Lecturer and student relationships matter even more online than on campus – article by Kate Roll (Head of Teaching and Asst. Prof at UCL's Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose) and Marc Ventresca (Assoc. Prof at Oxford's Said Business School) in The Guardian. "In the early days of teaching online, the focus was on recreating the familiar set-up of the physical classroom with the professor positioned at the centre – often referred to as the 'sage on the stage'. ... But us lecturers aren’t feeling so in charge anymore. Our experience of online teaching has been destabilising, but also levelling and humanising. ... Recent research on student engagement in online learning has underscored the need to focus on the quality and variety of such relationships. Online, it is important to establish a strong teacher presence to motivate students and ensure they feel cared for. Hearteningly, the research also found that students did not see online platforms as the main barrier to meaningful interaction. Building relationships online will require lecturers to have closer contact with students through more small-group tutorials and fewer extended lectures. This involves more regular email communications, concise and actionable feedback, and staff participation in online chats. It’s also about bringing oneself into the classroom. "
Fairytale Lockdown Assessment: Little Red Riding Hood – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "(1) Going to see Grandma. 'Providing care or assistance to a vulnerable person.' (2) Big Bad Wolf in the woods. 'Visiting a public open space for the purpose of recreation.' (3) Conversation with wolf. 'Interaction with one member of another household.' (4) Wolf eats Grandma. 'Obtaining basic necessities including food.' (5) Woodcutter working. 'Carrying out work that cannot be done from home.' (6) Killing the wolf. “Providing emergency assistance.'”
The 100 greatest UK No 1s: No 3, The Beatles 'She Loves You' – article by Richard Williams in The Guardian. “To hear She Loves You bursting out of a radio in the last week of August 1963 was to recognise a shout of triumph. Everything the Beatles had promised through the first half of the year found its focus in their fourth single, an explosion of exuberance that forced the world, not just their teenage fans, to acknowledge their existence. The double-jolt of Ringo Starr’s drums kicked off a record that, unusually, began with the song’s chorus: ‘She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah.’ Straight away that Americanised triple ‘yeah’ (Paul McCartney’s father, the first to hear the completed song, asked if they could change it to ‘yes, yes, yes’) offered a fanfare for a culture on the brink of irreversible change. It marked the moment when the Beatles moved from being just another pop sensation to a national obsession: misquoted by prime ministers, cursed by barbers, viewed by schoolteachers as the vanguard of a revolution that must be stopped. And before long, almost universally adored.”
Good Science is Good Science – article by Marc Lipsitch in Boston Review, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Jonathan Fuller’s recent essay ...sees ... two ‘competing philosophies’ of scientific practice. One, he says, is characteristic of public health epidemiologists like me, who are ‘methodologically liberal and pragmatic’ and use models and diverse sources of data. The other, he explains, is characteristic of clinical epidemiologists like Stanford’s John Ioannidis, who draw on a tradition of skepticism about medical interventions in the literature of what has been known since the 1980s as ‘evidence-based medicine,’ privilege ‘gold standard’ evidence from randomized controlled trials (as opposed to mere ‘data’), and counsel inaction until a certain ideal form of evidence—Evidence with a capital E—justifies intervening. Fuller rightly points out that this distinction is only a rough approximation ... But the distinction is also misleading in a subtle way. If the COVID-19 crisis has revealed two ‘competing’ ways of thinking in distinct scientific traditions, it is not between two philosophies of science or two philosophies of evidence so much as between two philosophies of action.”
A Case for Cooperation Between Machines and Humans – article by John Markoff in The New York Times, referenced by John Naughton in his Observer column. "Ben Shneiderman, a University of Maryland computer scientist who has for decades warned against blindly automating tasks with computers, thinks fully automated cars and the tech industry’s vision for a robotic future is misguided. Even dangerous. Robots should collaborate with humans, he believes, rather than replace them.... Dr. Shneiderman, 72, began spreading his message decades ago. A pioneer in the field human-computer interaction, he co-founded in 1982 what is now the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems and coined the term 'direct manipulation' to describe the way objects are moved on a computer screen either with a mouse or, more recently, with a finger.... Since then, Dr. Shneiderman has argued that designers run the risk not just of creating unsafe machines but of absolving humans of ethical responsibility of the actions taken by autonomous systems, ranging from cars to weapons."
