By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A broken paradigm? What education needs to learn from evidence-based medicine
Lucinda McKnight, Andy Morgan, Journal of Education Policy, 2019/02/22
I'm not sure how long this SlideShare version of the paper, but you should download it while you can;  Microsoft will ak you login to download, but the ResearchGate download works). Here's the paywall version ($US43/hour, if you can believe it, and they wonder why people hate publishers). Here's the gist: a lot of people are promoting evidence-based education, which is drawn from evidence-based medicine, but they aren't as quick to took at the problems being found in evidence-based medicine. "There is no pure, superior version of scientifically produced truth in the form of the RCT or meta-analysis, as medicine well knows.  EBM has not yet fixed the problems it set out to solve... There is no excuse for education to continue to pretend that this superior truth". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Analysis — What If We Personalized Education Funding? How Routing Dollars to Students Instead of Schools Could Fund a More Nimble System
Travis Pillow, Paul Hill, The 74, 2019/02/27
The idea touted in the title is being floated by a publication created to support the charter school movement. It would also be supported by proponents of a voucher movement. I don't agree with it, but think it's important to look at the argument. As I read it, I consider the provision of other services - health care, say? From where I sit, it makes the most sense simply to fund the services directly and ensure that people can access them as needed, so we don't have the overhead of distrfibuting vouchers (or whatever), collecting payments, and all the rest. And it is moreover not clear what problem the use of vouchers solves. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. MOOCs and the Master's Degree
Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology, 2019/02/27
You have to read to the end of the second page of this three-page article, but the gist is this: "the MicroMasters effort has become a branding and recruitment coup — whether for career acceleration or master's gateways — that should lay poaching worries to rest." While it may look like a very small number of students pass through the MicroMasters and into the institution, the number is still in the thousands, and moreover, "there was no record of them having ever had interest in UMUC before". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Advancing academia with Wikipedia
Sharon Aschaiek, University Affairs, 2019/02/27
Short description of how universities are designating Wikipedians in residence (WIR) to support the institutional mandate through the coordination of editing and other activities related to the online encyclopedia. "Wikimedia offers free recruitment, training and content creation support to institutions seeking WIRs. According to the organization, these services fall in line with its goal to encourage cultural and educational institutions to share their resources freely on Wikimedia sites". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The impact of conformity in education
Dave Cormier, Dave’s Educational Blog, 2019/02/27
According to Dave Cormier, "When we identify the technology and not the people beyond we missed the systemic cultural practices that are helping to shape the people who are the bad actors on those platforms." Technology may be an enabler, but it's the people who actually behave one way or another. That's why "we need our schools to replicate models of inclusivity and equity that are not about the imposition of conformity. That means that we accept people the way they come in the door, and we help them come up with answers that belong to them". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Casualties of the future: college closures and queen sacrifices
Bryan Alexander, 2019/02/26
The primary value of this article is that it lists a welter of college closures and cutbacks, a list suitable for reference when encountering a person who says that the existing system is secure and unchanging. Bryan Alexander postulates that we are now in a boundary zone, "right in the midst of a switching period, a liminal space, marked by uncertainty and instability". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. It’s about Trust, Stupid! Why Blockchain-based BlockCerts are the wrong solution to a false problem (2/3)
Serge Ravet, Learning Futures, 2019/02/26
Serge Ravet offers an extended and well-argued case against the use of blockcerts in education. The term 'blockcert' refers to a specific approach using blockchain to validate digital credentials. The question being posed asks what advantage they have over badges and (especially) the Verifiable Claims W3C specification. The problem, argues Ravet, is different from the solution offered by blockchain: "A credential is not fungible, i.e. its ownership can’t be transferred to someone else or transformed into something different, like exchanging a credential for a bowl of lentil stew. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Do Better at Conference Diversity
Hopper, 2019/02/26
This is good advice not just for conference organizers but for educational facilitators generally. Suggestions range from the obvious (have women on your organizing committee) to the unexpected (consider alternatives to the conference t-shirt). I like that they recommend not just gender diversity but also "racial diversity, age diversity and other forms of diversity." I would add that you don't just want different colours and shapes, you want people offering diverse perspectives. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Once hailed as unhackable, blockchains are now getting hacked
Mike Orcutt, MIT Technology Review, 2019/02/21
One of my colleagues, Andriy Drozdyuk, has been saying all along that there is only one real blockchain, Bitcoin, because the innovation is as much social as it is technical. It is the investment and number of distinct users that makes it secure, not the technology. The recent Ethereum Classic hack may be proving him right. In this hack, bad actors took over more than half of the nodes and then began to write 'double spend' transactions, effectively defrauding the system. Ths is th sort of attack blockchain technology - though not necessarily Bitcoin - is vulnerable to. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Vast amounts of data about our children are being harvested via apps used by schools. This is what is being collected and stored
Jamie Manolev, Anna Sullivan, Roger Slee, EduResearch Matters, 2019/02/21
This article references a recent report published by the UK Children’s Commission on data collection in schools, but the bulk of the article is dedicated to the data-collection activities of ClassDojo. The authors write, " New research examining ClassDojo is raising concerns about how student data about behaviour may be collected, accumulated and then used." The range of data collected is a bit astonishing, and includes such things as "working hard, on-task, and displaying grit". More...