321 Matching Annotations
  1. May 2022
    1. Innovation is opening up educational policies and practices.

      A tool one can use to think about different ways of opening education is Open Learning Experience Bingo, a "game" you can apply to learning experiences and identify and/or imagine different ways to open them up.

  2. Sep 2021
    1. seeing spaces of opportunity

      I'm seeing a space of opportunity in the way we map and plan at the intersection of knowledge practices — like teaching and learning, research, publication, archiving — and tools. I'm thinking about ways we can use practices like Jennifer Hardwick outlines here to map and plan in new ways that emphasize human activity and connections rather than technologies.

      What spaces of opportunity are you seeing?

  3. Jun 2021
    1. Te Hiku Media gathered huge swathes of Māori language data. Corporates are now trying to get the rights to it

      Example of tension between indigenous IP and commercial use.

    1. We hope to develop a license that is an international example for indigenous people's retention of mana over data and other intellectual property in a Western construct.

      Indigenous people's license example.

  4. May 2021
    1. The future of the university as an open knowledge institution that institutionalizes diversity and contributes to a common resource of knowledge: a manifesto.

      A manifesto calling on universities to become fully open knowledge institutions.

  5. Apr 2021
    1. Higher Education Digital Capability Framework An open-source capability framework for higher education. 4 dimensions, 16 domains and 70+ capabilities.

      Digital education capability map/landscape from https://www.holoniq.com.

    1. 2021 Global Learning Landscape An open source taxonomy for the future of education. Mapping the learning and talent innovation landscape.

      CC BY licensed framework for education landscapes from https://www.holoniq.com

    1. evolve our decision-making structures to more directly imbue care, equity, and representation into our work and leadership

      A way of talking about what needs to be done in organizations to better support equity/representation.

  6. Mar 2021
    1. A more useful model is to understand all realms of the qualitative, ethnographic and quantitative experimental paradigms, and to seek balance in employing methodologies appropriate to the context and timing of research questions in the human-centered design process.

      On balancing informal qualitative and formal quantitative approaches to human-centered design.

  7. Jan 2021
  8. May 2020
    1. The idea behind ACE is that we elevate three characteristics that are clear, context sensitive, values driven and mission aligned, and we use them to plan assignment-, course- and institution-level responses to COVID-19 in the areas of our university that are connected to teaching and learning.

      You know I love a good framework, and the ACE framework from Robin DeRosa is aces! Adaptability: create flexibility for learners (and everyone). Connection: connect activities beyond the classroom. Equity: include everyone.

  9. Feb 2020
  10. Dec 2019
    1. There are many excellent available resources about how to introduce zines into higher education (check out this excellent Resource List from Barnard College), but for a few examples: Sakina Laksimi-Morrow, Teaching and Learning Center Fellow at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, invited fellow graduate students to share their teaching assignments and syllabi in Developing a Socially Conscious Pedagogy. Simmons College librarian Dawn Stahura has written about working with a faculty member to read and develop zines in a Sociology class, relating to content about eating disorders.

      Links to zine learning experiences collected by Elvis Bakaitis.

    2. Zines as Open Pedagogy

      My annotations here are a (partial) record of how I'm going through this open education assignment while playing "open education experience bingo".

      My bingo card for this learning experience record will be published on my blog. Caveat: I didn't end up making an annotation for everything I checked off on the bingo card.

    3. the discomfort of grading highly personal work. Sometimes keeping the spirit of “open pedagogy” may involve the idea of “closed” –  considerations of student privacy, personal spaces, and making it equally ok to restrict access

      Openness on including and/or creating new/different evaluation strategies that are sensitive to personal dimensions of works produced in the experience.

    4. there’s a strong overlap between the representation of queer, or otherwise marginalized authors, and this very welcoming, open format

      Openness on including people.

    1. What Open Education Taught Me

      My annotations here are a record of how I'm going through this student's reflection on open education experiences while playing "open education experience bingo".

      My bingo card for this learning experience record is published on my blog.

    2. To Put Yourself Out There and Make Connections

      Openness in connecting to people.

    3. To Trust the System

      Wow. This seems contradictory, but in a good way?

      Trust in the system (of openness) because it will help you expand your horizons.

      Openness in reflecting on roles and recognition, and connecting on recognition.

    4. My professors are still learning too.

      Openness on surfacing and including roles.

    5. To Collaborate With My Peers

      This is a very rich section: openness in developing skills, connecting materials, skills, roles, feedback and evaluation to other learners, and including other learners in the experience.

    6. Open education comes down to one word: accountability.

      Openness on surfacing and reflecting on roles and design.

    7. To Take Control of My Education

      Openness on reflecting about design.

    8. To Keep An Open Mind

      Openness on reflecting about materials.

    9. Open education is the philosophy and belief that people, even the world should produce, share, and build on knowledge that everyone has access to.

      Maybe one of the best definitions of open education I have ever seen.