The Salisbury Poisonings: TV drama revisits Novichok attack 'horror' – article by Steven McIntosh on the BBC website. "The three-part series is based on the events of March 2018, when the Wiltshire cathedral city faced one of the biggest threats to UK public health in recent years.... It's an extraordinary story, which Salisbury is still recovering from. But the dramatisation isn't some kind of James Bond-style spy thriller.... Instead, it focuses on the response of the local community and health officials.'We were drawn to the stories of the people who had to clean up this mess, rather than the people who made it,' says Declan Lawn, who co-wrote the script with Adam Patterson. 'It's about ordinary people who have to pick up the pieces. We thought that's where the drama was, where the emotion was.' ... At the centre of the The Salisbury Poisonings is Tracy Daszkiewicz (played by Anne-Marie Duff), the director of public health for Wiltshire.... 'To us now, it seems perfectly logical,' says Duff, referring to how common certain health measures have become since coronavirus. 'Of course we close our doors and windows and wear masks, but at the time, it seemed like she was being thoroughly extreme and overreacting. But what's glorious about Tracy is her background. Her background is in social work, she's very grassroots, she comes at things from a tactile level. So she'll ask, "What do we know to be true? What do we know if someone has food poisoning? What if the water source becomes contaminated?"' "
The Lancet has made one of the biggest retractions in modern history. How could this happen? – article by James Heathers in The Guardian. "The answer is quite simple. It happened because peer review, the formal process of reviewing scientific work before it is accepted for publication, is not designed to detect anomalous data. ... the sad truth is peer review in its entirety is struggling, and retractions like this drag its flaws into an incredibly bright spotlight. The ballistics of this problem are well known. To start with, the vast majority of peer review is entirely unrewarded. The internal currency of science consists entirely of producing new papers, which form the cornerstone of your scientific reputation. There is no emphasis on reviewing the work of others.... However, even if reliable volunteers for peer review can be found, it is increasingly clear that it is insufficient. The vast majority of peer-reviewed articles are never checked for any form of analytical consistency, nor can they be – journals do not require manuscripts to have accompanying data or analytical code and often will not help you obtain them from authors if you wish to see them.... Peer review during a pandemic faces a brutal dilemma – the moral importance of releasing important information with planetary consequences quickly, versus the scientific importance of evaluating the presented work fully – while trying to recruit scientists, already busier than usual due to their disrupted lives, to review work for free."
Fighting over statues obscures the real problem: Britain's delusion about its past – article by Martin Kettle in The Guardian. "When history waves a national flag, it always tells a partisan story not a true one. Britain is a very divided country on class, culture and other grounds. We thus react to the inherited celebrations of British greatness either by embracing or by rejecting them, but always too emphatically. Events such as the toppling of the Colston statue do not solve this divide. There is too little shared imaginative space, not enough humility and tolerance within civil society, and therefore a less generous approach than there should be to the task of evolving a shared culture. The absence of a national museum of British history, underpinned by a better history curriculum, disables the country. As a consequence, British history continues to be a political battleground between those who insist that our historic greatness is self-evident and empowering, and those who cannot bring themselves to see much in our history beyond lies about crimes. In public policy, public rituals and public debate the old, island-story narratives of greatness still have the upper hand.... The failure to look the history of empire in the eye is not the only neglected issue in Britain’s enduringly delusional relationship with its past. But it is the one that more than any other impoverishes modern Britain’s understanding of itself and the world of 2020."
Britain can no longer ignore its darkest chapters: we must teach black history – article by David Olusoga in The Guardian. "I went to school in the 70s and the 80s, and the last thing I expected of my schools back then was that they would be the places in which I would be taught about black history. In my school, racism was ubiquitous and unrelenting, and not just from the pupils. For a year I was terrorised by one of my teachers. A man who drank his tea from a mug emblazoned with one of the National Front’s slogans.... At that school, and the next one, there was no such thing as black history. The history of the British empire, the chapter of our national story that would have explained to my classmates why a child born in Nigeria was sat among them, was similarly missing from the curriculum. ... There have long been calls for the national curriculum to properly incorporate black British history.... This week [Lavinya Stennett] launched a new campaign in which members of the public are being asked to sign an open letter to the education secretary, Gavin Williamson, requesting that black history be made compulsory, in order to help 'build a sense of identity in every young person in the UK', Stennett says.... Little about the actions of the young people who pulled Colston from his pedestal and those who cheered him on his descent to the bottom of Bristol harbour, was random. Much of it was emblematic of a generation of young black Britons and their white friends and classmates who have educated themselves on the realities of the slave trade and slavery just as they have on the structural nature of racism. They know that they cannot rely on the national curriculum to provide the history that we all need, no matter our race or ethnicity. They know how urgently we need a new curriculum that makes sense of our history, with all its dark chapters included. It is those stories, the ones we find uncomfortable as well as the ones we celebrate, that have created the nation we have become. This, along with much else, is what has to change."
