OLDaily

More meaningful assessments, with the student `front and center’
Melissa Rayworth, Remake Learning, 2020/06/11

Interesting commentary. "In his 2016 book The End of Average, Dr. Todd Rose explains that, to (Edward) Thorndike, the purpose of school wasn’t to educate each student. It was to sort them based on what he believed to be their inborn intelligence. 'It is deeply ironic,' writes Rose, 'that one of the most influential people in the history of education believed that education could do little to change a student’s abilities.'” I wonder what percentage of educational reserachers have similar views today.

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Kenney goes good on his charter school promise
2020/06/11

Alberta has one of the best education systems in the world, however, it is not making enough money for the private sector, so the government is preparing to institute a system of charter schools in the province, which should bring it to U.S. standards of achievement in relatively short order.

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'Online learning is here to stay - so we must work out how to do it well'
Robin Ghurbhurun, JISC, 2020/06/11

So says Robin Ghurbhurun with about as heavy a sigh of exasperation as one can possibly put into a headline. Maybe show some enthusiasm! Anyhow, the reality is that "a partial opening of campuses in September means that many learners and staff must continue to work from home." There is at least a recognition that "improving education will require a huge shift from merely transferring courses online to transforming teaching, learning and assessment... The present archaic system, often still with pen and paper, is simply not fit for purpose. Increasingly, learning and assessment will follow the learner, accessible at the point of demand, but on-site and remotely." If only there had been someone to say all this before now.

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Five ways to build a community of learners online
Dennis Pierce, eSchool News, 2020/06/11

I have long said educators should tap into existing communities of practice, rather than try to build their own. But people are going to keep trying, I guess. In that rergard, this article offers some suggestions. It's not a long article, but the advice seems very 'teacherly' - "engage students in norm-setting', 'use get-to-know activities', 'provide frequent opportunities for discussion, sharing, and collaboration'. It's not clear to me that this is in any sense a 'community'. But that probably disappeared when the teacher created one and took ownership of it.

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Linked Research on the Decentralised Web
Sarven Capadisli, 2020/06/11

This is a long document containing references to a lot of reserach on the decentralized web. It also adds to that work "a new communication protocol, Linked Data Notifications (published as a W3C Recommendation) which enables decentralised notifications on the Web" and "another core contribution of this work is a Web standards-based implementation of a clientside tool, dokieli, for decentralised article publishing, annotations and social interactions." Add this to your list of essential references.

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Online Learning Is Not the Future
Peter C. Herman, Inside Higher Ed, 2020/06/11

A university professor asks students in his class whether they liked online learning and finds they did not. What's more interesting are the responses in the comments and on Twitter: @karenraycosta: "this isn't really about the quality of #onlinelearning. It's not about evidence. It's about power and the status quo";  @readywriting: "It isn't news that students hate (bad) online learning. Stop conflating (bad)y online learning with good online learning; @LangOnCourse: "Don't judge online teaching based on your informal surveys of students who chose to attend a residential university."

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