  11. Nov 2019
    1. meta-cognitive dimension

      I definitely recognize the value of metacognition in learning experiences; I'm wondering, though, how it's related to openness. Here is one of those places where I'm trying to work through what "open" means, and trying to connect these various dimensions together. The others I can see in terms of somehow reducing barriers/uncovering/connecting across boundaries.... is this one kind of like surfacing in that it's important to be able to open something in other ways? Like if you reflect, then you can better move in new directions?

    2. prerequisite

      Nice point here! I hadn't thought of it before but yes, if something isn't "surfaced" it's hard to then open it in some other way. And surfacing could be a form of opening insofar as it is related to something like transparency.

    3. Design

      This one feels to me more like a "what" than a "how"; in other words, the way I'm thinking at the moment, design of a learning experience could be one of the ingredients that is opened up in some of the other ways (shared, participants can be involved in it, it can be inclusive or not, etc.). But perhaps I'm not quite getting the point here?

      Even in the example it sounds to me like the design could be the thing that's opened and they way it's opened (by people representing different experiences and points of view) could be in terms of the "include" aspect.

    4. Develop:

      As I'm reading through this I'm wondering how to differentiate "develop" from "create." On reading and re-reading I'm still seeing create/revise/remix and modify/extend as similar. Can you explain the difference further?

    5. there’s the question of HOW it’s being opened.

      I am really intrigued by this project, and particularly by this list of "how" things may be opened. That's partly because for a couple of years I've been trying to think through for myself all these various dimensions and in what way they could all be said to share something that makes them "open" (if that's at all a possible task). I've gone through several iterations of talks/workshops about this at different places and still don't feel like I've got it! So I'm curious to reflect on this list further. A couple of thoughts follow below.

    1. Wiley’s (2013) notion of “renewable assignments,”

      I thought the term "renewable" as opposed to "disposable" came up later. The word "renewable" does not appear in David's 2013 blog post cited here.

    2. We accept as axiomatic that students learn by doing

      While I personally agree that "learning by doing" is perhaps one of the or even the most powerful forms of pedagogy, a very large part of current and historical pedagogy does not really engage doing. So either not ALL learning involves doing, or the majority of education that happens without doing doesn't involve learning.

    3. We define OER-enabled pedagogy as the set of teaching and learning practices that are only possible or practical in the context of the 5R permissions which are characteristic of OER.

      Definition of "OER enabled pedagogy".

    4. Those interested in OER care about the way the word “open” is used in educational contexts.

      Sure. And others also care about the way open is used in educational contexts beyond OER, to mean more than just specific copyright statuses.

    5. OER-enabled pedagogy

      First use of "OER-enabled pedgogy" outside of David Wiley's blog?

    1. People were really excited about the day of sadness.

      Literally LOLed.

    2. This is an activity I stole from Bonnie Stewart.

      "Stealing" from family is a core practice in OEP.

    3. A large part of the ‘resources’ conversation in OER is this kind of problem. Cheaper access to books. More people using books. Nice measurable problems that can be fixed.

      Lowering costs for learning materials via OER: A complicated problem vs what Dave calls complex problems, like open pedagogies.

    4. The Day of Happiness

      A masterful way to help shape the conversation.

  12. Aug 2019
    1. Rather, the real threat is the creeping forces of privatization that continue to undermine our public mission. If we are to reclaim that mission, to reclaim control of the work produced in and by our colleges and universities, we must do so as a sector, acting not just in solidarity with but in generosity toward the other institutions to which we are inevitably connected and also toward the public that we all jointly serve.

      A call to act together as a community: "to go far, go together".

    2. I asked the provost what the possibilities might be for a very important, highly visible research university—one that understands its primary mission to be service to the public good—to remove the tenure and promotion logjam in the transformation of scholarly communication by convening the entire academic campus, from the provost through the deans, chairs, and faculty, in a collective project of revising—really, reimagining—all of its personnel processes and the standards on which they rely in light of a primary emphasis on the public good. What would become possible if all of those policies worked to ensure that what was considered to be "excellence" in research and teaching had its basis in the university's core service mission?

      The core project of open knowledge practices.

  13. Jul 2019
    1. I argue that digital literacies should notbe taught as a technical skill, but should be seen as a partof cultivating critical citizenship

      This is an incredibly important point: too often explorations of digital practices focus on skills (often even then too narrowly defined, as when specific software programs are taught, rather than higher level skills about using an entire software category, like word processing, or spreadsheets), when they should be focusing on how digital practices fit in to wider human life, as in citizenship.

    Tags

    Annotators

  14. May 2019
    1. Jenae Cohn

      You can also follow Jenae on Twitter.

    2. help students become expert learners

      Yes! The overall goal is to empower students to have agency over their digital fluency, not just enable them to use this or that software or technique.

    3. different applications and platforms

      Yes! For example: practice in using spreadsheets in general, rather than just what to click on in a single product like MS Excel.

    4. instructional designers are key players

      And maybe librarians, who along with IDs are well-placed to work across curricula and embed digital literacies practices strategically?

    5. literacies

      Yay! I love the plural form in all cases. There is always more than one "literacy".

    6. it is not always clear where students go to access training for these skills

      Like with writing, digital literacies/skills/fluency should be incorporated across the curriculum.

