1. Schools in the UK often exclude difficult pupils, usually for no better reason than they want to ensure their school’s performance stats are not damaged by poor exam results or frequent absence from school. Good piece here from The Guardian suggesting that this state of affairs needs to change https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/31/schools-should-be-ranked-on-exclusions-as-well-as-gcses-say-experts  

2.This piece by Jamie Medwell from Tribune is about a worryingly similarly dehumanising practice, explaining how you can now be sacked by an algorithm https://tribunemag.co.uk/2022/01/amazon-algorithm-human-resource-management-tech-worker-surveillance

We ourselves have an app called ‘MyHR’ at work that has a ‘terminate’ function …

3. First of two pieces today from Stephen Downes’s daily newsletter, OLDaily, a list of educational YouTube channels https://www.reddit.com/r/edtech/comments/sit1xq/i_made_a_list_of_educational_youtube_channels/

Lots of great stuff, including a site devoted to picking locks, but not a single site specifically devoted to languages or literacy, or not that I noticed.

You can sign up to OLDaily (Online Learning Daily) for yourself here https://downes.ca/

4. Improving Cognitive Presence in Online Discussions in Large Enrolment Courses is the title of the second piece (which means ‘how to help students pay more attention in class’.)

Summary here https://blog.ascilite.org/improving-cognitive-presence-in-online-discussions-in-large-enrolment-courses/

and original article by Janet Mannheimer Zydney et al., Enhancing online protocols through design-based research to improve cognitive presence in a large enrolment course, here https://ajet.org.au/index.php/AJET/article/view/5994/1799

PDF below. Don’t let the title put you off.

5. I’m pretty sure I’ve recommended the Oxford English Dictionary ‘word of the day’ before but I make no apology for doing so again https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/132823

You can sign up for yourself here https://www.oed.com/emailupdates

Wonderfully lo-tech – if the list server ain’t bust, don’t fix it!

6. And, finally and more light-heartedly than some items above, a review of James Joyce’s Ulysses on its first publication one hundred years ago https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/feb/02/james-joyces-ulysses-reviewed-observer-1922