OLDaily

An avalanche is coming: Higher education and the revolution ahead
Michael Barber, Katelyn Donnelly, Saad Rizvi, Institute for Public Policy Research, 2022/09/20

Here is a video of a workshop offered in the 'Catalyst' series by the Penn Graduate School of Education (GSE) and as the title suggests it's more focused on the business of edtech than the tech of edtech. It's worth looking at presentations like Katelyn Donnelly's 'Next Massive Trends in Education Technology' (slides) to see how edtech is being viewed in this context. She offers 'four trillion dollar facts': edtech is now unstoppable, basic literacy and math are still challenges, there's a poor ROI on education (evidenced by $1.75 trillion outstanding student loan debt), and the rise of freelancers (contributing $1.2 trillion to the U.S. economy). The result? It's in this report (77 page PDF). The traditional university is being unbundled. "In the era of modern technology, when students can individually and collectively create knowledge themselves, outstanding quality without high fixed costs is both plausible and desirable."

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Reflective Equilibrium in a Turbulent Lake: AI Generated Art and The Future of Artists
Anders Sandberg, Practical Ethics, 2022/09/20

What are the ethics of artificially generated content? This article focuses on art, but it could be anything, really, and where it focuses on (new and would-be) artists, we could think of it as applying to any student in any learning context. In particular, we could (and should) as what the difference is between a student looking at a wide range of resources and coming up with a project or presentation, and the same student using an AI tool to accomplish the same task. Sure, we'd like the student to do the work themselves, but isn't it a bit like training students in artisan crafts in a world dominated by manufacturing? Mean while, what is the artisan's standing in this new world? "Finding a moral reflective equilibrium requires locating a balance between general principles (creative freedom in art and technology, moral rights to one's creations, …) and particular issues (the nature of Internet, globalization, the business of imagery, censorship, …)."

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https://edtechteacher.org/making-sense-of-the-metaverse-in-education/
Tom Daccord, EdTechTeacher, 2022/09/20

This article is a bit disjointed as it struggles to pull together the strands of virtual reality, blockchain and artificial intelligence that combine to form the metaverse. But it does make the important point that the metaverse will require interconnectivity between systems, something that doesn't exist at the moment, and would require corporations to take very different stance on cooperation and competition than they do today. It concludes with four scenarios, including the greater possibility for fully immersive learning, increasing gamification of learning, and the struggles teachers and parents will face to make sense of this new world.

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Systems Change: Making the Aspirational Actionable
Alison Badgett, Stanford Social Innovation Review, 2022/09/20

This is one of those articles that reads better from the bottom up than the top down. Reading it this way will allow you to learn what systems change is and how to do it before the more polemical section on why it's important. And it highlights one of the article's more important points, namely, "We can't get to a place where individuals and groups shape society to meet their own needs by imposing on them a conception of what those needs are and how to address them—hence the field's important and growing emphasis on proximate leadership. Those proximate to a problem understand how inequity and oppression occur at the individual level because they've lived it or are otherwise proximate to those who have."

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World’s first women’s liberation journal by Dwarkanath Ganguly, one who fought for women literacy
GetBengal, 2022/09/20

This is a short tribute to Dwarkanath Ganguly (1844-1898), a schoolteacher in British-ruled Bengal (India) in the late 19th-century. It focuses on his support for "Kadambini Basu nee Ganguly, who was one of the first female graduates of India and later went on to study medicine and became one of the first female doctors." But it also cites his weekly magazine called Abalabandhab (Friend of Women) "through which he began bringing to light concrete cases of exploitation and the extreme suffering of women." The Wikipedia article on Ganguly also describes his work supporting women's education, including the founding of schools and "untiring campaigning to let women students appear for university examination."

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The Coming Sea-Change in Teacher Education
Chris Dede, Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 2022/09/20

According to Chris Dede (9 page PDF), "The world has become hybrid--and will stay that way because many people and organizations value the new opportunities this presents." The pandemic "has forced a global enhancement of technical capacity such that even small cities across the world have high bandwidth communications empowering economic, civic, entertainment, and personal ends." This means "Developing pre-and in-service teachers adept in face-to-face and in online instruction (not one or the other) is both a necessity to prepare students for life in a hybrid world and an opportunity to extend the ecosystem of learning environments and instructional strategies." Image: Tribune.

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New Context, New Teachers, and New Teacher Education
Yong Zhao, Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 2022/09/20

"Although all schools are forced to return to normal, to the education that everyone had," writes Yong Zhao (7 page PDF), "it would be shameful to lose what COVID gave us in education." What did the pandemic give us? It showed, first, that students can learn online, which means "there is no need for teachers to instruct." And second, "when students are provided opportunities to engage in self-determined learning, they are intrinsically motivated." This, he says, allows teachers to focus on their core tasks: first, "serving as a talent coach for each and every student," second, "to become a community organizer," third, to "be a project manager" to help students identify and solve problems, fourth, "to find and curate resources", and fifth, to be "a human educator instead of an instructional machine" with "his or her strengths and passions." Image: WEF.

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Blockchain as a Learning Management System for Laboratories 4.0
Abdallah Al-Zoubi, Mamoun Dmour, Rakan Aldmour, International Journal of Online and Biomedical Engineering, 2022/09/20

This (19 page PDF) is a pretty good and very detailed description of a use case for blockchain technology in education, and specifically, a mechanism for supporting the use of digital labs by students working in a learning management system (in this case, Moodle). The parameters for access and use of the lab are established using an Ethereum smart contract, while data is linked from the blockchain and stored using the interplanetary file system (IPFS), which provides robustness against single-point failures or intrusions. The difficulty with this approach (in my view) is that the technology it's using might not be more reliable than the technology it replaces, and there are in addition cost overheads (in the form of Ethereum gas fees) to consider.

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