#accessible education

[thecrashcourse]

The change in your pocket isn't worth much these days, but the crash course coin can change educational outcomes for thousands of learners. Support Crash Course and help us reach even more teachers, students and learners of all kinds with FREE trustworthy and entertaining content. CrashCourseCoin.com

[raffaellopalandri]

Beyond Names: A Disagreement with Ideologies

Daily writing promptWhat public figure do you disagree with the most?View all responses The question of which public figure I disagree with most feels like a loaded question. Disagreement, in my view, is less about personalities and more about the underlying ideas they champion. Photo by Markus Spiske on Pexels.com So, instead of singling out a single person, I’d like to delve into the…

[accessible-education-is-punk]

I found an amazing artist named John Fleissner, a teacher who makes art prints and murals relating to many social issues and I wanted to share the education related ones here. I highly encourage you to check out his website where you can see more of his works and read his mission statement.

Link to website

Link to website

There is also this amazing mural

[the-chaotic-snek]

so much of yall that hate math have just been severely traumatized my educators and the school system in general. Education needs to be more accesible

[marigoldacademy]

Early Education: A Thriving Industry Awaits

The early childhood education (ECE) industry is experiencing unprecedented growth, making it an opportune time for investment. With increasing awareness about the importance of early learning and development, the demand for high-quality childcare and educational services is soaring.

Read More: https://marigoldacademy.com/franchising/2024/08/early-education-a-thriving-industry-awaits/

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

the fact that shakespeare was a playwright is sometimes so funny to me. just the concept of the "greatest writer of the English language" being a random 450-year-old entertainer, a 16th cent pop cultural sensation (thanks in large part to puns & dirty jokes & verbiage & a long-running appeal to commoners). and his work was made to be watched not read, but in the classroom teachers just hand us his scripts and say "that's literature"

just...imagine it's 2450 A.D. and English Lit students are regularly going into 100k debt writing postdoc theses on The Simpsons screenplays. the original animation hasn't even been preserved, it's literally just scripts and the occasional SDH subtitles.txt. they've been republished more times than the Bible

[jstor]

We are pleased to share a significant milestone: JSTOR is now available free of charge in 1,000 correctional facilities worldwide, benefiting more than 500,000 incarcerated individuals. This accomplishment, made achievable through the generous backing of the Mellon Foundation, highlights JSTOR's steadfast dedication to promoting inclusive education.

Learn more about the JSTOR Access in Prison program.

[theabigailthorn]

You're not uniquely talented or hard working you just went to the right schools.

Yes, yes! This is exactly why I started Philosophy Tube! Why shouldn't someone else, anyone else, have access to the education I got??? The intellectual and cultural heritage of our species is for everyone, not just privileged people like me! :)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

MIT libraries are thriving without Elsevier

I'm coming to BURNING MAN! On TUESDAY (Aug 27) at 1PM, I'm giving a talk called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE!" at PALENQUE NORTE (7&E). On WEDNESDAY (Aug 28) at NOON, I'm doing a "Talking Caterpillar" Q&A at LIMINAL LABS (830&C).

Once you learn about the "collective action problem," you start seeing it everywhere. Democrats – including elected officials – all wanted Biden to step down, but none of them wanted to be the first one to take a firm stand, so for months, his campaign limped on: a collective action problem.

Patent trolls use bullshit patents to shake down small businesses, demanding "license fees" that are high, but much lower than the cost of challenging the patent and getting it revoked. Collectively, it would be much cheaper for all the victims to band together and hire a fancy law firm to invalidate the patent, but individually, it makes sense for them all to pay. A collective action problem:

https://locusmag.com/2013/11/cory-doctorow-collective-action/

Musicians get royally screwed by Spotify. Collectively, it would make sense for all of them to boycott the platform, which would bring it to its knees and either make it pay more or put it out of business. Individually, any musician who pulls out of Spotify disappears from the horizon of most music fans, so they all hang in – a collective action problem:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/21/off-the-menu/#universally-loathed

Same goes for the businesses that get fucked out of 30% of their app revenues by Apple and Google's mobile business. Without all those apps, Apple and Google wouldn't have a business, but any single app that pulls out commits commercial suicide, so they all hang in there, paying a 30% vig:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/15/private-law/#thirty-percent-vig

That's also the case with Amazon sellers, who get rooked for 45-51 cents out of every dollar in platform junk fees, and whose prize for succeeding despite this is to have their product cloned by Amazon, which underprices them because it doesn't have to pay a 51% rake on every sale. Without third-party sellers there'd be no Amazon, but it's impossible to get millions of sellers to all pull out at once, so the Bezos crime family scoops up half of the ecommerce economy in bullshit fees:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

