OLDaily

UNESCO calls for shakeup on Int’l Day of Education
Maureen Manning, The PIE News, 2022/01/25

The title is of course misleading, because it wasn't UNESCO that called for a shakeup, it was its Director General, Audrey Azoulay. And while she does say "we must rethink education" it's not really a shakeup. Her vision of education is centered around serving social objectives, and not the needs and aspirations of learners themselves (which, I think, would truly shake up education). Not that I disagree with the objectives - I mean, who doesn't want social justice and sustainable development? But it's not up to education to deliver these. Education can't act as a proxy for real solutions to failing social policy. Education is good if it's good for the people being educated. Otherwise, it's just propaganda.

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WTF is Web3?
Kayleigh Barber, Digiday, 2022/01/25

Another introduction to web3. The core idea of web3 is that you can publish articles on a decentralized network, recording ownership and links on the blockchain. This has naturally led to a frenzy of speculation about how web3 is the future of web monetization. But you can have a decentralized independent web without exchanging digital coinage. And the big thing about web3 has nothing to do with money; it has to do with identity. "On web3, your access credentials are not based on a username or password, but is based on cryptographic proof of you are who you are, and that proof is the same for any and all websites or platforms users access."

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web3 and higher education: our first Future Trends Forum exploration
Bryan Alexander, 2022/01/25

It's interesting to see the pundits all weighing in on web3 these days. I'm not sure what has prompted it - nothing really significant has happened in the last few months; it's just blockchain and tokens and NFT and IPFS as usual. A lot of the commentary has been quite critical - see, for example, Doug Belshaw commenting of a reecent paper that "There are so many issues with it that I don’t really know where to start." Here Bryan Alexander describes an interview with the paper's author; "our community started in with questions and pushback and we went all over the place, together: credentials, centralization vs decentralization, privacy and cryptography, the purpose of education." Just for fun, and to remind readers that this isn't something that started this week, I bring you my History of web3 on OLDaily page for your enjoyment.

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Naxi writing
Victor Mair, Language Log, 2022/01/25

S. Robert Ramsey writes, "The Naxi, a national minority indigenous to China’s extreme southwest, have what looks for all the world like pictographic writing as its literary tradition." What I found interesting is that the model of 'reading' the language is quite unlike what we would usually say about reading. "the symbols aren’t actually 'read.' They’re mnemonic devices used by a priest of the Bon religion to remind him of the details of a story he already knows by heart." The writing  is a memory aid, not an encoding. This suggests a process quite different from the 'decoding' process of reading described by some contemporary educators.

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The ‘shadow education’ phenomenon
Achala Gupta, BERA Blog, 2022/01/25

This short post is relevant in light of the recent Chinese government decision to shut down private tutoring agencies for children - I covered this here. The current study examines the phenomenon, here called 'shadow education', in India. With reference to her formal studies on shadow education, Achala Gupta here outlines "the process of shadowing itself, private tutoring centres’ strategies for gaining public trust, and the implications of ‘shadow education’ for educational practices." Although Gupta suggests "‘shadow education’ is integral to the overall educational landscape," she also notes that it "has implications not only for social class inequality in accessing quality education and securing school advantage." I would add that, just as is the case for other publicly funded services, the proponents of private education have a motivation and may often act to undercut funding and improvements for public education. Image: Liu & Bray, the Negative Impact of Shadow Education.

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Designing Theory-Driven Analytics-Enhanced Self-Regulated Learning Applications
Mohamed Amine Chatti, Volkan Yücepur, Arham Muslim, Mouadh Guesmi, Shoeb Joarder, 2022/01/25

This article (18 page PDF) proposes a "Student-Centered Learning Analytics-enhanced Self-Regulated Learning (SCLA-SRL) methodology" to guide research on developing developing dashboards for learners. This is need, argue the authors, because "the design of the indicators is rarely grounded in learning theories" and " the indicators are... often not well aligned with user needs." Moreover, most human-centered learning analytics (HCLA) "is not informed by well-established InfoVis design guidelines." As a case study, the SCLA-SRL methodology was applied "to design LA indicators to support SRL activities of bachelor students attending an introductory Python programming course," and this is described in the paper.

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