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Professional Development Opportunities in Educational Technology and Education For November 18, 2024 to June 2025, Edition #52
Clayton R. Wright, 2024/11/15

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The 52^nd edition contains selected professional development opportunities that primarily focus on the use of technology in educational settings and on teaching, learning, and educational administration. Only listings until June 2025 are most complete as dates, locations, or Internet addresses (URLs) were not available for a number of events held after that date. 277 page MS Word.

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Incremental Jobs and Data Quality Are On a Collision Course - Part 1 - The Problem
Jack Vanlightly, Jack Vanlightly, 2024/11/15

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The exciting bit comes in the first paragraph, where Jack Vanlightly references "the rise of DuckDB and its message that big data is dead."This leads to a world of incremental data processing jobs using data sets that are "inherently small, corresponding to things like people, products, marketing campaigns, sales funnel, win/loss rates, etc." The problem, though, is what happens to data quality. "Bad things happen when uncontrolled changes collide with incremental jobs that feed their output back into other software systems or pollute other derived data sets.... The ingest-raw-data->stage->clean->transform approach has a huge amount of inertia and a lot of tooling, but it is becoming less and less suitable as time passes."

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Internet freedom is fading in the new era of social control
Andrey Mir, Big Think, 2024/11/15

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The argument: The evolution of the internet as a medium makes stricter regulation of online behavior inevitable" The article traces the history of the web through five phases, the last of which depicts "digital platforms as proxies for state control through social scoring." But how inevitable is this? The turning point is the transition from 3.0 to 4.0 - that is, from "algorithms and digital platforms" to "platforms' political compliance and the restoration of corporate control". That happens only if we continue down the route of platforms, both in educational technology and online community generally. But there has been a lot of resistance to this.

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Advancing AI adoption and sustainable innovation
Digital Education Council, 2024/11/15

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Members of the Digital Education Council (mostly from business and management schools) have signed this short declaration (5 page PDF) following their inaugural meeting this week. Most interesting is their desire to "commit to developing strategies to maintain curricula relevance, at speed with the rapidly-evolving pace of industry."

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Green Open Access - Free for Authors But at a Cost for Readers
Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2024/11/15

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We expect The Scholarly Kitchen to represent the publishers' point of view, since that is its intent, but in this case it ventures into the realm of pure propaganda. No open access charges subscription fees to readers. In 'Gold' open access, publishers charge authors 'article publication fees', while in 'Green' open access no such fees are charged. So how is there a "cost" to readers? According to this article, it's in the time and effort it takes to find the 'version of record' of an article as compared to what is found in typical 'green' venues such as preprint repositories. This argument, of course, assumes readers want to find the 'version of record', and the author is ready with a 'fear, uncertainty, doubt (FUD)' argument. The author also argues that green versions are hard to find, compared to gold versions, ignoring such services as Unpaywall that index open access articles.

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The EdTech Revolution Has Failed
Jared Cooney Horvath, 2024/11/15

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Obviously you can't simply cite some PISA scores to show that 'ed tech is failing'. Minimally, it may well be that schools today are teaching less of what PISA is testing (eg. computer and information literacy). Additionally, there is a drift in what PISA tests for one year to the next (they don't test against curricula, they test against what PISA test designers believe a 15-year old should know, independently of curricula). There are additional factors, such as the pandemic, but not just that, also war and political change. And a final challenge is that most 15-year olds aren't actually taught using ed tech.

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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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