OLDaily

What Analytics taught me about my community
James Breiner, Entrepreneurial Journalism, 2022/06/16

I often use an article to make a point, and that's what I'm doing here. In this post, James Breiner reviews his metrics and draws some conclusions 'about his community'. He finds (as I have) that the newsletter drives the most traffic, that data matters, that headlines matter, and that people prefer the personal touch. A newsletter sent to subscribers is "not a message to the world but to them." I believe that. In my newsletter I'm writing to people, and not 'publishing', properly so-called. And I think (this is the point I want to make) that the focus on data, and especially readership and subscription numbers, contradicts this idea. If I'm focused on building a wide audience and hitting my numbers, then I'm publishing. And there's nothing wrong with publishing, but it's not what I do. I'm writing. To you. Not to the world.

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Chapter 5 Review: Design Pedagogies: “There’s Something Wrong with This System!”
Nanditha Krishna, HASTAC, 2022/06/16

This post summarizes the fifth Chapter of Sasha Costanza-Chock's Design Justice. I want to focus on one point in particular. "Design justice is a framework that can help guide us as we seek to teach computing, software development, and design in ways that support, rather than suppress, the development of critical consciousness and that provide scaffolding for learners' connections to the social movements that are necessary to transform our world." As readers know, I think supporting a critical consciousness is a great idea. But to me, "providing scaffolding for learners' connections to the social movements" sounds a lot like recruitment to a cause. And as much as I may support the cause, I would reiterate that recruitment is not the purpose of education.

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News & Media Literacy 101
Daniel Vargas Campos, Common Sense Education, 2022/06/16

I applaud the motivation of teaching students foundational news and media literacy skills. But I have to ask whether these are actually foundational (as opposed to, say, a grab-bag of topical issues enjoying current traction). Two of the five items for elementary students are about copyright, while two others are about not being fooled by images. I think the key to news and media literacy is understanding what the author wants you to believe. If you don't get this, none of the rest matters. But none of the items are about comprehension. Understand first, then make judgements, watch for fallacies, or share, or whatever.

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Networks: Resourcing Relationships and Interdependence for an Equitable Future Now
Natalie Bandad, Alison Lin, Networkweaver, 2022/06/16

The authors write, "Networks offer a structure for linking people and groups of people with a shared vision and shared values to build and strengthen the relationships necessary to shift big systems." Lots of things do that. I want to emphasize that what's special about networks is that they enable the linking of people with different vision and diverse values to work together in exchanges of mutual value - things like markets and conversations and research, for example. The whole "shared vision and shared values" represents to me an undesired politicization of networks in particular and society in general, replacing a system of dialogue and exchange with a system of power and influence. Think about it.

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5 areas ripe for a blockchain boom in higher education
Keith Rajecki, eCampus News, 2022/06/16

The five areas are: secure credentials, gamifying learning, record-keeping for grants, accreditation, and student financing. With the exception of gamification, all these have to do with records and bookkeeping, and arguably, blockchain is not even remotely required for gamification. It's a pretty sterile view of blockchain in education. I think we will see much more interesting applications once we get beyond this idea of education as a set of transactions leading to a degree. The technologies that create blockchain were designed to support a form of social cohesion and cooperation across decentralized networks of content and resources, or in other words, an alternative to centralized forms or organization and collaboration. Surely there's room for more imagination here.

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What Universities — and Libraries, Researchers, and Publishers? — Owe Democracy
Karin Wulf, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2022/06/16

This article introduces Ronald J. Daniels's book What Universities Owe Democracy. "Daniels calls for universities to commit to more explicit pro-democracy work. 'It is imperative,' he writes, 'in this moment of democratic backsliding, that our universities more self-consciously vindicate their obligations to this most precious and fragile form of self-governance.'" Aspects of this include: a focus on access (and an end to legacy admissions); a responsibility to cultivate "civic literacy"; and support for a form of pluralism that resists the weaponization of difference. I think these are laudable ambitions that need not be presented in a specifically U.S. context (after all, the rest of the world also has things like universities and democracy). I wonder, however, whether universities (especially as currently constituted) are well-equipped for this challenge. While there is a mythos of the universities' historical role in preserving democracy, their ethos of support for the power and privilege of the few reveals something very different.

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Creating an Interactive Dashboard to Support Middle School Teachers’ Implementation of a Technology-Supported Problem-Based Learning Program
Min Liu, Chenglu Li, Zilong Pan, International Journal of Designs for Learning, 2022/06/16

The cool factor for this paper (18 page PDF) is through the roof as it's part of a learning project called Alien Rescue. "Students, acting as young scientists are asked to participate in a rescue operation to find suitable relocation sites within our solar system for six different species of aliens who have been displaced from their home planets." This specific project involves the design of "a way for teachers to know, just-in-time, what features their students were accessing and the information (e.g., notes) their students entered in the program." The paper offers a detailed overview of the design process and offers a valuable insight into some of the deeper work being done in ed tech today (it's not all 'personalized learning' and such).

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