(Available in text or audio.) This article provides basic principles (agenda, duration) and technologies (gamification, discussion boards) and activities to keep employees engaged in online learning. While this provides strategy, it does not provide implementation guidance within the corporate environment. (2/10)

(Click Download full-text PDF to read.) In this article, the authors discuss the blended learning instructional delivery method. Through case study, the authors demonstrate the benefits of blended course design. Furthermore, the article addresses potential detriments (financial, instructional design) of a blended course design. A brief review of considerations and recommendations for a blended design was provided. Though this article focuses on the relationship to forensic science, the information is applicable across disciplines and delivery venues (corporate, academic). (6/10)

(Click Download full text to read.) In this brief article, the authors contrast the child and adult learner. Highlighting the adult learner's characteristics, the article further discusses factors that might affect the individual learning style. Furthermore, the authors discuss these styles in the context of eLearning (extravert, introvert, sensory type, intuitive adult, reflexive type, affective type, rational type, and perceptive type). Each learning type and preferred eLearning method is illustrated (Table 1, p. 60). Rationale for the implementation of eLearning is detailed (p. 61). Guidelines for the use of eLearning is discussed. (6/10)

Meeter, M., Bele, T., Hartogh, C. d., Bakker, T., de Vries, R. E., & Plak, S. (2020, October 11). College students’ motivation and study results after COVID-19 stay-at-home orders. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/kn6v9

Article explores technology usage among adult learners in higher education and how to optimize learning outcomes via tech tools in these settings. The author addresses educational/instructional design and the need for instructors to modify traditional approaches. Rating 6/10

Krumsvik, R. J. (2020). Extended Editorial. Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy, 15(03), 141–152. https://doi.org/10.18261/issn.1891-943x-2020-03-01

The problem based learning (PBL) strategy is defined. The strategy is defined as an iterative process with specific goals (knowledge, problem-solving skills, self-directed skills, collaboration, motivation for learning). The authors go on to describe the advantages, disadvantages, limitations, and considerations for the use of PBL. Integration of technology allows for new opportunities in education and training across disciplines. (7/10)

The author discusses four strategies (curriculum, mechanism, complement to instruction, instructional tool) for integrating technology in adult learning, their advantages and considerations. The use of any method will require changes to a curriculum, learning environment, and learner and educator roles. Therefore, technology integration should be done purposefully. 7/10

In this chapter, the author defines problem based learning (PBL) and highlights the benefits to the learner. In addition to incorporating technology to enhance learning, the article reinforces the need to foster the softer skills that may be developed as a result of PBL (teamwork, accountability, problem-solving, creative thinking, risk-taking, communication skills, and critical thinking skills). Though the data is limited, and there are inherent challenges, PBL is of value in course design. (8/10)

(Under "Viewing Options", select PDF.) In this article, Ernawaty and Sujono (2019) summarize results of a study funded by the Research and Higher Education Directorate of Indonesia. The study aimed to evaluate the cogency of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in problem based learning (PBL) and traditional teaching methods (TTM) based upon learner test scores. The concepts of PBL, TTM, and implications of ICTs are briefly reviewed. Results of the study revealed that PBL with the support of an ICT yielded the highest test scores. (6/10)

MOOC « Les clés de la laïcité – Le rôle des collectivités territoriales Cas pratique "Ecole publique : port de signes religieux" Décryptage video

Centre national de la fonction publique territoriale1

MOOC «Les clés de la laïcité

–Le rôle des collectivités territoriales

L'espace administratif -L'école vidéo

vidéo

Seeing the commentary from Greg McVerry and Aaron Davis, it's probably worthwhile to point you to the IndieWeb for Education wiki page which has some useful resources, pointers, and references. As you have time, feel free to add yourself to the list along with any brainstorming ideas you might have for using some of this technology within your work realm. Many hands make light work. Welcome to the new revolution!

