OLDaily

Elon Musk to buy Twitter for $44B US
Pete Evans, CBC News, 2022/04/26

The big news today is that Elon Musk has reached an apparent agreement with the Twitter board to buy the company for around $US 44 billion. He would then presumably take it private and run it as a fiefdom. This is of course always a possibility with proprietary platforms (while researching today I found that SlideShare is completely blocking me from viewing people's slides, which is what I feared when I left the platform after it was purchased by Scribd). So people shouldn't be surprised. If you want a public square, it has to be publicly owned. The best take on this is probably deAdder's (behind a subscription wall on Jeff Bezos's Washington Post website).

Unsurprisingly, as soon as the announcement hit, the federated social networking site Mastodon was hit with a surge of interest (and subsequennt slowdown, at least on mastodon social). People interested in this open source alternative to Twitter are directed to joinmastodon.org, which will offer then a selection of instances to choose from (the whole idea of Mastodon is that we don't all end up on a single platform owned by a billionaire). Note that you'll still be depending on billionaire owners of telecom platforms, so this isn't an issue that goes away simply by #leavingtwitter.

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Let’s get to work with productive learning strategies: All-in-one
Tine Hoof, Tim Surma, Paul A. Kirschner, Mirjam Neelen, 3-Star Learning Experiences, 2022/04/26

 "We hope you're not too shocked when we say that 'active' methods aren't necessarily more effective than 'passive' methods and vice versa," write the authors of this article summarizing a series of Dutch-language blog posts. They introduce the Dutch term 'werkvormisme', or 'instructional methodism', to refer to "the emphasis on one or more specific instructional methods, without carefully considering if the method, in itself, would lead to better learning." I don't know whether anyone actually does that, or whether (as I suspect) the difference is based on what is counted as "better learning". The series is based on Mayer and Fiorella's book Learning as a Generative Activity describing eight generative learning strategies that encourage learners "to 'remould' the subject matter and based on that, create their own output, such as a summary or a drawing" (or as I would say, aggregate, remix, repurpose, feed forward). The big difference is that the current authors replace 'feed forward' with 'integrate into their long-term memory', which, again, is the difference between their version of 'better learning' and others. Image: Enser.

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In Keeping with Academic Tradition: Copyright ownership in higher educationand potential implications for Open Education
Lindsey Gumb, Will Cross, Journal of Copyright in Education and Librarianship, 2022/04/26

This report (31 page PDF) is based on an analysis of 109 copyright ownership policies at postsecondary education institutions in the U.S. and concludes that while there is a general sense of shared values and unspoken assumptions about ownership and distribution, there is a lack of clarity in policy, and in practice, disagreement about core issues. For example, while "the question of faculty ownership in research and teaching materials remains primarily governed by individual institutional IP policies" there are "often substantial differences between the policies at individual institutions," in particular the ownership of work produced by non-academic staff (which is often treated as 'work for hire') and by students (who may or may not have a say in how their work is licensed). The authors argue that "As a field we need to decide how we balance these issues and write our values into these legal agreements, rather than leaving the issue to assumptions about academic tradition." But how will agreement be reached in an arena where there is such an imbalance of power? Image: Malin, et.al.

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A Call to Interrogate Educational Development for Racism and Colonization
Jamiella Brooks, Heather Dwyer, Marisella Rodriguez, Faculty Focus, 2022/04/26

The raised fist graphic was already a cliché when I was working at the student newspaper in the 1980s and the issues addressed in this article are just as old (even if we're using the new 'decolonization' terminology instead of the tried-and-true language of 'anti-imperialism'). I sincerely doubt that another round of genuflection by western-based academics and support workers will have a significant impact. I could be wrong, and I certainly don't want to discourage those working against racism and imperialism. But I don't think the problem here is simply the lack of awareness and training. I think work toward concrete reforms like public health care, access to education, equitably distributed infrastructure, fair employment practices, global financial reform, environmental justice, and limits to wealth and power will have far more effect, even if it is not done perfectly per the western-based academics and support workers. Stop fighting for change, and start working for it.

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A 4-year-old can run errands alone ... and not just on reality TV
Michaeleen Doucleff, NPR, 2022/04/26

To be clear, this article doesn't recommend simply sending a 4-yar-old on an errand unprepared. But it is about developing autonomy in children, counter to the prevailing North American trend of increasing parental supervision. "It's not so much about raising 'free range' kids – the term often used to describe children who are free to play and explore around their homes and neighborhoods on their own — but rather it's about raising smart, capable kids whose parents enable them to practice autonomy without sacrificing safety. Kids who have the skills they need to handle the responsibility." For another take on this, see this bit from Trevor Noah.

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