OLDaily

Edtech Who the &*#% are you?
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2022/07/04

This is another in the recent spate of posts questioning the nature of edtech. Alan Levine remind us there's more than one identity at play here. "I celebrate the real edtech I know," he writes, "the spirit and people that are not in it for venture capital chips or scale gorging." And it's funny: for all the writing and research Audrey Watters did, I think he never really got to know the lower-case edtech, where people really did support things like open access, genuine learning, care and community. I think that if she had, she would have felt less like a Cassandra. Not that I'm criticizing her; I just think that people did listen, but she could never hear them above the din of capitalist EdTech.

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Universities told to advertise drop-out rates
Samantha Booth, SchoolsWeek, 2022/07/04

Two different takes on the same story. In the first item from SchoolsWeek, we read that the (British) government would like universities "to advertise drop-out and employment rates to stop students ending up 'stuck on dead-end' courses." After all, ""Making such a significant investment in your time, money and future is not made any easier by bold university advertising." Then we have a second item from WonkHE which makes it personal and ridiculous, asking "what fresh hell is this?" and saying "Michelle Donelan demands data on your gifs." Methinks the wonk he protests too much.

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Indie Microblogging
Manton Reece, 2022/07/04

This is a well-written, clear and engaging online book about microblogging. Here we're not talking about social networks or small posts on blogger, but a distributed network on individually owned instances. Is it hard to get millions of people to leave the gilded cage that is social media? Yes. But as this book makes clear, it is possible and necessary,

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Can GPT-3 write an academic paper on itself, with minimal human input?
2022/07/04

The answer, I guess, is yes, though as Jon Dron notes, "a bit repetitive, a bit shallow, but it's just a 500 word paper- hardly even an extended abstract – so that's about par for the course." I've seen worse. And it's a harbinger of things to come. I'm not sure people understand how deeply things are about to change. "If I were an ethically imperfect, extrinsically-driven student with access to this," writes Dron, "I might even get it to write my assignments for me... Plagiarism detectors wouldn't stand a chance." Of course, not only students would cheat. There are many ethically imperfect academics out there.

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Anatomy of a book banning
Dave Eggers, Washington Post, Wayback Machine, 2022/07/04

This is an archived copy of a Washington Post ("Democracy dies behind a paywall") article by author Dave Eggers on his experience having a book banned in South Dakota schools. The article recounts the influence of funding and lobby groups on the school board election, but the most telling sentence, to my mind, is this: "voter turnout was low — less than 13 percent of the electorate cast ballots." Now Eggers talks about some of the things I've seen elsewhere - the "the mass exodus of teachers... 157 vacant positions in a district that employs 1,680," a district that is "disintegrating and imploding." But: 13 percent. It's not all voter suppression. It's an abdication of responsibility. People complain (and quite rightly) about what happens at the other end of the system when the Supreme Court makes a raft of controversial decisions. But democracy begins in things like school board elections - the hard work on the ground that it takes to build skills, networks and social knowledge. Never forget that.

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3 Ways COVID Changed Higher Education Forever
Ryan Lufkin, Emerging EdTech, 2022/07/04

This post demonstrates a pattern of identifying a change that most people would agree has happened, then linking it to something that doesn't follow at all. For example, after observing "online learning can achieve levels of engagement that are on par with in-person courses" and that "more and more adults will forgo retirement," Ryan Lufkin says "blended or hybrid learning is the new norm." After observing "99% of U.S. undergraduate students own a smartphone," he plugs a company that captures "the emotional power of the best Hollywood storytelling…to deliver fully immersive VR learning."

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Identity
Julian Stodd, Julian Stodd's Learning Blog, 2022/07/04

"I'm interested in questions of identity as an extension to my previous work on community and specifically 'belonging'," writes Julian Stodd. " We should seek to understand identity and belonging because it's easy to make the mistake that there is only one 'self' and that we need or want it to 'belong' – this leads us to language about 'bringing your whole self' to work, which may turn out to be a terrible idea." Maybe - but I would never want my identity to be subsumed under my employer's 'brand', as I see from so many people (especially on LinkedIn).

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