These are pieces which the IndieWeb should endeavor to experiment in and attempt to fix. Though I will admit that pieces of the IndieWeb layers on top of platforms like WordPress can help to mitigate some context collapse and aggregate social interactions better. (eg: reply context and POSSE)

I can't help but be reminded of the early professoriate in the 1400's when teachers were expected to be well known or interesting enough to have their own local following and pull in their own individual students. If they weren't the right sort of thought leaders or didn't teach the "right" subjects, they failed as teachers and were kicked out of the university. Social media in this era would have been more interesting whereas, now it barely seems to be a direct economic factor. (cross reference O. Gingerich, The Book Nobody Read)

I wonder here what role an IndieWeb-based version of academe looks like in which teachers all own their content on their own websites to make a more explicit appeal of work that they've done. Compare this with the concept that what they may be doing on Twitter isn't "work" and which isn't judged as such.

As I read this while thinking about the context of the IndieWeb and it's wiki, I'm thinking two cognitively dissonant thoughts: 1. The current technical uses are creating content more for themselves and their research and use and 2. They're not creating it to help out the users who may necessarily need a ladder or a bigger platform to get to where they are.

It's going to take a layer of intermediate users, creators, or builders to help create a better path to bring the neophytes up to a higher level to get more out of the wealth of information that's hiding in it. Or it's going to take helpers and mentors to slowly build them up to that point.

How can we more consistently reach a hand down to pull up those coming after us? How can we encourage others to do some of the same?

As I think of remix, reuse, redistribute and things like git and version control, I also can't help but think that being able to send and receive webmentions in the process of reusing and redistribution with referential links back to the originals will allow the original creator to at least be aware of the changes and their existence to potentially manually add them to the original project. (Manually because they may not (yet) know how to keep their content under source control or allow others to do so and send pull requests.)

As I'm reading this page I can't help but think about how it potentially predates and underlies the idea of the wiki which came just a few years after this piece of software.

This would generally apply to almost any wiki product. In part, it's why I maintain a personal wiki on the open web.

There's a kernel here of something about the value of links (social, business, etc.) as put forward by Cesar Hidalgo in Why Information Grows. Where is the real value? How can it best be extracted? Built up? Having a more direct means of valuing these otherwise seeming intangibles will be important in the future.

This first phrase is the most telling of all the issues we deal with on the edtech front. Because the industrial revolution touched almost every aspect of life since its inception, everyone presumes that it must also affect education.

Sadly other than helping to make searching for and obtaining material much quicker, it still needs to be consumed, thought about, and digested by a student. The industrial revolution simply hasn't increased the bandwith of the common student's brain. It's unlikely that anything in the near future will expand it.

They're also touting the most up-to-date content here, when it's an open secret that for the majority of textbooks don't really change that much from edition to edition.

So now we need to revisit the calculation above and put this new piece of data into the model.

Seriously?! It's now a "rental price"?

$ 2million compared to what? To everyone having purchased the textbooks at going rates before? This is a false comparison because not everyone bought new in the first place. Many bought used, and many more still probably either pirated, borrowed from a friend, from the library, or simply went without.

It almost sounds to me like they know they're not getting a cut of the money from poorer students who are finding the material for free online anyway, so they're trying to up the stakes of the piece of pie that they're getting from a different angle.

This other model of subscription at the level of the college or university is also one that they're well aware of based on involvement with subscription fees for journal access.

If they wanted to add more "depth and nuance" wouldn't they actually go into greater depth on the topic by adding pages instead of subtly painting it such a discouraging light?

But Texas students will read that some critics “dismissed the quality of literature produced.”

This is the understatement of the year. Faculty members will require extensive training and LOTS of assistance. This assistance SHOULD NOT come from student assistants, graduate students (who are likely to be heavily undertrained), or other "free" sources.

There are some pieces of this that immediately make me think that this model is more of a sort of "separate, but equal" sort of modality. Significant resources will need to go toward the equality piece and even then it is likely to fall short from a social perspective.

And of course, the first pivot (even in the same paragraph!) is exactly to these "free" or cheap sources which are likely to be overlooked and undertrained.