This is why one definition of "corruption" is a system with "concentrated gains and diffuse losses." The company that dumps toxic waste in your water supply reaps all the profits of externalizing its waste disposal costs. The people it poisons each bear a fraction of the cost of being poisoned. The environmental criminal has a fat warchest of ill-gotten gains to use to bribe officials and pay fancy lawyers to defend it in court. Its victims are each struggling with the health effects of the crimes, and even without that, they can't possibly match the polluter's resources. Eventually, the polluter spends enough money to convince the Supreme Court to overturn "Chevron deference" and makes it effectively impossible to win the right to clean water and air (or a planet that's not on fire):

https://www.cfr.org/expert-brief/us-supreme-courts-chevron-deference-ruling-will-disrupt-climate-policy

Any time you encounter a shitty, outrageous racket that's stable over long timescales, chances are you're looking at a collective action problem. Certainly, that's the underlying pathology that preserves the scholarly publishing scam, which is one of the most grotesque, wasteful, disgusting frauds in our modern world (and that's saying something, because the field is crowded with many contenders).

Here's how the scholarly publishing scam works: academics do original scholarly research, funded by a mix of private grants, public funding, funding from their universities and other institutions, and private funds. These academics write up their funding and send it to a scholarly journal, usually one that's owned by a small number of firms that formed a scholarly publishing cartel by buying all the smaller publishers in a string of anticompetitive acquisitions. Then, other scholars review the submission, for free. More unpaid scholars do the work of editing the paper. The paper's author is sent a non-negotiable contract that requires them to permanently assign their copyright to the journal, again, for free. Finally, the paper is published, and the institution that paid the researcher to do the original research has to pay again – sometimes tens of thousands of dollars per year! – for the journal in which it appears.

The academic publishing cartel insists that the millions it extracts from academic institutions and the billions it reaps in profit are all in service to serving as neutral, rigorous gatekeepers who ensure that only the best scholarship makes it into print. This is flatly untrue. The "editorial process" the academic publishers take credit for is virtually nonexistent: almost everything they publish is virtually unchanged from the final submission format. They're not even typesetting the paper:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00799-018-0234-1

The vetting process for peer-review is a joke. Literally: an Australian academic managed to get his dog appointed to the editorial boards of seven journals:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/olivia-doll-predatory-journals

Far from guarding scientific publishing from scams and nonsense, the major journal publishers have stood up entire divisions devoted to pay-to-publish junk science. Elsevier – the largest scholarly publisher – operated a business unit that offered to publish fake journals full of unreveiwed "advertorial" papers written by pharma companies, packaged to look like a real journal:

https://web.archive.org/web/20090504075453/http://blog.bioethics.net/2009/05/merck-makes-phony-peerreview-journal/

Naturally, academics and their institutions hate this system. Not only is it purely parasitic on their labor, it also serves as a massive brake on scholarly progress, by excluding independent researchers, academics at small institutions, and scholars living in the global south from accessing the work of their peers. The publishers enforce this exclusion without mercy or proportion. Take Diego Gomez, a Colombian Masters candidate who faced eight years in prison for accessing a single paywalled academic paper:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/07/colombian-student-faces-prison-charges-sharing-academic-article-online

And of course, there's Aaron Swartz, the young activist and Harvard-affiliated computer scientist who was hounded to death after he accessed – but did not publish – papers from MIT's JSTOR library. Aaron had permission to access these papers, but JSTOR, MIT, and the prosecutors Stephen Heymann and Carmen Ortiz argued that because he used a small computer program to access the papers (rather than clicking on each link by hand) he had committed 13 felonies. They threatened him with more than 30 years in prison, and drew out the proceedings until Aaron was out of funds. Aaron hanged himself in 2013:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

Academics know all this terrible stuff is going on, but they are trapped in a collective action problem. For an academic to advance in their field, they have to publish, and they have to get their work cited. Academics all try to publish in the big prestige journals – which also come with the highest price-tag for their institutions – because those are the journals other academics read, which means that getting published is top journal increases the likelihood that another academic will find and cite your work.

If academics could all agree to prioritize other journals for reading, then they could also prioritize other journals for submissions. If they could all prioritize other journals for submissions, they could all prioritize other journals for reading. Instead, they all hold one another hostage, through a wicked collective action problem that holds back science, starves their institutions of funding, and puts their colleagues at risk of imprisonment.