    7. The norms, applications, and protocols required to engage in digital research, reading, and writing require explicit instruction.

      Yes! If we expect students to do something, we should devote learning time to helping them learn how/advance their knowledge.

    8. ability to leverage technology to create new knowledge, new challenges, and new problems and to complement these with critical thinking, complex problem solving, and social intelligence to solve the new challenges

      Another definition of digital literacy, recast as digital fluency.

    9. shorthand for the myriad social practices and conceptions of engaging in meaning making mediated by texts that are produced, received, distributed, exchanged etc., via digital codification

      A definition of digital literacy.

    10. Device ownership alone doesn't make people digitally literate

      A key point: a lot of people might have technology, but that doesn't mean they have built up knowledge and skills about how it works or how to do things with it.

  15. Apr 2019
    1. The example of the Linux kernel shows that this is completely possible.

      I think the Linux kernel analogy breaks down even more in considering "the other 93%" of educational content, which David has already identified here as more niche, less kernelesque, than content for core courses. Seems to me, the more specialized and rarely used something is — either in digital technology or in content — the less likely it is going to be the focus of widespread, shared activity.

      If commercial publishers could rely on OER content for core classes and generate revenue from wrapping them in additional services (as David describes here), what is their incentive to devote any resources to labor-intensive, niche content that would have far lower revenue margins?

    2. Traditional textbook content like words and images are just like the operating system kernel – kind of boring.

      This is the part of the argument here I don't find convincing. I'm not sure we can liken content — yes even "traditional textbook content" — to OS kernels or roads as a kind of "boring" infrastructure. Content is an expression of knowledges/understandings right? If anything, content seems more like the "interesting" part that relies on the kernels/roads.

      Yet I am interested in the idea of thinking of content as PUBLIC infrastructure, in the sense that like roads, we have common interests in securing public sources for the resources necessary to produce and maintain educational content.

  16. Mar 2019
    1. four goals

      Ivanka's restatement of the Board's four goals, stated in more detail elsewhere.

    2. Tim — Apple

      Here's how Trump's now infamous possible misstatement has been transcribed, not as a mistake, nor with a slash ("to save time & words"), but with an em dash, suggesting that Trump was thanking both Tim, and his company Apple, together in shorthand.

    1. Open Initiatives in Universities

      Benefits of OKI for EDUs:

      1. Wider access to info.
      2. Reclaiming scholarly production.
      3. Increased open info and technology creation.
      4. Research ROI.
      5. Greater openness -> stronger science.
      6. Address unequal distribution of data/flows: expose "data shadows".
      7. Lower scholcomm costs.
    2. crises of discrimination, particularly around such identity-based facets as gender, race and ethnicity

      crises of discrimination in open projects

    3. challenging power relationships between makers and users of knowledge

      shift of power between knowledge makers and users

    4. Data globalisation

      Data is crossing borders at a higher rate than people or goods. Wondering how this is measured as data, people, and goods are different types of entities.

    1. DXtera Institute is a non-profit, collaborative member-based consortium dedicated to transforming student and institutional outcomes in higher education.

      DXtera Institute is a non-profit, collaborative member-based consortium dedicated to transforming student and institutional outcomes in higher education. We specialize in helping higher education professionals drive more efficient access to information and insights for effective decision-making and realize long-term cost savings, by simplifying and removing barriers to systems integration and improving data aggregation and control.

      With partners across the U.S. and Europe, our consortium includes some of the brightest minds in education and technology, all working together to solve critical higher education issues on a global scale.

    1. 3 Tips to Help You Prototype a Service
      1. Design only the details that matter
      2. Factor in the before and after
      3. Involve users and employees
    1. But when you think of it, our educational institutions aren’t built to recognize the complexity between pasts and futures. In effect, we build superhighways with one on ramp, and lots of off ramps that lead to dead ends.

      I'm going to forgive the automobilist metaphor because the point is just so dang right!

    2. But many of the conditions that make these settings deeply uncomfortable are larger than that level of course-contained pedagogy.

      Amen! Even worse maybe in K12, where all the social issues we are not addressing elsewhere are expected to be solved in under-funded classrooms.

    3. Scaling In: The Community Dimensions of Innovation

      Great reading for answers to the question "yes, but does it scale?"

    4. To solve the problem of ‘scaling up’ requires ‘scaling in’ –by this we mean developing the designs and infrastructure needed to support effective use of an innovation.

      On "scaling-in" rather than "scaling-up".

  17. Feb 2019
  18. quickthoughts.jgregorymcverry.com quickthoughts.jgregorymcverry.com
    1. Why an HTML/CSS First Approach Works for #OER and why #OER Must Work for an HTML First Approach

      I'm in strong support of an HTML-first approach for both humans and OER. Great stuff Greg! Love the offline, non-digital learning activities!

    2. For too long the field of #OER has simply been a field studying itself. We debate what is open and what is not. What is a resource what is pedagogy...and is that pedagogy really praxis....