If a school is going to do this they need to take it seriously and actually give it professional resources.

This is moving education in exactly the WRONG direction. Students are already ill-prepared to do the actual work and studying of education, now we're going to try to extract extra efficiency out of the system by asking them to essential teach themselves on top of it? This statement seems like the kind of thing a technology CEO would pitch higher education on as a means of monetizing something over which they had no control solely to extract value for their own company.

If we're going to go this far, why not just re-institute slavery?

Naturally, because you know, educators know how to educate other educators, right?!

This is related to the broad idea of modality shifts in more modern educational contexts.

Thanks for aggregating a variety of sources here!

I'd recently come across Robert Talbert's post <cite>Traditional Grading: The Great Demotivator</cite> which likely fits into this same sub-topic.

I ran across this 5 year old article courtesy of a few recent tweets:

This took me back to a time and something I’d forgotten writing, that has made me rethink where we are now: https://t.co/COgNQnutZr

— Kate Bowles (@KateMfD) April 25, 2020

“power is distributed very unevenly throughout the global network of higherEd institutions. If digital innovation is left to the market, we will continue to see scale and standardisation dressed up as personalisation and differentiation.” ⁦@KateMfD⁩ https://t.co/pqskuKPbQj

— Robin DeRosa (@actualham) April 25, 2020

What surprises me is that it's about education and pedagogy that starts off with a vignette in which Kate Bowles talks about the unknown purpose of Stonehenge.

But I've been doing some serious reading on the humanities relating to memory, history, and indigenous cultures over the last few years. It dawns on me:

I know what those stones are for!

A serious answer provided by Australian science and memory researcher Dr. Lynne Kelly indicates that Stonehenge and similar monolithic sites built by indigenous cultures across the world are--in fact--pedagogic tools!!

We've largely lost a lot of the roots of our ancient mnemonic devices through gradual mis- and dis-use as well as significant pedagogic changes by Petrus Ramus, an influential French dialectician, humanist, logician, and educational reformer. Scholar Frances Yates indicated in The Art of Memory that his influential changes in the mid-1500's disassociated memory methods including the method of loci, which dated back to ancient Greece, from the practice of rhetoric as a field of study. As a result we've lost a fantastic tradition that made teaching and the problem of memory far worse.

Fortunately Lynne Kelly gives a fairly comprehensive overview of indigenous cultures across human history and their use of these methods along with evidence in her book Memory Code which is based on her Ph.D. thesis. Even better, she didn't stop there and she wrote a follow up book that explores the use of these methods and places them into a modern pedagogy setting and provides some prescriptive uses.

I might suggest that instead of looking forward to technology as the basis of solutions in education, that instead we look back---not just to our past or even our pre-industrial past, but back to our pre-agrarian past.

Let's look back to the tremendous wealth of indigenous tribes the world over that modern society has eschewed as "superstitious" and "simple". In reality, they had incredibly sophisticated oral stories and systems that they stored in even more sophisticated memory techniques. Let's relearn and reuse those techniques to make ourselves better teachers and improve our student's ability to learn and retain the material with which they're working.

Once we've learned to better tap our own memories, we'll realize how horribly wrong we've been for not just decades but centuries.

This has been hard earned knowledge for me, but now that I've got it, I feel compelled to share it. I'm happy to chat with people about these ideas to accelerate their growth, but I'd recommend getting them from the source and reading Dr. Kelly's work directly. (Particularly her work with indigenous peoples of Australia, who helped to unlock a large piece of the puzzle for her.) Then let's work together to rebuild the ancient edifices that our ancestors tried so desperately to hand down, but we've managed to completely forget.

The historical and archaeological record: The Memory Code: The Secrets of Stonehenge, Easter Island and Other Ancient Monuments by Dr. Lynne Kelly

A variety of methods and teaching examples: Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History by Dr. Lynne Kelly

I quite like this idea as a means of pedagogy.

