich is typical of a lot of ethics articles, but also unhelpful. It does, however, have some nifty names for these wrongs, which could form the basis for a popular infographic. My own approach to citation is to credit sources. Usually this does not mean an exhaustive search to find who had an idea first, because we live in a veritable soup of ideas and nothing - nothing - is fully oroiginal to any person we could credit. So I focus on providing credit for where I got the concept (or article, or image, or whatever). And I'll depend on redactive critics (or some AI of the future) to traces ideas back to their origin.

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Online Teacher Professional Development in Canada: A Review of the Research
Pamela Beach, Elena Favret, Alexandra Minuk, Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, 2021/12/03

This is one of those papers where I read about what teachers are doing to promote their own professional development and I ask why we aren't imagining such a process for learning generally. Here are the four main themes identified in the research: knowledge exchange; reflective practice; multifaceted learning opportunities; and just-in-time support. I can only imagine what my education would have looked like if characterized through these four themes. Sadly this report is far more focused on how the studies were conducted than in what they actually said.

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Attentional Literacy as a New Literacy: Helping Students Deal with Digital Disarray
Mark Pegrum, Agnieszka Palalas, Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, 2021/12/03

The paper breaks into essentially three parts, the first identifying a need to define this new literacy, the second suggesting an approach in a “deep path” of mindfulness, and the third applying this approach to education, for example, the idea that "mindfulness leads to a broadening of epistemology and what is considered as knowledge," and the suggestion that " attentional literacy may help ameliorate digital disconnection." There's a lot of overlap between the concept of attention literacy and other literacies, but there may be a niche for the concept. Hard to say. Image: Tremolada.

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