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Personal and Personalized Learning
> For these reasons, it may be preferably to embrace an alternative to personalized learning, which might be called personal learning. In the case of personal learning, the role of the educational system is not to provide learning, it is to support learning. Meanwhile, the decisions about what to learn, how to learn, and where to…
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Grit and racism
> Rubbish! Soft skill training is disguised bootstrapping, which insidiously blames youth for failing in racist systems designed to block their success, and it abdicates the middle class from any responsibility to uproot inequality. It’s racism that really keeps students out of college and careers, not kids’ lack of resilience. Students are ready for college…
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Economies of Distraction
>What caught my attention with respect to our conversation here was the conclusion, implicit in his argument, that many of the features that have built the Internet into a weapon of mass distraction are not intrinsic to the medium, but are instead a side-effect of its cooption as a tool for capital growth. >That’s a heavy…
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OER Intermediacy
> Our architectures tend to emphasize stability (present usefulness) over the intermediate nature of such things. > > As an example, we often choose formats which privilege sharing (present usefulness) at the expense of remix (intermediacy). I first encountered this when looking at OpenCourseWare (OCW) in the mid-aughts. In the quest to share things in…
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Barriers to Remix
> What resonated to me from Mike’s piece above everything else was his recognition of a clash between usefulness and remixability. Resources that tend to be universally useful (PDF) tend to not be remixable. Resources that tend to remixable (let’s say open source code) tend to only be accessible by a privileged few who understand…
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The MakerBot Obituary
> MakerBot is a dead company walking. Yes, the newest version of the Smart Extruder is more reliable, with most extruders printing successfully after 1200 hours. Thingiverse, a MakerBot property, is still the most popular object sharing repository on the Internet, but others including YouMagine are making inroads. What does the future hold for MakerBot? It…