The fun, secret part is that Kathleen hasn't (yet?) discovered IndieAuth so that she can authenticate/authorize micropub clients like Quill to publish content to her own site from various clients by means of a potential micropub endpoint.

I'll suspect she'll be even more impressed when she realizes that there's a forthcoming wave of feed readers [1] [2] that will allow her to read others' content in a reader which has an integrated micropub client in it so that she can reply to posts directly in her feed reader, then the responses get posted directly to her own website which then, in turn, send webmentions to the site's she's responding to so that the conversational loop can be completely closed.

She and Lee will also be glad to know that work has already started on private posts and conversations and posting to limited audiences as well. Eventually there will be no functionality that a social web site/silo can do that a distributed set of independent sites can't. There's certainly work to be done to round off the edges, but we're getting closer and closer every day.

I know how it all works, but even I'm impressed at the apparent magic that allows round-trip conversations between her website and Twitter and Micro.blog. And she hasn't really delved into website to website conversations yet. I suppose we'll have to help IndieWebify some of her colleague's web presences to make that portion easier. Suddenly "academic Twitter" will be the "academic blogosphere" she misses from not too many years ago. :)

If there are academics out thee who are interested in what Kathleen has done, but may need a little technical help, I'm happy to set up some tools for them to get them started.

I'm reminded here of Malcolm Gladwell's thesis about helping the masses rather than the edge cases. see also: https://boffosocko.com/2018/05/01/episode-06-my-little-hundred-million-revisionist-history/

I want to go back and read this too.

This completely flies in the face of the need for more basic science research which is far more likely to create vast potential advancement rather than focusing on smaller edge cases.

I'm reminded here of the broad idea that many bloggers write about sooner or later of their website being a "thought space" or place to contemplate out in the open. More often than not, even if they don't have an audience to interact with, their writings become a way of thinking out loud, clarifying things for themselves, self-evolving, or putting themselves out there for potential public reactions (good, bad, or indifferent).

While writing things out loud to no audience can be helpful and useful on an individual level, it's often even more helpful to have some sort of productive and constructive feedback. While a handful of likes or positive seeming responses can be useful, I always prefer the ones that make me think more broadly, deeply, or force me to consider other pieces I hadn't envisioned before. To me this is the real value of these open and often very public thought spaces.

For those interested in the general idea, I've been bookmarking/tagging things around the idea of thought spaces I've read on my own website. Hopefully this collection helps others better understand the spectrum of these ideas for themselves.

With respect to the vulnerability piece, I'm reminded of an episode of <cite>The Human Current</cite> I listened to a few weeks back. There was an excellent section that touched on building up trust with students or even a class when it comes to providing feedback and criticism. Having a bank of trust makes it easier to give feedback as well as to receive it. Here's a link to the audio portion and a copy of the relevant text.

And this is likely the reason that the longer form blogs never went out of style in areas of higher education where people are still posting long form content. This "proof of work" is something they ultimately end up using in other areas.

Jessifer example of three part post written for a journal that was later put back into long form for publication.

How can choice and competition improve schools? From a capitalistic perspective one needs to be much more mobile or have a tremendous number of nearby schools for this to happen. Much like the lack of true competition in local hospitals, most American families don't have any real choice in schools as their local school may be the only option. To have the greatest opportunity, one must be willing to move significant distances, and this causes issues with job availability for the parents as well as other potential social issues.

When it's the case that there is some amount of local selection, it's typically not much and then the disparity of people attending one school over another typically leads to much larger disparities in socio-economic attendance and thus leading to the worsening of the have and the have-nots.

Even schools in large cities like the Los Angeles area hare limited in capacity and often rely on either lottery systems or hefty tuition to cut down on demand. In the latter case, again, the haves and have-nots become a bigger problem than a solution.

I'll have to circle back around on these to add some statistics and expand the ideas...

This last sentence is so painful...

Reminiscent of Jefferson's quote "He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."

I felt like exactly this myself!

Example of moral hazard of gameplay.

