OLDaily

Is education policymaking also being privatised?
Christopher Lubienski, World Education Blog, UNESCO, 2022/04/04

Good post today by Christopher Lubienski. There is already a great deal of privatization in educational services and delivery (so much so it's really hard to draw a line) and now there's a push to take the actual decision-making out of government hands. Why? Lubienski points to a number of factors (quoted): an erosion of trust in institutions, the rise of economic inequality, and the promotion of alternative facts, 'experts,' and evidence-free perspectives. But there are good reasons to push back against this trend, he writes. First, business skills "do not necessarily transfer to other sectors, where trained experts often have better, evidence-based insights into the problems." And second, "privatization of public policymaking further disenfranchises marginalized communities who become the subjects of philanthropists' experiments."

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Artificial Intelligence: Generative AI
Jackie Gerstein, User Generated Education, 2022/04/04

Most overviews of artificial intelligence (AI) describe four major types of application: descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive. In my course last year I added two more: generative, and deontic AI. This post from Jackie Gerstein discusses generative AI "as part of (students') larger Artificial Intelligence elective as well as being part of the ISTE AI Explorations course I am taking" and offers  more detail, including a number of examples. Generative AI fits in well to several criteria, including "creating new, useful or imaginative solutions" and "communicate clearly and express themselves creatively".

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Academic Freedom Isn't Free: Don’t Buy It: The Marketing Scam of MSM and the "Science of Reading"
P.L. Thomas, National Education Policy Center, 2022/04/04

The purpose of this post is to provide some context to another post in today's newsletter. Here's what we read on the National Education Policy Center website: "Since 2018, Education Week has published a steady stream of click-bait press-release journalism promoting the 'science of reading' (SoR).... EdWeek and mainstream media have been complicit for almost four years now in the SoR marketing scam that uses 'science' like a baseball bat to disorient the public and political leaders so non-scientific products and policies are slipped into the education system."

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Instructional design is useless
nick shackleton-jones, aconventional, 2022/04/04

I checked the date of this short article very carefully before posting it, but it appears Nick Shackleton-Jones is quite serious. And I'm in non-ironic agreement with him here. Most instructional design "is basically just whimsy & ritual, with little or no evidential support," he writes, while that which does have evidential support "doesn't relate to learning, instead to peculiar instructional challenges such as recall tests." Instead, ask yourself "Why do you think, YouTube, Google & TikTok are entirely bereft of instructional design? If they really helped people learn, don't you think they would be popular?"

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i-Ready Learning System: Full Review for Teachers and Parents
Med Kharbach, Educational Technology and Mobile Learning, 2022/04/04

This is a review of i-Ready, to be sure, but it's hardly a "full" review. i-Ready is another one of those products that performs assessments with the objective of identifying a student's skill levels in different disciplines, all with the objective or providing personalized learning resource recommendations in subjects such as reading and math. What this review does not provide is any assessment of how well it performs this task. Even if the reviewer isn't assessing the product themselves (and why would they?) we should at least see some reference to evidence provided either by the company or (preferably) independent review. After all, even company-friendly car reviews will tell us about the vehicle's gas mileage, it's acceleration, and (ideally) ratings from Motor Trend or Car and Driver. Browsing the company's own research, for example, we find it is related to the Science of Reading program. Now what does that tell us? Let's demand more from our coverage of ed tech.

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Stop Framing Wellness Programs Around Self-Care
Michelle A. Barton, Bill Kahn, Sally Maitlis, Kathleen M. Sutcliffe, Harvard Business Review, 2022/04/04

This is in many respects a good article about orienting self-care around taking care of each other rather than "the very wellness efforts that organizations create, with their slate of classes and mobile apps, can become subtle forms of abandonment in the guise of support." A strength of the article is the argument showing that "when groups frame distress or adversity as a collective rather than individual problem, the resulting communal coping strategies bolster genuine connection and better recovery." I get that, and I appreciate that. But there is something subversive, I think, about aligning your self-help community as your work community. My communities - much like most people's, I would imagine - are centred around friends and family, activities I enjoy. The people I work with I work with; the problems we face together are work problems.

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The Personal Is Philosophical
Kieran Setiya, Boston Review, 2022/04/04

The book being reviewed here is the translation of the coded part of his notebooks Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote during the years of the first world war. Ideally they would be displayed, as reviewer Kieran Setiya suggests, alongside the unencoded parts of the same notebooks. These, the rather less personal parts of the notebooks, were published long ago, edited by philosophers who believed the analytical writings should be kept apart from the personal. Those of us who have read Ray Monk's biography of Wittgenstein will understand how wrongheaded that was, and if there were any lingering doubt, this review should put it to rest. This is a great review that gets, I think, to some of the really important nuances in the work. Writes Wittgenstein, "The older I grow, the more I realize how terribly difficult it is for people to understand each other, and I think that what misleads one is the fact that they all look so much like each other. If some people looked like elephants and others like cats, or fish, one wouldn't expect them to understand each other and things would look much more like what they really are."

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