OLDaily

Welcome to Online Learning Daily, your best source for news and commentary about learning technology, new media, and related topics. We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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Development and Validation of a Critical Thinking Assessment-Scale Short Form
Rita Payan-Carreira, Ana Sacau-Fontenla, Hugo Rebelo, Luis Sebastião, Dimitris Pnevmatikos, MDPI, 2022/12/26

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This study (19 page PDF) is worth a look for a variety of reasons. It presents a validation of a self-assessment survey of critical thinking (CrT) skills. Self-assessment surveys are tricky, because of the tendency of people to lie when answering questions like "I restate another person's statements to clarify the meaning." Even so, such measures can be validated, for example, by showing a correlation between survey results and actual results on objective tests of respondents' skills. Another reason to look at this article is to study the actual definition of critical thinking. It's not a melange of pseudologic like lateral thinking or growth mindsets; "Standardized tests are based on well-established CrT-skills taxonomies, such as Ennis' and Facione's, and have been used for a long time to measure the CrT skills in students." The attached image lists these skills.

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The future of journalism is not you
Megan Lucero, Shirish Kulkarni, Nieman Lab, 2022/12/26

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There are important lessons for education in this sequence of stories. "We have to face the truth," write Megan Lucero and Shirish Kulkarni. "Most mainstream news outlets create harm in our communities. They misrepresent, exploit experiences, scapegoat those experiencing marginalization," etc. They do this to promote commercial interests tied to their owners. For example, "in the Southeast, power company money flows to news sites that attack their critics." Another article warns, "the creator economy will be astroturfed." We need to "hold the platforms that incentivize outrage, harassment, and disinformation accountable, but we must also be sure not to replicate the flaws of traditional media in a new setting." Now while all of this describes news media, the same considerations hold for education.

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Free software programs a risk to students' privacy - EdTech industry body
John Gerritsen, RNZ, 2022/12/26

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According to this Radio New Zealand (RNZ) article, "The Education Technology Association (EdTechNZ) said... It said many schools were using free and under-maintained programs, because they could not afford better and did not know enough about the risks." The article is obviously promoting the local New Zealand software industry, but it's doing so in such a way as to confuse 'free' software such as Twitter and Facebook' with 'free' software such as Mastodon and WordPress, and by suggesting (falsely, in my view) that free software carries privacy risks that commercial software does not. Says Dave Lane, quite accurately, " It's a confusing message, unfortunately, and will almost certainly scare any edTech procurement people into the hands of high priced but still proprietary and possibly surveillance capitalist options, because they just don't understand this stuff."

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America’s Adult Education System Is Broken. Here’s How Experts Say We Can Fix It.
Annie Waldman, Aliyya Swaby, Anna Clark, ProPublica, 2022/12/26

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Sometimes even when news media is trying to do the right thing it misses the mark. There's a lot to like about this story but the method of interviewing 'experts' and on the basis of that recommending solutions to a problem is flawed. Yes, I agree with some (not all) of these experts and support some of their solutions, but that's irrelevant. The people selected as experts are almost all involved with one or another solutions provider, not a researcher in the field with a much broader perspective. And even if they were, the sample size is far too small to get a range of opinions. We don't know which views represent a genuine consensus and which are idiosyncratic. The result is a set of recommendations firmly rooted in 'the way it has always been done, only more so', for example, more in-person classes, more job training, etc.

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