      I don't really get this opinion, or how it pertains to Greg's otherwise important point about the format of OER. Seems like it ignores BOTH the great many tangible contributions folks have made in the field of OER AND the very important conversations that also take place around topics as or more important than technical formats, like pedagogy, and the socio-economic ecosystem in which OER participates.

    1. Onefactor that continues to emergeas an important predictor of retention/persistenceis strong faculty-student relationships.

      Human contact supports success.

  19. Jan 2019
    1. The immense value of NOT “achieving a useful consensus” around what we mean by “open” and staying in that deeply interesting conversation is precisely because when we foreclose it, when we leave it, we miss out on new understandings for ourselves, and close them down for others. It’s no surprise that some women with very different global perspectives, like Maha and Sarah Lambert (whose paper “Changing our (Dis)Course: A Distinctive Social Justice Aligned Definition of Open Education” inspired Maha to write today) would remind me why we need to keep definitions of open, open.

      This paragraph is a core part of the main point I was trying to convey in this post. I was trying to celebrate respect for/comfort with/the value of ambiguity/messiness/"the other" in the term "open pedagogy" that the closed term "OER-enabled pedagogy" wasn't invented to support. As Maha Bali put it differently (better?) in part of a tweet about how truly open discourse might have: "Respect for the 'other' ... that does not reciprocate that respect. Comfort with ambiguity and messiness the 'other' does not have."

    1. Nate Angell has made similar comments in the past

      Read more about how I wasn't thinking about techno-determinism.

    2. Others will doubtless continue this deeply interesting conversation and I wish them well as they do – I am in no way criticizing them as I withdraw from these conversations.

      But no hard feelings.

    3. I’m convinced that the terms “open pedagogy” and “open educational practices” are understood so differently by so many people that there is literally no hope of achieving a useful consensus about the meaning of either of these terms. Some definitions are centered on OER. Some are centered on the public, linkable nature of the “open web.” Some are centered on social justice. Some are centered on collaboration. Some are centered on innovation. Some are centered on learner empowerment. Some are exercises in the permutations of these. There have even been arguments made that a clear definition would somehow be antithetical to the ideal of open. As I said, there appears to be no consensus coming for the meaning of either of these terms. For my own personal purposes of writing, researching, and advocating, the absence of a shared understanding of these terms removes any utility I previously hoped they had. Consequently, I don’t think I’ll use these terms any longer or participate in the discussion about their meanings going forward.

      David abandons debates about open practices/pedagogy.

    4. We learn by the things we do.

      Something everyone in the open education community might agree on.

    5. All of the activities that we associate with knowledge creation and other forms of scholarship are remix activities. They involve standing on the shoulders of giants, whether remixing existing knowledge in novel ways or combining previous understanding with genuinely new insight. Everything is a remix on one level or another.

      All knowledge production is a remix.

    1. Design Justice: towards an intersectional feminist framework for design theory and practice

      Design is key to our collective liberation, but most design processes today reproduce inequalities structured by what Black feminist scholars call the matrix of domination. Intersecting inequalities are manifest at all levels of the design process. This paper builds upon the Design Justice Principles, developed by an emerging network of designers and community organizers, to propose a working definition of design justice: Design justice is a field of theory and practice that is concerned with how the design of objects and systems influences the distribution of risks, harms, and benefits among various groups of people. Design justice focuses on the ways that design reproduces, is reproduced by, and/or challenges the matrix of domination (white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, and settler colonialism). Design justice is also a growing social movement that aims to ensure a more equitable distribution of design’s benefits and burdens; fair and meaningful participation in design decisions; and recognition of community based design traditions, knowledge, and practices.

    1. A Social Justice Framework for Understanding Open Educational Resources and Practices in the Global South

      Abstract: At the heart of the open educational resources (OER) movement is the intention to provide affordable access to culturally relevant education to all. This imperative could be described as a desire to provide education in a manner consistent with social justice which, according to Fraser (2005), is understood as “parity of participation”. Drawing on her concept of social justice, we suggest a slight modification of Fraser’s framework for critically analysing ways in which the adoption and impact of OER and their undergirding open educational practices (OEP) might be considered socially just. We then provide illustrative examples from the cross-regional Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) project (2014-2017) to show how this framework can assist in determining in what ways, if at all, the adoption of OER and enactment of OEP have responded to economic inequalities, cultural inequities and political exclusions in education. Furthermore, we employ Fraser’s (2005) concepts to identify whether these social changes are either “affirmative” (i.e., ameliorative) or “transformative” in their economic, cultural and political effects in the Global South education context.

  20. Dec 2018
    1. Powered by Publics

      That’s why 130 institutions are joining together to increase college access, student, and postsecondary attainment. The initiative, called Powered by Publics: Scaling Student Success, represents the largest ever collaborative effort to improve college access, advance equity, and increase college degrees awarded.

    1. Inflation-adjusted Textbook Pain Multiplier for Decision-Makers

      Analysis and solutions to better convey the economic impact of rising textbook costs.

    1. Amazon isn’t just an online retailer. It’s infrastructure.

      Another point to make is how Amazon's "other" business, Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a wide array of widely used web infrastructure. AWS commercial infrastructure (among others) increasingly provides the digital infrastructure used by both public and private systems.

