OLDaily

How to Change Your Conversations About Cultural Appropriation
James Mendez Hodes, 2020/01/03

I gave this item a slow and careful read, because it's a bit outside my comfort zone. I was rewarded with a nuanced, informed and engaging discussion of cultural appropriation. I like that it resisted drawing hard lines (someone wears deadlocks in Sweden; who cares, really?) and was sensitive to intention and context (someone goes overboard defending a person who wears dreadlocks in Sweden; what is their intent here?). "Next time the issue comes up, slow down and break the topic into its component parts. Don’t draw preconceived lines. Don’t pass sentences. Focus on the expression on the table and its own distinct character. Who has the power? Who’s vulnerable to harm? Where are the patterns? What’s the context?" Good good advice.

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Free Textbooks for Law Students
Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed, 2020/01/03

This article questions whether some open access law textbooks count as open educational resources (OER) because they do not allow derivatives to be made from them. The article doesn't actually link to the texts, but they are freely available: here's the Trademark Law text (862 page PDF), and here's the Copyright Law text (702 page PDF). Both are CC non-commercial licensed, and only the Copyright Law text includes the no-derivatives clause. So is it OER? The story quotes Cable Green from Creative Commons as stating that they are not OER. My official and well-considered view on the matter? I don't care. (My image is directly from the Copyright Law text download; I cannot explain why it's different from IHE's image).

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Predictions for Journalism 2020
NiemanLab, 2020/01/03

This is a long list of short contributions to a Nieman Labs special study on the future of journalism. Amid the dire predictions are suggestions about the business model, focus on content, focus on specific issues, format changes, and maybe even the rise of blogcasting. From my own perspective, I think I've found a good formula for doing journalism in this newsletter, but I don't know how I would make it pay if I had to leave my day job. Anyhow, this item will keep you occupied for a good while over the weekend, if you let it. Time well spent.

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China No. 1 on 2018 PISA: Is the country really an education powerhouse as the rankings suggest?
Siyi Zhang, JMDedu, 2020/01/03

The answer to the question in the title is "no", though the story doesn't explicitly say so. The tests were from a total of 12,058 students from 361 schools in Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang (B-S-J-Z), a small fraction of the total student population. As always, "socio-economically advantaged students outperformed disadvantaged students," so what we have here is a sample of the wealthiest students in China's wealthiest cities. Now this sample, and this population, is nothing to be disregarded - it is equivalent to the entire student population of other countries.

Meanwhile, in the JMD article, there's a lot of expression of discomfort with the results even taken at face value. China's education system ranks among the least 'efficient' (ie., it is supplemented with a lot of time spent learning outside school). The students' "satisfaction with life" ranks near the bottom. And there's concern about the type of learning that results: “Preparations for exams are a little bit too exaggerated... the exam is just one of many ways to verify learning. It is about whether you can think like a scientist or mathematician, translate a real world problem into a mathematical solving, interpret the result back in the problem context.”

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The Complete Guide to Memory
Scott Young, Jakub Jílek, 2020/01/03

This long item showed up in Mike Taylor's list today (it's from last February). I would characterize it as 'practical advice for students' combined with a folk psychology of memory. It's long, it contains a lot of practical advice (that works, based on my own experience), and it's well written. As a theory of memory it falls short in numerous places, but as a way to help students prepare for tests, well, you could do a lot worse.

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