Greg McVerry (quickthoughts.jgregorymcverry.com)1. Begin with You Ghandi never said "Be the change..." still doesn't mean it ain't great advice. We need to be the web we want to see.1 In fact in my recent efforts into #OpenPedagogy (my approach to getting at #ProSocialWeb) I have focused on the words of another Yogi (correctly attributed) C...
"Meritocracy" was coined as satire; the messaging for and against Medicare for All; and Dutch economic historian Rutger Bregman.
A college admissions scandal has highlighted what people refer to as "the myth of meritocracy." But actually, meritocracy itself is a myth. This week, On the Media looks at the satirical origins of the word and what they tell us about why the US embraces it. Plus, the messaging for and against Medicare for All, as well as a historical look at why we don't have universal healthcare. And economic historian and Tucker Carlson antagonist Rutger Bregman.
1. John Patrick Leary [@JohnPatLeary], professor at Wayne State University, on the history of the satirical origins of the word "meritocracy". Listen.
2. Paul Waldman [@paulwaldman1] of The Washington Post on the messaging war over Medicare for All and what the media is getting wrong about the proposal. Listen.
3. Jill Quadagno of [@floridastate] on the history of why the U.S. has shunned universal healthcare. Listen.
4. Rutger Bregman [@rcbregman] on the myths about wealth and who creates it. Listen.
Women at the Salk Institute say they faced a culture of marginalization and hostility. The numbers from other elite scientific institutions suggest they’re not alone.
The thing that goes unsung in a lot of these gender inequality articles is the assured dramatic loss to science as a result. If women were given equal footing, funding, and support what great discoveries would they have otherwise have found by this point? Assuredly the world would be far better off from those unknown discoveries.
It was quoted in the title of the article, but the full quote is even more damning.
“I know a lot of men who sincerely promote gender-equality opportunities for women, but all their efforts are devoted toward younger women,” Emerson says — because it’s less costly. “But I want what my male colleague has, and that will cost a few million dollars.”
In more than a dozen academic fields—largely STEM related—not a single black student earned a doctoral degree in 2017.
The best part of reading through them on the day after is being able to read and react to all the additional conversations and sub-threads. There’s also more time to catch what I missed and read and reflect on some of the more dense links to other sources. I hope I can manage to digest it all before PressEDConf20 is upon us.
It was a huge amount of effort and work by our wonderful hosts and all the presenters. Congratulations all around!
Dr LJ (Twitter)I recommend an eduroam account - or scihub https://t.co/78R9ZGLAUO #openaccess #openscience #PressEdConf19
— Dr LJ (@drlaurajane) April 18, 2019
Dr LJ (Twitter)I had resistance at first from Consultants who feared content being public - worried re reputation risk. I was careful abt content, & explicit how feedback would be used - protecting #trainees confidentiality, & considering public content.#RespEd #MedEd #PressEdConf19 /11
— Dr LJ (@drlaurajane) April 18, 2019
I am a philologist fascinated by the metamorphoses of text on the Web. Curious about the ways the Semantic Web unfolds, I explore how content writing is changing, changing us and the way we think, write and live. Currently I am a PhD student at the Sofia University Faculty of Journalism and Mass Communication. Read more about me
Kevin Carey's critique of the corporate role in inflating the price of online education singled out 2U. In this essay, CEO Chip Paucek answers back.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Times Higher Education (THE))Friendly competition can push us all to do better. But when the competitiveness that fuels excellence and prestige becomes based in the logic of the market, universities lose sight of their true purpose, writes Kathleen Fitzpatrick
This article reminds me a lot of the thesis in American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper. There they indicate that America’s economy isn’t one of pure capitalism and competition, but that we’ve gotten here by a healthy dose of having a mixed economy. Higher education needs a lot of that same mixed economy perspective to fix the wrongs of decades of to much direct competition which is having far too many unexpected consequences and emergent behaviors which we didn’t expect, anticipate, and now have trouble attempting to fix.
This article is so important, just this once, I’ll recommend that those who hit the website’s paywall and don’t want to register, use a read it later service like Pocket or Instapaper which should give you the full text or you can use your browser’s functionality for “viewing source” to get a marked up version.
Kristian Serrano (Twitter)I’m exploring https://t.co/0bzuwdtDr8 to see if it can help me change how I think about sharing and owning my content on the web. I’m intrigued by the indieweb movement, and I think it’s something we should all embrace. You can find me at https://t.co/7zwlgVfVlZ
— Kristian Serrano (@KristianSerrano) April 6, 2019
“What a chilling thing to say about young people crossing the world to learn.” –Kate Bowles (in response to the slide immediately above)
The fact that businesses, governments, and even universities themselves would take such an ugly standpoint on teaching and learning is painful. It reminds me that one of the things that I think the open IndieWeb movement gets right is that it is people-centric first and foremost. If you can take care of people at the most base level, then hopefully what gets built upon that base–while still watching it carefully–will be much more ethical.
The IndieWeb is a people-focused alternative to the “corporate web”.
As a result of this people-centric vision, I’m seeing a lot less of the sort of ills, unintended consequences, and poor emergent behaviors caused by the drive toward surveillance capitalism within the giant social media silos like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et al.
I’m reminded of a part of the thesis that Cesar Hidalgo presents in Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order from Atoms to Economies of the idea of the personbyte and what that looks like at a group level, then a corporate level, and I wonder how it may grow to the next level above that. Without ultimately focusing on the person at the bottom of the pyramid however, we may be ethically losing sight of where we’re going and why. We may even be building an edifice that is far more likely to crumble with even worse unintended consequences.
Here’s her talk in full. I highly recommend it.
https://youtu.be/ff1NBTLjWj8?t=1900,3943
There’s two kinds of scholarship today: there’s Titanic studies and there’s deckchair studies.
— McKenzie Wark
And as the smart ship grewIn stature, grace, and hue,In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too— Thomas HardyI’m an academic at an Australian university. I’ve led an educational design team through an institutional LMS transition, and I’m currently Associate Dean International in our Law, Humanities and Creative Arts Faculty.
I’m interested in the assumptions that regulate work, innovation, profit and risk in higher education, and in the way that the system shaped by these assumptions affects those of us working in universities.
As someone once put it in the search that led them here, this is a blog about:
“shared governance consensus bullshit.”