    2. The Future of the Public Mission of Universities

      A compelling tour through the financial and human impacts of various initiatives to privatize public infrastructures — including public education.

  21. Nov 2018
    1. other works

      I'll try to link related works here:

      1. "A Comprehensive Framework For Evaluating Educational Vouchers" by Henry Levin.
      2. "The common in higher education: a conceptual approach" by Krystian Szadkowski
    2. DeAngelis basically calls for a total revolution in how education is funded and delivered in the USA based on a smattering of shaky results drawn from less than 20 studies using different methodologies on limited populations in contexts ranging from urban Washington DC to Bogota, Columbia to Delhi and Andhra Pradesh, India.

      DeAngelis uses the "fallacy of the inverse" to make his argument, which takes this form: "If some students who do X have good outcomes, then every student who does not do X will have bad outcomes." Read more in my annotation on DeAngelis's article.

    1. The paradox of resistance: critique, neoliberalism, and the limits of performativity

      I found this post from Sherri Spelic's post, "A Convention In My Mind.

    2. This is why, in the seemingly interminable debates about the ‘validity’ of neoliberalism as an analytical term, both sides are right: yes, on the one hand, the term is vague and can seemingly be applied to any manifestation of power, but, on the other, it does cover everything, which means it cannot be avoided either.

      Neoliberalism's ambiguity: it can describe anything, and yet is also everything.

    3. Neoliberalism is the requirement to submit all your research outputs to the faculty website, but neoliberalism is also the pride you feel when your most recent article is Tweeted about.

      The Tweet pride part of this hits home.

    4. In formal terms, critique is a form of a Russell’s paradox: a set that at the same time both is and is not a member of itself.

      Critique as Russell's paradox.

    5. Namely, the object or target of critique becomes increasingly elusive, murky, and de-differentiated: but, strangely enough, so does the subject.

      Interesting: so something like as critique gets deeper (?) the agency of the critic disperses.

    6. Varieties of neoliberalism, varieties of critique?

      The three main varieties of critique of neoliberal knowledge production: marxist, poststructuralist, and neo-materialist (eg, big data, ai, machine learning).

    7. Relatedly, given the level of agreement among academics about the general direction of these changes, engagement with developing long-term, sustainable alternatives to exploitative modes of knowledge production has been surprisingly scattered.

      Alternative practices to exploitative knowledge production have not kept up with critiques.

    1. Because students were not randomly assigned to the MPCP or the public school comparison group, we cannot assume causality regarding the relationship between the voucher program and crime and must, instead, infer causality.

      causality inferred

    1. (1) Freedom to Choose; (2) Productive Efficiency; (3)Equity; and (4) Social Cohesion

      The four dimensions of evaluation for education.

    2. Balancing individual choice for addressing childrearingpreferences with a common educational experience that will promote equity and socialcohesion has always been a major challenge for the educational system. To a large extentthese goals are in conflict and place the school system under continual tension

      Observation that public education exists in an ongoing (and unresolvable?) tension between providing for individual and social needs.

    3. it is importantto address the role of the schools in a democratic society characterized by considerableethnic, racial, regional, and socioeconomic diversity such as the United States

      on the unique situation of the USA

    1. a specific good or service is strongest for a good or service deemed to be a “public good.”

      Based on my understanding of public goods, I’m thinking most or all are not provided by government. A public good might be protected or endangered by government policy, but provided by it? There are examples like lighthouses, but most services provided by government are excludable and rivalrous. I agree education is not a classic public good.

    2. By Corey A. DeAngelis

      You can learn more about Corey from his linked Cato Institute bio and list of publications, at The Heartland Institute, and at GMU's Mercatus Institute. You can see a record of Corey's citations on Google Scholar. Visit Corey on Twitter, where his account has a banner picture of Milton Friedman, and on LinkedIn. You might also find Corey's take on Trump's 2018 State of the Union address and his 28 Aug 2018 EdChoice interview interesting.

    3. In order to reduce the externalities associated with government schooling, we should allow private schools to continue their specialized approaches by reducing the quantity and intensity of regulations linked to private school choice program funding.

      Another policy leap: no evidence has been presented that supports the idea of regulation increasing "the externalities associated with government schooling".

    4. Market entry and competitive pressures could improve the diversity and quality of educational options available to children while reducing average educational costs.

      The important word here is "could". Is there evidence that market entry leads to any of these outcomes?

    5. Specifically, states should pass legislation to enact universally accessible Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) to allow families to customize their children’s educational experiences.

      Note that there is a jump here from vouchers to ESAs that is nowhere substantiated in any of the previous argument or data.

    6. Since government schooling in the United States results in a net negative externality relative to private schools of choice, we should not subsidize government schooling based on the economic argument that it is a merit good.

      Setting aside that this article is riven with logical leaps and unconvincing data, the bigger question is whether a purely economic evaluation of schooling mechanisms is enough to make a policy recommendations of such magnitude.

    7. Since schooling fails both the nonrivalry and nonexcludability conditions, there is no strong argument for government operation of schooling on the basis of the service being a public good.

