OLDaily

A Network of Fake Test Answer Sites Is Trying to Incriminate Students
Colin Lecher, The Markup, 2022/02/15

The use of so-called 'honeypots' is well-entrenched in law enforcement, but this is the first I've seen of it in education technology. The idea is that agencies use a fake target to lure would-be thieves, or in this case, cheaters. The company, Honorlock, "provides a way to track cheating students through what Honorlock calls 'seed sites' or others call “honeypots”—fake websites that remotely tattle on students who visit them during exams." As in the case of law enforcement honeypots, critics are calling this sort of thing "entrapment" and arguing that it's like "a teacher walking around with the answer key and putting it on the corner of each desk and then penalizing students if they look over at it."

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The end of free Google storage for education
Rupert Goodwins, The Register, 2022/02/15

For Google, 'forever' ends next July. That's when the end of unlimited cloud storage for educational users is slated to end. The actual announcement was made a year ago, but as this article notes, there is increasing angst in the educational community as the date approaches. I think the major issue here isn't so much that Google is charging for storage - when you get to 100 terabytes, it seems pretty reasonable to charge real money - but that it started as free to attract data and then became something you had to pay for. Customers who don't pay face a lot of work. As Mike Barker of the University of Arizona commented, "I have been migrating TBs of data off Google for months now. SLOW."

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Referring to the World: An Opinionated Introduction to the Theory of Reference
Mark Sainsbury, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2022/02/15

It's not until you start looking seriously at what we think we are talking about that you begin to appreciate the complexities of reference in language. I was first exposed to this in Gareth Evans's seminal Varieties of Reference, and here we have a review of an equally interesting contemporary book Referring to the World, by Kenneth A. Taylor. The review discusses a number of the issues considered by Taylor, issues that arise by virtue of the fact that the words may actually refer to objects or properties, or be merely an "objectual representation", that is, a word that is “fit” or “ready” for the job of standing for something real, without actually doing so. Only the former can be said to actually assert some fact about the world, so when you say "Pegasus can fly", you are not actually asserting anything. The same, though, is true of statements we make in pure mathematics. It's not necessary to know everything about how a language refers, but it is necessary to know that it is not straight-forward and simple.

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"Facilitators" or "guides on the side"? No thanks
Terry Freedman, ICT & Computing in Education, 2022/02/15

Terry Freedman dances around this point quite a bit, but my own reason for eschewing the role of 'guide by the side' or 'facilitator' is that there is not much reason for me to be in the room other for the expertise I can bring to bear on a subject. That doesn't mean I think I have a license to "stand at the front of the class and bore the kids into submission" but I do think my role is to actively engage with people on the subject matter, not stand by the side while they work it out for themselves. Freedman takes the tack of suggesting areas where students many need help, of criticizing the idea than non-experts can teach with the aid of learning packages, and arguing that students are not able to be fully self-managing. These all may or may not be true, but they're irrelevant. For me, I'm in the room for my expertise. That's why they asked me to be there. That's what I'm going to contribute.

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Coursera bets on degrees — a small but growing part of the business
Natalie Schwartz, Higher Education Dive, 2022/02/15

As 2U expands from online program management into MOOCs with its acquisition of EdX, Coursera is expanding from MOOCs into degree programs, according to this report. "Maggioncalda said the company is still in the beginning stages of building its degree business. But this segment has recently seen major growth, with revenue from degrees reaching $13.3 million in 2021's fourth quarter — a 43% increase from a year ago."

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Universities must change or lose their place to alternative education providers: OECD education chief
Sandra Davie, The Straits Times, 2022/02/15

This article is a mix of fantasy and reality and it's sometimes hard to separate the two. And it's hard to know exactly what OECD's education chief Andreas Schleicher is advocating here as he swing from saying "students go to university to learn from great professors, do ground-breaking research, collaborate with their peers on projects and experience the social life of campus living" to saying "the current model of studying four years for a degree and then going out to build a career, will not work any more." It demonstrates a tension, I think, between what universities actually do, and what OECD would like them to do. We see a very similar message in a report (behind a spamwall) from EY. "Universities must prepare for a future where students could demand degrees, low-cost options or asynchronous learning. Otherwise, institutions risk becoming obsolete."

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Massive List of Chinese Language MOOC Platforms in 2022
2022/02/15

I found tbhis while looking for something else, and since it's pretty recent and quite comprehensive, I definitely don't want it to pass by without being mentioned. Most readers are probably familiar with the Chinese XuetangX MOOC platform, but this just heads a list of 24 Chinese MOOC platforms that offer over 69 thousand courses in Chinese.

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