Ways to make online literary festivals feel more realistic – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "Give this summer's online literary festivals a more realistic feel by picking one of these cards. (1) Mislaid ticket. Rifle through your bag in a blind panic for 15 minutes. (2) Bad seat. Sit as far as you can from the computer. (3) Sudden downpour. Stand fully-clothed in the shower for three minutes. (4) Talkative neighbours. Turn the radio on throughout the event. (5) Queue for a coffee. Wait 25 minutes and then make yourself a really terrible cup of coffee. (6) Behind a tall person. Place a watermelon in front of your screen. (7) Went to wrong event. Watch random YouTube videos for one hour."
Solving online events – blog post by Benedict Evans, referenced in John Naughton's Observer column. "A conference, or an ‘event’, is a bundle. There is content from a stage, with people talking or presenting or doing panels and maybe taking questions. Then, everyone talks to each other in the hallways and over coffee and lunch and drinks. Separately, there may be a trade fair of dozens or thousands of booths and stands, where you go to see all of the products in the industry at once, and talk to the engineers and salespeople. And then, there are all of the meetings that you schedule because everyone is there. ... The only part of that bundle that obviously works online today is the content. It’s really straightforward to turn a conference presentation or a panel into a video stream, but none of the rest is straightforward at all.... I understand why events organisers and events platforms want to try to put all of these things into one website on one date, but the results generally remind me of ‘virtual malls’ in the 1990s. A mall aggregates people and retailers, and that has value for both sides. Then the web came along, and clearly people would shop online, but how? Should retailers have their own websites, or should there be landlords who would aggregate that traffic? And should there be lots and lots of different ‘virtual shopping malls'? No. That aggregation model makes no sense online. Today, of course, we do have aggregators, in Google or Instagram, but they don’t work anything like a shopping mall. Going online breaks the bundle, and conferences will be the same."
The Long Shadow Of The Future – article by Steven Weber and Nils Gilman on Noēma website, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "One of the less-positive effects of digital social media over the last decade has been to contribute to a set of mythologies about the special value of ideas. Ideas are of course powerful and ultimately the source of innovation and social change, but the pandemic is revealing a sharp difference between power and value. ... Put simply, ideas are cheap and easy to create and distribute — never more so than on social media platforms. But really knowing how to get things done effectively requires a set of capabilities that are difficult to create, expensive to maintain and improve, and not something you describe in 280 characters. Pandemics and other mass emergencies and mobilizations like wars demonstrate the difference in sharp relief. The ability to execute becomes visibly more important than the ability to ideate. What’s more, the best ideas are rarely discovered in isolation from practical implementation. Improvement depends on concrete feedback from what happens when ideas are put into practice in the world. What works and what doesn’t reveals itself to operators before (and often more clearly than) it reveals itself to idea generators."
Are Universities Going the Way of CDs and Cable TV? – article by Michael D. Smith in The Atlantic, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "After the Coronavirus upended American life, millions of college students made the transition from sitting in campus lecture halls to live-streaming seminars at their kitchen tables. Do students think their pricey degrees are worth the cost when delivered remotely? The Wall Street Journal asked that question in April, and one student responded with this zinger: 'Would you pay $75,000 for front-row seats to a Beyoncé concert and be satisfied with a livestream instead?' Another compared higher education to premium cable—an annoyingly expensive bundle with more options than most people need. 'Give me the basic package,' he said. ... I need no convincing of the value of campus life and in-classroom education. I recognize that online platforms can’t perfectly replace what we deliver on campus. But they can fulfill key pieces of our core mission and reach many more students, of all ages and economic backgrounds, at a far lower cost. What online services lack in quality, they make up for in convenience—and as they get more popular, they’re only going to get better, which in turn could unbundle the prevailing model of higher education. Indeed, that unbundling is already happening. Employers such as Google, Apple, IBM, and Ernst & Young have stopped requiring traditional university degrees, even for some of their most highly skilled positions. Inevitably, as employers embrace new skills-based certifications, many students may question the value of the traditional four-year degree."
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