Despite this structural barrier, academics have fought tirelessly to escape the event horizon of scholarly publishing's monopoly black hole. They avidly supported "open access" publishers (most notably PLoS), and while these publishers carved out pockets for free-to-access, high quality work, the scholarly publishing cartel struck back with package deals that bundled their predatory "open access" journals in with their traditional journals. Academics had to pay twice for these journals: first, their institutions paid for the package that included them, then the scholars had to pay open access submission fees meant to cover the costs of editing, formatting, etc – all that stuff that basically doesn't exist.

Academics started putting "preprints" of their work on the web, and for a while, it looked like the big preprint archive sites could mount a credible challenge to the scholarly publishing cartel. So the cartel members bought the preprint sites, as when Elsevier bought out SSRN:

https://www.techdirt.com/2016/05/17/disappointing-elsevier-buys-open-access-academic-pre-publisher-ssrn/

Academics were elated in 2011, when Alexandra Elbakyan founded Sci-Hub, a shadow library that aims to make the entire corpus of scholarly work available without barrier, fear or favor:

https://sci-hub.ru/alexandra

Sci-Hub neutralized much of the collective action trap: once an article was available on Sci-Hub, it became much easier for other scholars to locate and cite, which reduced the case for paying for, or publishing in, the cartel's journals:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.14979

The scholarly publishing cartel fought back viciously, suing Elbakyan and Sci-Hub for tens of millions of dollars. Elsevier targeted prepress sites like academia.edu with copyright threats, ordering them to remove scholarly papers that linked to Sci-Hub:

https://svpow.com/2013/12/06/elsevier-is-taking-down-papers-from-academia-edu/

This was extremely (if darkly) funny, because Elsevier's own publications are full of citations to Sci-Hub:

https://eve.gd/2019/08/03/elsevier-threatens-others-for-linking-to-sci-hub-but-does-it-itself/

Meanwhile, scholars kept the pressure up. Tens of thousands of scholars pledged to stop submitting their work to Elsevier:

http://thecostofknowledge.com/

Academics at the very tops of their fields publicly resigned from the editorial board of leading Elsevier journals, and published editorials calling the Elsevier model unethical:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2012/may/16/system-profit-access-research

And the New Scientist called the racket "indefensible," decrying the it as an industry that made restricting access to knowledge "more profitable than oil":

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24032052-900-time-to-break-academic-publishings-stranglehold-on-research/

But the real progress came when academics convinced their institutions, rather than one another, to do something about these predator publishers. First came funders, private and public, who announced that they would only fund open access work:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06178-7

Winning over major funders cleared the way for open access advocates worked both the supply-side and the buy-side. In 2019, the entire University of California system announced it would be cutting all of its Elsevier subscriptions:

https://www.science.org/content/article/university-california-boycotts-publishing-giant-elsevier-over-journal-costs-and-open

Emboldened by the UC system's principled action, MIT followed suit in 2020, announcing that it would no longer send $2m every year to Elsevier:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/12/digital-feudalism/#nerdfight

It's been four years since MIT's decision to boycott Elsevier, and things are going great. The open access consortium SPARC just published a stocktaking of MIT libraries without Elsevier:

https://sparcopen.org/our-work/big-deal-knowledge-base/unbundling-profiles/mit-libraries/

How are MIT's academics getting by without Elsevier in the stacks? Just fine. If someone at MIT needs access to an Elsevier paper, they can usually access it by asking the researchers to email it to them, or by downloading it from the researcher's site or a prepress archive. When that fails, there's interlibrary loan, whereby other libraries will send articles to MIT's libraries within a day or two. For more pressing needs, the library buys access to individual papers through an on-demand service.

This is how things were predicted to go. The libraries used their own circulation data and the webservice Unsub to figure out what they were likely to lose by dropping Elsevier – it wasn't much!

https://unsub.org/

The MIT story shows how to break a collective action problem – through collective action! Individual scholarly boycotts did little to hurt Elsevier. Large-scale organized boycotts raised awareness, but Elsevier trundled on. Sci-Hub scared the shit out of Elsevier and raised awareness even further, but Elsevier had untold millions to spend on a campaign of legal terror against Sci-Hub and Elbakyan. But all of that, combined with high-profile defections, made it impossible for the big institutions to ignore the issue, and the funders joined the fight. Once the funders were on-side, the academic institutions could be dragged into the fight, too.