      As the author himself argued that people are just mispeaking when they say education is a public good, we can just ignore this conclusion as a strawman.

    8. However, these estimates should be treated with caution

      No, these estimates should be treated with caution because they equal "about half of the U.S. GDP in 2016".

    9. The only quasi-experimental study linking private school choice to crime finds that private schools reduce the likelihood that male students will commit felonies by 4 percentage points in Milwaukee.

      Near as I can tell, this study is just as likely to suggest that students that complete school are less likely to commit crimes than students that don't. The private school choice connection is a stretch.

    10. I exclude the two most costly types of crime — rape and murder — from this calculation in order to provide a more conservative estimate.

      So then included are the "less costly" types of crime, including crimes more often prosecuted against people of color.

    11. it is infeasible to quantify the effects of tolerance, political participation, and racial segregation on society overall

      Here the author admits that it is hard to quantify educational benefits.

    12. over the course of 13 years of k-12 schooling

      Do the numbers being used here actually reflect the costs of the full 13 years of K-12 schooling? It seemed like most of the data was just for a few grades here and there.

    13. Hanushek estimates that a one-standard-deviation increase in student cognitive ability leads to a 13 percent increase in lifetime earnings.

      I can't read this paper behind its paywall, but note that here we are grabbing a one-standard deviation measure from a study on teacher effectiveness and using it to extrapolate individual lifetime earnings based on standard deviations in math score tests from one meta-analysis of a a small collection of studies on voucher-based educations.

    14. Overall, Shakeel, Anderson, and Wolf find that private school choice programs increase reading scores by 4 percent of a standard deviation and math scores by 7 percent of a standard deviation.

      Except that the results from this study are pretty inconclusive overall and especially for the USA, so here the author is applying a global result to a USA context.

    15. Data and Analysis

      Here we go: now the author will extrapolate the spurious conclusions from above to the entire public school population.

    16. the preponderance of the scientific evidence suggests that government schools produce socially less-desirable outcomes than do private schools of choice

      Where "the preponderance of evidence" means the very small number of methodologically and statistically unconvincing studies included here that focus on private schools of choice.

    17. Table 1: Government-schooling externalities and their signs

      Now that I've dug deeper, I see how unsubstantiated this table is. The primary issue is that very limited and methodologically imperfect studies that purport to show positive externalities for voucher-based choice programs are flipped to suggest that "government schooling" has negative externalities.

      Here's an analogous argument: Because some small studies of people that ate carrots with lunch shows that they had less indigestion than control groups that didn't eat carrots with lunch, all lunches without carrots cause indigestion.

      Also, if one explores the references, it turns out most of them are by one or more of the same set of authors.

    18. As shown in a review of 11 experimental and quasi-experimental studies, DeAngelis finds that private school choice programs in the United States increase these types of civic outcomes.

      Just to be clear here, the author is now talking about himself in the third person.

    19. This savings happens for two main reasons: (1) school voucher laws usually mandate that the voucher amount must be a fraction of the total per pupil expenditure in traditional public schools; and (2) private school tuition fees are often below the state-mandated maximum voucher funding amount.

      Based on this, the savings would be to the government though, right, not the individual taxpayer/voucher user? So the level of taxation is the same, but thanks to vouchers, the government would need to spend less on education?

    20. all taxed funds are a negative externality if taxed individuals do not consent to the transaction

      Again, the view that taxes are inherently coercive.

    21. Educated Populace

      The upshot of this section is there are no clear education advantages to vouchers in the USA.

    22. the only difference between treatment and control groups is that one group received access to a private school choice program

      It turns out the story is a bit more complicated that the author suggests here. The meta-analysis that these conclusions apparently rest on are not compelling for the USA context and the meta-analysis itself is riddled with questionable methodologies and conclusions.

    23. A meta-analytic and systematic review of 19 experimental voucher studies around the world

      I read this article, and found it to be even less supportive of the conclusions drawn here than in the dismal summary below.

    24. a hard-working individual

      Would someone who skated through medical school provide the same social/economic benefit?

    25. better-educated citizens may produce high-quality goods and services that benefit the rest of society

      OK, this at least seems like a social benefit a real economist might include.

    26. Society benefits from a better-educated populace because individuals are more likely to interact with people who could teach them something new.

      Wait, what? This is the first, primary social benefit of education?

    27. The three externalities that I examine are (1) an educated populace, (2) taxpayer costs, and (3) social cohesion.

      What happened to lowered crime and more informed voting? It will be interesting to see how an educated populace and social cohesion are measured.

    28. random lotteries

      exclusion by chance?

    29. they could take those same funds to schools of their choosing

      They could take those funds to other schools, but would they? Maybe the analogy with immunization would be better.

    30. a realistic counterfactual: a private school of choice that could accept the public school’s per pupil funding amount as full payment for tuition and fees

      We shall also see if there is evidence of private schooling that can increase education (rather than just schooling) more efficiently than public schooling.

    31. if the traditional public schooling system is reducing overall levels of education, or producing education very inefficiently

      Two conclusions that the author has set out two prove.

