OLDaily

The State and Social Change
Julian Stodd, Julian Stodd's Learning Blog, 2021/12/21

I guess if you get your theory of change wrong, everything else follows. Normally I like Julian Stodd, but this post just seems to miss the mark (but in useful ways). To change, then. He writes, "Change happens at the intersection of systems: sometimes through negotiation, sometimes neglect, sometimes conflict." I don't think that's even close to right, not even if limited to discussion of social change. Change happens through growth, birth and death. It happens through movement and inertia. Only some change is caused by friction, and that are the change he's describing here. If you describe society solely in terms of friction, it's inevitable that you start talking in terms of power and control and dominance. But there's a lot of change that happens outside that sphere, including most of education, if we would let it.

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Social Media: Time for a Break?
Stefanie Panke, AACE Review, 2021/12/21

When it first started social media was great. Blogs and the blogosphere were so much fun. Places like Mastodon today are like that. This article makes it clear what the problem is with the rest. To quote Jaron Lanier: "The problem is not the Internet or social media in a broad sense but rather specifically the use of the algorithms... anytime anybody connected with somebody else it was financed by third party whose motivation was to manipulate what happened. Then the whole business model was about how to manipulate more and more. What that results in is people being directed rather than exploring and that makes the world small." Small. That's a really good word for it. Like, when I'm looking for something to watch on YouTube, I feel the walls of the algorithm closing in on me.

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Wrapping up 2021...
Alexandra Mihai, The Educationalist, 2021/12/21

This isn't so much a wrap-up for 2021 as it is two posts combined. The first discusses and links to a number of resources on hybrid learning (or hi-flex or whatever else they're calling blended learning these days). I'm still not a fan. Requiring people to be in a specific place at a specific time in order to learn creates a barrier, while providing in-person learning for some people in the class and online for others creates an unbalanced environment that is difficult to manage well. I understand that people want and need to socialize, but I don't see why this needs to be in the context of someone trying to teach them geometry. The second part of the article focuses on a 'faculty development around the world' podcast series. Image: Viewsonic

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Masking protocols and a values-based approach to norms in the classroom
Aditi Garg, Educatus, 2021/12/21

I'm looking at this article less as a means of promoting safe masking in a learning environment (though that obviously is its function) but as an example of a more general approach toward fostering cultural norms. I've seen the four-step process before, both online and offline: remind, request, remove and report. Obviously this works only for more serious (and hence, reportable) violations. The post is vague about who performs these actions. In some places, I think, people take it upon themselves. But in more reserved cultures (including my own, I think) people prefer to leave it to authorities.

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'I want you to be alive': Rapper Logic's 1-800-273-8255 song linked to fewer suicides, study suggests
Solarina Ho, CTV News, 2021/12/21

We need more like this. "Logic’s song likely represents the broadest and most sustained suicide prevention messaging directly connected to a story of hope and recovery in any location to date and is thus a serendipitous event for research." We all have a part to play, those who sing the song, and those who listen to it and make this message the popular choice for people to hear.

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Sci-Hub This
Göktuğ, Mastodon, 2021/12/21

Göktuğ writes, "I made a little bookmarklet called scihub-this, which finds the first DOI on the web page and looks it up on sci-hub. Seems to work fine on JSTOR too, and it's one click from web page to PDF." Just to make life a little easier, I edited the code slightly to put it into a link - just drag this link to sci-hub this to your favourites or bookmark toolbar. Then when you hit a journal paywall, try clicking on the bookmark. It won't always work - most pages I tried in testing weren't available - and there may be better URLs to use than sci-hub.se as a base URL.

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What Sci-Hub’s latest court battle means for research
Nature, 2021/12/21

"Delhi court will scrutinize whether the pirate paper website falls foul of India’s copyright law. The verdict could have implications for academic publishers further afield... The defence will argue that Sci-Hub’s activities are covered by the list of exemptions in India’s Copyright Act of 1957." Ironically, if you want to read this article, you'll have to turn to Sci-Hub, because it's paywalled in Nature. Here's the link (it's not up yet as I write, so give it a couple of days).

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