Now, Elsevier – and the cartel – is in serious danger. Automated tools – like the Authors Alliance termination of transfer tool – lets academics get the copyright to their papers back from the big journals so they can make them open access:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/26/take-it-back/

Unimaginably vast indices of all scholarly publishing serve as important adjuncts to direct access shadow libraries like Sci-Hub:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#cornucopia-concordance

Collective action problems are never easy to solve, but they're impossible to address through atomized, individual action. It's only when we act as a collective that we can defeat the corruption – the concentrated gains and diffuse losses – that allow greedy, unscrupulous corporations to steal from us, wreck our lives and even imprison us.

Community voting for SXSW is live! If you wanna hear RIDA QADRI and me talk about how GIG WORKERS can DISENSHITTIFY their jobs with INTEROPERABILITY, VOTE FOR THIS ONE!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/16/the-public-sphere/#not-the-elsevier

[ily-no-romo]

I keep hearing people say “oh they’re too smart to explain it to us” about teachers. No. Nope. No. They’re just a bad teacher.

There are teachers who know an insane amount about what they’re teaching and are well beyond their students’ level of understanding who still do a great job explaining the material. Because they’re good teachers.

You can know a lot about a topic and still explain it well to people who are new to the topic. Some people aren’t good at that because some people aren’t good teachers, and that’s okay.

But if someone is a bad teacher, and they’re responsible for teaching you, don’t excuse their failure to do their job with the compliment of “they’re just too smart…”

This applies to things outside of school as well. If you know a lot about a topic and need to help someone else understand it but aren’t good at teaching, find someone else to help because “being too smart” isn’t an excuse to let people down. And if you go to someone for help and they don’t give you the help you need, hold them accountable or find another source, rather than assume this is a topic that only truly intelligent people can learn about and engage with.

[thecrashcourse]

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[alwaysbewoke]

A new study by the education watchdog Available to All reveals that school attendance zones and selective admission policies in the U.S. often exclude students of color and low-income families from elite public schools, thereby reinstating levels of segregation reminiscent of 1968. The study criticizes the use of residential addresses for school assignments, which supports "educational redlining" that favors affluent families, leading to systemic inequalities in access to advanced educational programs. Available to All calls for legislative reforms to protect enrollment rights and recommends that school districts minimize the importance of geographical boundaries to combat segregation and improve school access for all. The resurgence of school segregation to levels seen in 1968 is a stark reminder of how deeply systemic inequality is entrenched in our education system. Policies that favor affluent families and perpetuate educational redlining deny many Black and low-income students the opportunity to access quality education.

but listen to the racists and coons, black people are just making shit up and "playing the victim/race card."

[alicentflorent]

“Alicent is a woman for trump” and “Sansa is princess brexit” are still the most stupid, out of touch takes that I’ve seen in this fandom

[meregrin]

my two cents are that people outside of finland (and even the more left-leaning circles in finland) are not really taking into account that an average person here doesn’t know jack shit about israel or palestine. the first and only time either of them got mentioned in my 12 years of schooling (i’m a few years younger than jere) was an optional history course focusing on post-ww2 history in my final year of high shcool. jere went to vocational school and they don’t teach history at all there so he’s relying on his junior high education which isn’t saying much considering he’s said multiple times he didn’t pay attention at school.

it doesn’t help that the mainstream reporting (which he’s forced to rely on since he doesn’t speak fluent enough english) about the palestinian genocide has been frustratingly neutral and both-sides-y here in finland. obviously some of that is due to journalistic ethics and responsibilities because our news medias can’t get their reporters within gaza’s borders and they can’t report on things unless the information comes from a reputable source or they can fact check them.

all this is to say that i'm willing to bet actual money he doesn’t even know the definition of genocide in finnish, not to mention IDF or zionism or even judaism. those things are simply not taught here and the idea of him being a zionist is laughable. i studied anthropology at university and the amount of times i’ve had to explain fairly simple concepts like colonialism or genocide to people, even highly-educated ones, is staggering. and i didn’t really understand those things either before i went to university. finland used to love to rave about our PISA scores but the truth is that the level of basic education here has been really poor for decades.

[tarantula-hawk-wasp]

At a certain point blaming the school system for failing to teach you every fact becomes an excuse to absolve yourself from learning on your own time as an adult. Maybe you had bad teachers and curricula, maybe you never did the assigned reading, maybe you were taught propaganda, but it’s okay to start now. It’s okay to learn geography from online games. It’s okay to get entry level books from the library on a subject. It’s okay to explore Wikipedia and other reputable websites as a start. You can learn as an adult. You should continue learning as an adult.

[chronicsymptomsyndrome]

Knowing and admitting you need help is one thing

but knowing what help you need or how to acquire it or where to even start is a whole other thing entirely.

Anyone have any tips or resources for this?