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Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

I don't want to be too critical because I think their hearts are in the right place, but I have to admit disappointment on reading the majority of these articles. These articles as a whole are very light reading, and lacking the sort of clarity and depth I would have hoped this subjct merits. I mean, I just did a study on data literacy, so I looked forward this article on data literacy, but I came away with the question of whether the authors had read anything about the subject before opining. Similarly, the chapter on digital pragmatism is a mish-mash of sometimes unsourced observations on satisficing, fractals, murmurations, collaboration, conferences, and butterflies, most of which has nothing to do with pragmatism. The article on higher education as commons rails against the 'education factory' model (styled for no particular reason as an 'imginary) and recommends "resolving the collective action problem by cooperating, not competing."

The paper on 'openness' as a strategy against platformisation describes a process where their students write a manifesto, discover that open is hard, and ultimately "discarded strategies that turned out to be radical and simplistic, such as promoting FLOSS as an alternative" (this, tbh, was one of the better papers). I'm still not sure how the dialogue of assessment and social good connects with ethics in any way; there's no examination at all of what ethics would be in such a context, just the blanket assertion that "what matters the most in assessment — not technical matters, but ethics and good education " and that's the extent of it). Goodness knows, I'm not a stickler for whether authors have 'read so-and-so', but I wasn't seeing any indication here that the subjects being discussed have been the focus of a wide and rich literature over the last few years.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Dec 23, 2024 10:46 p.m.

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