    32. Pigouvian subsidy

      One feels we are getting close to the author's reasoning about why government should support education at all.

    33. but for which I don’t earn a market income

      There are more possible positive externalities from education than blog posts that aren't produced via market incomes, decreases in crime, and informed voting.

    34. I will be able to command a higher salary in the future, and I will feel good about being an educated citizen

      two of the possible individual benefits that might be derived from an education

    35. as an economist would say

      maybe "as some economists would say" given that there is more than one definition of merit goods.

    36. Fortunately, schools will never suffer from a true free-rider problem because they are not true public goods. That is precisely why private schools and tutoring services operate effectively today without government operating or funding them.

      Sidenote: because it's easy to exclude houses from firefighting, no one can take advantage of firefighters without paying, that's why there is a healthy market in private firefighting.

    37. If someone does not pay me to educate the student, I can simply deny the student services.

      If someone does not pay "me" [sic] to fight a fire at their house, I can simply let their house burn.

    38. because it is not difficult to exclude a person from a school — or any other type of institution with walls — schooling fails the nonexcludability condition

      because it is easy to not fight a fire at one house and just prevent the fire from spreading

    39. Because of this, schooling fails the nonrivalrous part of the definition

      therefore, firefighting is rivalrous (and should not be provided by government)

    40. if students are added to a given classroom, the teacher is less able to tailor the educational approach to each child, which could reduce the average amount of personalized education received by each student

      if firefighters must fight fires at every house, they are less able to perfect firefighting at any one house

    41. If one student occupies a seat in a classroom, another child is prevented from sitting in the same seat.

      If the firefighters are fighting fire at one house, they can not fight fire at another house.

    42. If schooling were indeed a public good, there would perhaps be a stronger economic argument for government funding and operation of schools.

      Synopsis of the argument so far: People mistakenly call public schooling a public good when they really mean it is good for the public. But nevertheless, we have proven public schooling is not a public good. We assert without evidence that government funding should focus on public goods. Therefore there is no reason for government to fund public schooling.

    43. A radio station can be thought of as a true public good.

      Hm. Not the example I would have reached for. The radio spectrum might be a better example. One could easily broadcast an excludable radio program encrypted that only people who had paid for a key could decrypt and listen to.

    44. the market avoids the potential free-rider problem with radio stations by using advertisements as a funding source

      The UK has used a different system to support broadcast (receiver licensing) and public broadcasting in the USA uses yet another support mechanism, philanthropy.

    45. the free-rider problem could be eliminated if all members of society were forced to pay for the service indirectly through taxes

      Again, the idea that taxes are coercion rather than say, a common interest contract.

    46. The economic argument for government using coercion to fund

      This seems like a bit of a jump: all taxation is coercion.

    47. it is important for the current study to examine the externalities of the actual policy in place in the United States

      Agree: focus on reality.

    48. And, of course, schooling and education are not one and the same.

      Is anyone arguing that schooling is the only mechanism for education? Another strawman?

    49. Within seven decades, every state had followed suit; Mississippi was the last state to pass a compulsory schooling attendance law in 1918.

      Is there any scholarship about relative social effects during this fairly long (70-year) transition period?

    50. the United States should instead fund education directly—rather than schooling

      This is a somewhat buried, but key argument in this work: that schooling and education are not equivalent and that public schooling is not an effective mechanism for education.

    51. When people, including prominent education scholars, say that schooling is a public good, I believe they mean that schooling is “good for the public.”

      Should the article stop here? Is the main point then that there is just a confusion in terms and folks are mistakenly saying school is a public good when they just mean it's good for the public?

    52. For example, someone who pursues 10 college degrees may achieve a well-rounded and advanced education without contributing much to other individuals in society.

      Strawman argument: who pursues 10 college degrees?

    53. (1) the U.S. government should not operate schools at the local, state, or federal level on the basis of schooling’s being a public good;

      Seems like a strawman recommendation as the author himself claims that folks are misspeaking when they talk about public education as a public good.

    54. an original contribution to the literature

      a bold statement

    55. In order to place public schooling into one of the remaining two categories

      What I'd like to see addressed first is why it is helpful to categorize public schooling as one of these (or maybe any) specific economic good. What is the value of this framing overall?

    56. Public schooling fails both conditions specified in the standard economic definition of a public good.

      Agree. So why should we even be debating it? According to the author, even the folks who say "education is a public good" meant something else, so let's move on.

    57. demerit good
    58. merit good
    59. public good
    60. Is Public Schooling a Public Good?

      Supposedly the central question of this work, but very shortly, the author holds that what people mean when they say "public schooling is a public good" is really just "public schooling is for the public good" and so one is left wondering if a different consideration of that question might be more valuable.

    1. Marty Lueken interviews Corey DeAngelis about what brought him to the school choice movement and what research is next for him

      An interview with Corey DeAngelis where he talks about what attracted him about school choice, his research, and how he thinks about talking with others about his views.

    2. Even in the United States, 17 evaluations that are experimental, the majority are positive effects on test scores. But to be honest, even if they were almost all negative, which they’re not, I still don’t think we should use that information alone to prevent people from making decisions for their kids’ educations.

