OLDaily

Preservice Teachers’ Perceived Philosophies of Education in the Context of Outcome-Based Teacher Education Curriculum (OBTEC)
Eliseo Perante Marpa, International Journal on Studies in Education, 2022/09/09

This study (16 page PDF) was conducted in the Philippines and asked a number of preservice teachers what  'educational philosophies' they had. Of course we can't draw any sort of generalization from such a tiny and localized study, but I found it interesting that the author used a standardized survey instrument (adapted because three questions were not suitable to the Philippine context, which is interesting in its own right) based on a list of educational philosophies - essentialism, perennialism, progressivism, reconstructionism, and existentialism - which seemed to me idiosyncratic. Where had it come from? This list isn't a set of learning theories, which is where my focus has always been, but rather, a set of philosophies describing what should be taught, and the most authoritative source I found was Ornstein and Hunkins's book Curriculum: Foundations, Principles and Issues, which iterates the first four on the list (p. 68), and related them to schools of philosophy generally (realism, idealism, and pragmatism), with existentialism being added by others later to address the obvious gap in their list.

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A Framework for Understanding the Power of Platforms
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, 2022/09/09

This post is about why platforms are successful and how they might evolve in the future, but I think it hints at what will become a deeper issue of discussion in the near-term. It centers around the question of governance. Asking whether a distributed autonomous organization (DAO) can remove middlemen and reduce transactions costs, Marshall Van Allstyne argues "that's only half the story. The other half of the story is again the positive orchestration of externalities... DAOs that implement governance, such as adding smart contracts, could potentially be a threat to platforms with very interesting new implications." In my own work, I refer to this as a deontic capability of AI. It's where the system determines what should be the case. This is a key element to governance, and we can imagine AI doing many of the orchestration functions performed by platforms today - not just recommending and delivering resources, but judgement-based tasks such as defining when speech may be objectionable, or defining success conditions for (say) degree completion, or creating a long-term institutional strategy.

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The Hole in Her Head
Steve Dodson, Languagehat, 2022/09/09

The full NY Times article (archived) is behind a paywall, but Steve Dodson performs a service by quoting it at length and offering comments. The gist is that while the person in question was missing parts of her brain corresponding to Broca's area, widely considered essential to the development of language, she was nonetheless able to speak and read, as these skills developed in other parts of her brain. "The language skills the doctors were most worried about at my birth — speaking, reading and writing — turned out to be my professional passions," she writes. The story supports the idea that "language in the brain is distributed throughout the entire brain," and not located in one place.

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Scientists Asked Students to Try to Fool Anti-Cheating Software. They Did.
Aaron Gordon, Vice, 2022/09/09

I can imagine the company wanting to litigate, but they might have a harder time against the authors of this study (12 page PDF) who found that "none of the cheating students were flagged by Proctorio" and suggest that "the use of online proctoring is therefore best compared to taking a placebo: it has some positive influence, not because it works but because people believe that it works, or that it might work." Ouch! The article in Vice also reports that while "David Lux, a spokesperson for Proctorio, referred Motherboard to three other studies on 'the efficacy of online proctoring'...  none of the three studies were controlled experiments (and) none of them sought to find out if online proctoring software is effective at catching cheaters."

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Learning Module: Anti-Racism, EDI and Positionality in Teaching and Learning
Jessica Snow, Alix Redmond, Alicia Revington, University of Calgary, 2022/09/09

This is a resource hosted by the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning at the University of Calgary. The three-lesson resource is clear, factual and to the point. I might quibble with precise wording here and there but overall I have no complaints. It would be especially useful for people who haven't been exposed to issues of racism and discrimination in a systemic way and would help frame their thinking on the subject. It doesn't make accusations or suggest that people should feel guilty; instead it describes the existing reality today and offers concrete steps to help people, and especially aspiring teachers, to reflect on their own beliefs and practice, and ensure they are offering learning in an inclusive and non-discriminatory way.

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