Category: Education

Listened to S1 E5: A Level Playing Field? (Contested, Part 5 of 6) by John Biewen from Scene on Radio

Two families, both making big investments of time and money to involve their kids in sports. But the investments they’re able to make are very different. In Part 5 of “Contested,” our series on sports, society and culture: Sports and the American Dream.

Composite Photo: Thomas Schmidt, left, video still by Ian McClerin, and Jalani (“JT”) Taylor, video still by Hannah Colton.

This is an awesome and eye-opening episode. The misconceptions about sports as a “way out” are apparently even worse than I thought they were. The statistics about becoming an elite physician being better than being a pro athlete are just stunning. The availability heuristic we’re given with relation to sports constantly on television and in the media is apparently heavily hampering a lot of people specifically and society at large.

Very few people really make any money through sports. Less than 5,000 men and women all-in make a living by doing it.

There are more black cardiologists in the US than there are black men in the NBA. The odds of getting an elite job by going to medical school are infinitely better than trying to get into professional sports.

Replied to Feed WordPress 101: Feeding The Machine by Alan LevineAlan Levine (CogDogBlog)
If you are just syndicating a few feeds into your own site, or maybe for a single class of students, it’s not much work to manually add the feeds. Collecting them can be as simple as asking students to email you the address for their blog, or collecting them via something like a Google Form. Many of us dream of a single one button solution, but my experience in creating at least half a dozen of these sites are is… feeds can be messy.
Alan, this series is great. Coincidentally I came across it courtesy of Greg McVerry (#) after having spent some time over the past few days discussing feed discovery with David Shanske who recently wrote a small WordPress plugin for helping to uncover RSS feeds for tags and categories. Today he wrote some broader thoughts about feed discovery you may appreciate.

In addition to all of this, since you’re a coder, you might also appreciate some of the more advanced feed discovery code David has written into the Yarns Microsub Server for WordPress (code on Github). You may be able to build some of the discovery bits into some of your syndication hubs/planets in the future.

Of course, like FeedWordPress and the relatively similar PressForward plugin, you might also be able to bend Yarns into an aggregator in similar ways.

Read Ethical Edtech (Digital Pedagogy Lab)
Much of what passes as educational technology are corporate products designed for purposes of profit-seeking, surveillance, data collection, and user lock-in. Other kinds of technology exist, but they typically lack the marketing and sales budgets of competing vendors. Ethical EdTech is an online community that shares tools and techniques to facilitate pedagogy that puts participants... Read More
Read - Want to Read: Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire (Bloomsbury Academic; 4th edition)

First published in Portuguese in 1968, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was translated and published in English in 1970. Paulo Freire's work has helped to empower countless people throughout the world and has taken on special urgency in the United States and Western Europe, where the creation of a permanent underclass among the underprivileged and minorities in cities and urban centers is ongoing.

This 50th anniversary edition includes an updated introduction by Donaldo Macedo, a new afterword by Ira Shor and interviews with Marina Aparicio Barberán, Noam Chomsky, Ramón Flecha, Gustavo Fischman, Ronald David Glass, Valerie Kinloch, Peter Mayo, Peter McLaren and Margo Okazawa-Rey to inspire a new generation of educators, students, and general readers for years to come.

Book cover of Pedagogy of the Opressed by Paulo Freire

Read Disruption’s legacy by Martin Weller (blog.edtechie.net)
Clayton Christensen passed away yesterday. I never met him and he was by many accounts a warm, generous individual. So this is not intended as a personal attack, and I apologise if it’s timing seems indelicate, but as so many pieces are being published about how influential Disruption Theory was, I would like to offer a counter narrative to its legacy.
One of the most important points here:

It legitimised undermining of labour – the fact that Uber, Tesla, Amazon etc all treat their staff poorly is justified because they are disrupting an old model. And you can’t bring those old fashioned conceits of unions, pensions, staff care into this. By harking to the God of Disruption, companies were able to get away with such practices more than if they had simply declared “our model is to treat workers badly”.

Originally bookmarked on January 29, 2020 at 06:38AM

Bookmarked ATI 2019-20 Webinar Series (Academic Technology at USNH)

USNH Academic Technology Institute Presents the 2019-20 Open Ed Webinar Series The next in the series is Feb 6 at 7:00 pm -  Ungrading: Pedagogical Possibilities for Going Beyond the Grade. Hosted by Robin DeRosa of Plymouth State University. Register here!  

These webinars are designed for past and present ATI Ambassadors as a way to continue our learning and sharing help keep us current on trends in Open Education. At ATI 2019, ambassadors identified key areas of interest that they wanted to learn more about and explore more in depth.

Read Reducing Friction and Expanding Participation in the Continuous Improvement of OER by David Wiley (iterating toward openness)
I’m going to write a post or three about some of the friction that exists around using OER. There are some things about working with OER that are just harder or more painful than they need to be, and getting more people actively involved in using OER will require us to reduce or eliminate those po...
This reminds me I should write up something about using Webmention in conjunction with OER.
Bookmarked Full line up of OER20 featured speakers is announced by alt_fjones (OER20)
We are delighted to announce the full line up of featured speakers for our 2020 OER Conference. Joining The Zemos Collective and sava saveli singh who were announced at the end of 2019, we have now completed the line up with Joe Deville and Janneke Adema.
Read A Special Kind of Hell: Un-Grading is Another Kind of Grading by Karen Cangialosi (karencang.net)
I’ve been teaching for more than 27 years, but it is just in the last five that I stopped grading traditionally, and so I am what some may call an “un-grader”. But the thing is, if you work in an institution where your job is to assign final grades at the end of the semester like I do, then you are still a grader.
Listened to Want to succeed? Take an Econ 101 course by David Brancaccio from Marketplace

New York Times Columnist Nicholas Kristof thinks understanding the basics of the economy will help you get far in life.

https://www.marketplace.org/2020/01/28/want-to-succeed-take-an-econ-101-course/

College students receive any number of recommended introductory courses. But according to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, one of the key classes you might need to take to succeed in life might be an introductory economics course.

As part of the Marketplace Morning Report’s “Econ Extra Credit” project, host David Brancaccio spoke with Kristof about how an Econ 101 class can provide a student with a robust toolbox that could be used later in life to both understand and address larger issues like rent control or how to fund a tax cut.

“We’ve repeatedly mangled macro economic policy in the U.S.,” Kristof said. “It’s pretty obvious that even lawmakers kind of have no clue about really basic issues, like you know, what a fiscal stimulus is.”

Click on the player above to hear their conversation on the merits of Econ 101, as well as Kristof’s thoughts on how introductory economics has adapted to better reflect real world economic issues.

This interview is part of our “Econ Extra Credit” project, where we read a new introductory economics textbook provided by the non-profit Core-Econ together with our listeners. If you’d like to join us in this project, email MorningReport@marketplace.org and let us know you’re reading along with Marketplace through the end of Spring.

I love the idea that Marketplace is planning on using an OER (open educational resources) economics textbook to do a public bookclub/MOOC/guided self-study of Economics 101. 

Naturally I worry that the participation rates will start high and end low, but the fact that they’re encouraging their listeners to expand themselves and delve a bit deeper than just listening to their show is fantastic.

And honestly, who couldn’t use an ECON refresher from time to time–particularly one that takes a dramatically different approach to the subject than the one many of us took?