Open Access and its Discontents: A British View from Outside the Sciences
Richard Fisher, Open and Shut?, 2017/12/21
In this post Richard Fisher argues that "polemical articles by Open Access enthusiasts claiming to know ‘what researchers want’ (when in reality what they mean is ‘what I and my immediate peer groups would find most helpful’) can be profoundly off-putting to those outside the circle of advocacy." There's a presumption of "universal acceptance of the principles behind Open Access" which leads him to "wonder which planet these agencies are inhabiting." Some examples: in STEM, research is used to create other products and services, which ultimately pay for the research, but in non-STEM fields the research output is the product. More...

The New Media Consortium: its sudden death and what comes next
Bryan Alexander, 2017/12/21
"The New Media Consortium (NMC) regrets to announce that because of apparent errors and omissions by its former Controller and Chief Financial Officer, the organization finds itself insolvent. Consequently, NMC must cease operations immediately.” Bryan Alexander writes. More...

Patterns in Contemporary Canadian Picture Books: Radical Change in Action
Beverley Brenna, Shuwen Sun, Yina Liu, in education, 2017/12/21
I was disappointed to find that there were no pictures in this article about picture books, just a few tables. This article doesn't ask whether picture books are still “the staple of children’s literature” - that's just a given - but instead enquires into 'how exactly they are changing in contemporary iterations," and in particular, whether there is "evidence of Radical Change" (capitalized because there's a Reference). More...

A Robot Goes to College
Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed, 2017/12/21
Not only did the robot pass the course, it identified 31 forms of love. That's pretty interesting, but I thinlk it's weird that a course in the Philosophy of Love included " a class debate about the use of nonlethal versus lethal weapons (an extension of a discussion about love and conflict) with students from an ethics course at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point." Maybe it's just me, but it feels like everything is being militarized. More...

Our Staggering Class Divide Starts With Childrearing (Joan Williams)
Larry Cuban, Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice, 2017/12/21
There is a truth in this article and an even deeper lie. The truth is that upper class children are educated differently than lower class children. "The ideology of natural growth prevalent among the poor and the working class contrasts with the 'concerted cultivation' of the professional elite.... Concerted cultivation is the rehearsal for a life of work devotion: the time pressure, the intense competition, the exhaustion with it all, the ethic of putting work before family." The suggestion nhere is that if we taught poor people to increase their drive, they would be successful to. More...

Introduction to Psychology with Professor Paul Bloom
Paul Bloom, Yale University, 2017/12/20
Interesting project. According to the email, "Knowledge 4 All Foundation together with the UNESCO Chair in OER in Slovenia is testing a new machine translation service specifically tailored for educational texts from EN to 11 languages." This is one of two videos they're using as a test case (Physics I: Classical Mechanics is the other). More...

Global education rankings to measure tolerance
Sean Coughlan, BBC News, 2017/12/20
According to this report, the OECD's Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) will be testing students' "global competence" in the next round of evaluations. "It's intended to find out how well young people can understand other people's views and cultures, how they can look beyond the partisan echo chamber of social media and distinguish reliable evidence from fake news." The tests, and the results, could be controversial. More...

Google Maps's Moat
Justin O’Beirne, 2017/12/20

The 'moat' in the title represents how hard it will be for competitors, like Apple Maps, to catch up. More...

A Field Guide to 'jobs that don't exist yet'
Benjamin Doxtdator, A Long View on Education, 2017/12/20
I found this article via the most recent of Audrey Watters's posts summarizing 2017. It traces the origin of the claim that "We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t exist yet, using technologies that haven’t been invented, in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.” It also attempts to debunk it. The claim appears to have its origin in a Bill Clinton speech in 1996. More...

Measuring And Driving Usage Of Teams For Education
Sam McNeill, Microsoft Education Blog, 2017/12/19
The headline refers to Microsoft Teams, and not to teams in general. There's a reference back to this article on how to measure activity in Teams. More...