OLDaily

The likely effects of the commercialisation of higher education were hiding in plain sight for decades
Terry Freedman, ICT & Computing in Education, 2022/07/06

I have mixed feelings about this item. Terry Freedman laments the commercialization, which he conflates with "the government's insistence that graduates secure well-paying jobs within a certain period of time after graduating." One the one hand, sure, I believe that people should be able to take courses in Egyptology because they are interested in the subject, even if no job results. On the other hand, I am not in favour of a system where only people with time and money to spare can take courses in Egyptology. But on the third hand, it's not fair to low income people to offer courses in Egyptology that offer no opportunity for employment or advancement. But all these are the contortions of a dysfunctional system. People - rich or poor - should be able to study Egyptology and make a decent living even if they end up working in (shudder) the service industry.

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Reviewing the ed tech angst
Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, 2022/07/06

Martin Weller weighs in on the recent edtech angst. He makes some obvious points: "The ed tech industry is different (from) the ed tech community of practitioners," he writes. Also, "a new generation of ed tech practitioners (is) here and they may approach it differently." Moreover, "the rapid (and rapidly repeating) nature of ed tech... burns people out." And it didn't help that "many found that post-pandemic their views were not respected," All of this is true. It's a tough industry (as is pretty much anything in tech) and if you don't have an enthusiasm for it you get burned out and disillusioned pretty quickly. I also think you need rather more variety than most ed techies are allowed to have: I combine writing, consulting, blogging, coding, gaming, travel and speaking, and more all into one gig. Doing it this way, and staying excited about the new (the way I am about things like the indieweb and Octopus) go a long way. But I remember well the days back at Assiniboine when I had to fight with my managers to forge my career my own way. If you let them, managers will make you a hired wrench and leave you tired and frustrated with no prospects for the rest of your career.

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How to be a techno-optimist
Jonny Thomson, Big Think, 2022/07/06

I am mostly a techno-optimist, and it might be because I'm old enough to actually remember what things were like before the internet and such. In this article, Jonny Thomson writes that we need three things to be techno-optimists: a belief that good prevails over bad, especially in human nature; affirmations of improvement over some period of time; and a way to measure those improvements. I find that I really only need the second. I don't blindly believe in the good, because I can see ugly for what it is and know that we have to push back. And I equate measurement with dysfunction. We measure for the good only if we're not able to recognize the good. Being a techno-optimist is, to me, most of all, about agency. But nobody gives us agency; we have to take it.

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Weary, old, a little broken, but not letting go of the dream: edtech in the 21st Century
Jon Dron, 2022/07/06

Between the influence of technology and the intransigence of education there was never really any hope for edtech. At least, that's what Jon Dron seems to be saying here. "Machines try to make automata inside us in their own distorted image," he writes, and "the educational establishment changed us. It took our monkey-paw rainbows of wishes, chewed them up, and spat them back at us in trademarked beige." I'm sympathetic, but I have been warning about incipient commercialism for twenty years or more, and have long given up on the idea of change from within the educational system. But don't blame the machines; they're not the ones converting you to automata, you are, if you're complying, and your managers are, with each new policy they impose. And I'll say it again: we have to build the future the way we want it, not depend on the institutions to change themselves. Because they won't. Look at the list of things Dron says we should do. It's within our power to do them.

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