The author reviews assumptions of the adult learner and adult learning theory. In discussion of adult learning theories (self-directed learning, experiential learning, transformational learning), the article investigates their use in online learning. Furthermore, the author provides online course development recommendations for the adult learner. A brief critique of andragogic principles is provided. Adult learning principles used in a live environment are of benefit and necessary in the virtual environment. Click "Full Text" to read article. 7/10

IZA – Institute of Labor Economics. ‘COVID-19 and the Labor Market’. Accessed 6 October 2020. https://covid-19.iza.org/publications/dp13641/.

What is the role of market requirements in all this? After all, pragmatically if the markets don't hire that said elite, they will not have that value anymore

Friedmann, M. (2020, September 21). City official: 2 Yale students tested positive for COVID after visiting professor’s lecture. New Haven Register. https://www.nhregister.com/news/article/City-official-2-Yale-students-tested-positive-15584946.php

Gurung, R. A. R., & Stone, A. (2020, September 14). You Can’t Always Get What You Want and It Hurts: Learning During the Pandemic. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/wqdx8

Effects and Use of OER in the global south. Survey, Statistics and data analysis presentation

Triggle, Nick. ‘Is It Time We Learned to Live with the Virus?’ BBC News, 21 September 2020, sec. Health. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-54228649.

Mance, H. (2020, September 18). The future of the university in the age of Covid. https://www.ft.com/content/9514643d-1433-408c-8464-cb4c0e09c822

It’s Hard to Keep a College Safe From Covid, Even With Mass Testing. (2020, September 11). Bloomberg.Com. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-11/how-coronavirus-rampaged-through-university-of-illinois-college-campus

Problem of PhD profiles in business

Well said

FreeOurKnowledge/discussion. (n.d.). GitHub. Retrieved September 10, 2020, from https://github.com/FreeOurKnowledge/discussion

Evi Viza on Twitter. (n.d.). Twitter. Retrieved September 7, 2020, from https://twitter.com/evi1603/status/1302170026800304129

McArdle, Elaine, August 26, and 2020. ‘COVID Adaptation’. Harvard Law Today. Accessed 7 September 2020. https://today.law.harvard.edu/covid-adaptation/.

Chickering and Gamson's seven principles were the foundation for learner-centered education (1987).

1. Encouraging faculty/student contact
2. Developing reciprocity and cooperation among students
3. Using active learning strategies
4. Offering rapid feedback
5. Emphasizing time on task
6. Communicating high expectations
7. Respecting diverse talents and ways of learning

Habanek's (2005) descriptive study of learner-centered syllabus design.

Nuzzo, J. B., & Sharfstein, J. M. (2020, July 1). Opinion | We Have to Focus on Opening Schools, Not Bars. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/opinion/coronavirus-schools.html

Barrett, L. F. (2020, July 8). Opinion | College Courses Online Are Disappointing. Here’s How to Fix Them. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/opinion/college-reopening-online-classes.html

Admin. (2020, June 8). Institutional Vandalism: The University & Covid-19. Critical Legal Thinking. https://criticallegalthinking.com/2020/06/08/institutional-vandalism-the-university-covid-19/

Nunes, L., & Writer, A. S. (2020). Working Around the Distance. APS Observer, 33(7). https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/covid-19-remote-learning-teaching-research

Sir Anthony Seldon on Twitter. (n.d.). Twitter. Retrieved September 2, 2020, from https://twitter.com/AnthonySeldon/status/1300355492783554561

Petersen, A. H. (n.d.). Between f**ked and a hard place. Retrieved August 30, 2020, from https://annehelen.substack.com/p/between-fked-and-a-hard-place

Lancet, T. (2020). Research and higher education in the time of COVID-19. The Lancet, 396(10251), 583. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)31818-3

University_covid_dashboards. (n.d.). Google Docs. Retrieved August 29, 2020, from https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1orYcRrRTQ6SiCJ7GXObZg1el70YeIHmjJEkrYFj40DA/edit?usp=sharing&usp=embed_facebook