      My reading of the data Corey relies on to make this argument is not so clear-cut. Meanwhile, he wants it all ways: people should rely on evidence, people should not use test score evidence to make educational decisions.

    3. Because as much as I hate it, hate to say, is there are some people out there that just don’t care about the evidence.

      After looking at the evidence Corey relies on to make his case in Is Public Schooling a Public Good? An Analysis of Schooling Externalities, I find I care about the evidence, but don't find it compelling.

    1. Public funding could be a proxy for voucher amount, as publicly-funded vouchers tend to be of significantly greater value than privately-funded ones.

      OMG, so say it. Giving people more funding for education has a bigger effect than giving less.

    2. In addition, the PACES programwas distinctivein providingindividual student incentives for academic achievement.

      Why is this not the policy recommendation of the study?

    3. It could be that there is a much larger gap in the quality of public and private schools in Colombia (and other countries, for that matter) than in the US (Angrist et al. 2006).

      Therefore public schools in the USA are not significantly different than privates?

    4. In summary, these results indicate positive effects of school vouchers that vary by subject (math or reading), location (US v. non-US), and funding type (public or private). Generally, the impacts of private school vouchers are larger for reading than for math. Impacts tend to belarger for programs outside the US relative to those within the US. Impacts also generally are larger for publicly-fundedprograms relative to privately-funded programs.

      I'm underwhelmed by the story the conclusions tell. Are most metaanalyses so unable to demonstrate credible results?

    5. The overall results so far indicate that school vouchers havepositive effects in both reading and math, but that these impactsare largest in programs outside of the US.

      So results here are not applicable to the USA context.

    6. The US programs, overall, had a TOT effect that was not statistically different from zero

      Wait, again USA effects were basically zero.

    7. we see that the US programs had an overall effect that was barely a null effect,

      Wait, USA results in reading were barely null?

    8. As some studies did not report their findings in detail, we made necessary assumptions to derive accurate sample sizes for the treatment and control groups.

      Wait, what? Assumptions?

    9. In the U.S. voucher programs inour meta-analysis, students who lost the voucher lotteries often found other ways to access school choices

      Wait, what? The control group managed to participate in the same experience as the other group?

    10. The counterfactual condition for control group students varied across the programs.

      Given this complexity, it may be hard to explain why any of the "control group" students experienced lower educational outcomes.

    11. Fortunately, much of the research on school vouchers in the U.S., and some of the evaluations abroad, has taken the form of random assignment experiments.

      Note: random assignments within the population that has already self-selected to participate in voucher systems, so possibly a measure of that subpopulation.

    1. The challenge that entrepreneurs undertake should be less a matter of How can I decentralize everything? than How can I make everything more accountable?

      accountability rather than decentralization

    2. We should care less about whether something is centralized or decentralized than whether it is accountable. An accountable system is responsive to both the common good for participants and the needs of minorities; it sets consistent rules and can change them when they don’t meet users’ needs.

      make centralization accountable

    3. People enter into networks with diverse access to resources and skills. Recentralization often occurs because of imbalances of power that operate outside the given network.

      Recentralization of decentralized processes thanks to varying resources/skills of participants.

    4. Another approach might be to regard decentralization as a process, never a static state of being — to stick to active verbs like “decentralize” rather than the perfect-tense “decentralized,” which suggests the process is over and done, or that it ever could be.

      For decentralization as a process rather than a state.

    5. Blockchains, for instance, enable permissionless entry, data storage, and computing, but with a propensity to concentration with respect to interfaces, governance, and wealth.

      How blockchain is decentralized and not.

    6. Rather than embracing decentralization as a cure-all, policymakers can seek context-sensitive, appropriate institutional reforms according to the problem at hand. For instance, he makes a case for centralizing taxation alongside more distributed decisions about expenditures. Some forms of infrastructure lend themselves well to local or private control, while others require more centralized institutions.

      being more specific about what is centralized and what is decentralized

    7. When centralization arises elsewhere in an apparently decentralized system, it comes as a surprise or simply goes ignored.Here are some traces of the persistent pattern that I’m talking about:

      Examples of centralization within decentralized systems.

    8. Decentralization is the new disruption

      Exploring decentralization today.

    1. This is Colony.A platform foropen organizations.

      a platform for cooperative open communities

  22. Oct 2018
    1. Horizon Report 2018 Higher Education Edition

      Read annotations on the Horizon Report: 2018 Higher Education Edition from EDUCAUSE. Sign up or log in above to add your own annotations and replies.

    1. Meanwhile, IT organizations are often defined by what's necessary rather than what's possible, and the cumulative weight of an increasingly complex communications infrastructure weighs ever heavier.

      In the middle of a deeper exploration of the 2014 edtech landscape.

    2. In our main article, we argue that those of us in higher education, rather than offloading our vision to venture capital-inspired "solutions" for education, should be using open architecture, through open-source applications, to reinvest in creative people, processes, and possibilities-that is, to reclaim innovation.

      A call for and examples of opening knowledge practices.