Tatiana Prowell, MD on Twitter: “#Coronavirus tracking from @UNC shows 31% of #SARSCoV2 tests run this week were positive, a dramatic increase from previous wks. Is anyone in #publichealth surprised by these outbreaks? I don’t think so. This higher ed experiment is a bad idea in states w/ uncontrolled #COVID19. https://t.co/pfiYlKEcSx” / Twitter. (n.d.). Twitter. Retrieved August 28, 2020, from https://twitter.com/reconfigbehsci/status/1298565943845621760, https://twitter.com/tmprowell/status/1298136038012002304

CSaP. (2020, May 1). Science, Policy & Pandemics: Episode 6 - How has the pandemic impacted children and adolescents? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2mbV99cdLA&feature=youtu.be

COVID-19 and the Labor Market. (n.d.). IZA – Institute of Labor Economics. Retrieved 26 July 2020, from https://covid-19.iza.org/publications/dp13493/

Eric Feigl-Ding on Twitter: “Breaking: Los Angeles and San Diego school districts will be remote-only in the fall. California’s 2 largest public school districts said instruction will be remote-only in the fall, citing concerns that surging coronavirus infections pose too dire a risk for students & teachers. https://t.co/E6DTBeb2RF” / Twitter. (n.d.). Twitter. Retrieved July 17, 2020, from https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1282741042186518534

Coronavirus update: CDC chief backs school reopenings; Pfizer lifts curtain on vaccine data. (n.d.). Retrieved August 27, 2020, from https://ca.sports.yahoo.com/news/coronavirus-update-cdc-chief-backs-school-reopenings-pfizer-lifts-curtain-on-vaccine-data-180316629.html

Inequality in the Impact of the Coronavirus Shock: Evidence from Real Time Surveys. COVID-19 and the Labor Market. (n.d.). IZA – Institute of Labor Economics. Retrieved August 7, 2020, from https://covid-19.iza.org/publications/dp13183/

Bol, T. (2020). Inequality in homeschooling during the Corona crisis in the Netherlands. First results from the LISS Panel. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/hf32q

Feldmann, A., Gasser, O., Lichtblau, F., Pujol, E., Poese, I., Dietzel, C., Wagner, D., Wichtlhuber, M., Tapiador, J., Vallina-Rodriguez, N., Hohlfeld, O., & Smaragdakis, G. (2020). The Lockdown Effect: Implications of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Internet Traffic. ArXiv:2008.10959 [Cs]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2008.10959

Preprint Servers Have Changed Research Culture in Many Fields. Will a New One for Education Catch On? - EdSurge News. (2020, August 20). EdSurge. https://www.edsurge.com/news/2020-08-20-preprint-servers-have-changed-research-culture-in-many-fields-will-a-new-one-for-education-catch-on

Flat Earth “Science”—Wrong, but not Stupid. (2020, August 22). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8DQSM-b2cc

ReconfigBehSci (2020) what I am getting at (ex lawyer here, sorry) is that given the conjunction of mandatory schooling and explicit statement that it is ok to go to school if infected it is the legal default that the child has to go to school (unless an exception is applied for and granted)!? Twitter. Retrieved from: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1295728757353963529

Guimbeau, A., Menon, N., & Musacchio, A. (2020). The Brazilian Bombshell? The Long-Term Impact of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic the South American Way (Working Paper No. 26929; Working Paper Series). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w26929

Michael Apple | Power, Policy and the realities of curriculum and teaching

Reading Rec.

This article starts with a strong opinion on what kinds of stories the media writes about high education.

CNN, A. V., Holly Yan and Christina Maxouris. (n.d.). FDA won’t ‘cut corners’ to approve a Covid-19 vaccine, commissioner says. CNN. Retrieved 12 August 2020, from https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/10/health/us-coronavirus-monday/index.html

Gale, W. G., Gelfond, H., Fichtner, J. J., & Harris, B. H. (2020). The Wealth of Generations, With Special Attention to the Millennials (Working Paper No. 27123; Working Paper Series). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w27123