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OLDaily - Text Edition by Stephen Downes Oct 04, 2016
Open Educational Practices: A literature review
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Useful literature review that breezes through the subject
with a light touch. At virtually any point it could dive
more deeply, but the 35 pages read briskly and are a fairly
comprehensive overview of the subject. I found the latter
parts of the paper less useful - why do we need a
'theoretical framework' to talk about open educational
practices? To my mind (and this is a general point) the
material itself tells us how it should be discussed;
bringing in a framework imposes an external frame of
relevance that can be (and is probably) inappropriate for
the current domain. Anyhow. I'll take off my "critic's" hat
now. Heather Ross describes the context in this short blog
post Linkwhich should be
read prior to reading the review. Image: Wikipedia
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Toward a Constructive Technology Criticism
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This is a long and detailed report that blows through tech
journalism like a breath of fresh air. It had me thinking
about what it is that i do with this newsletter - not
journalism, not curation - is it tech criticism? Maybe.
But: "criticism carries negative connotations—that of
criticizing with unfavorable opinions rather than
critiquing to offer context and interpretation." That's not
me. And also: "There’s so much glittery, breathless
writing about technology that fails to slow down and think
about why we’re making these things, who we’re
making them for, and who we’re leaving out when we
make them." That's not me either. Anyhow. Beginning toward
the end of the first third of the article there is a
terrific set of "traps of styles and tactics" that ought to
be required reading for anyone in the genre. There's some
discussion about who is a critic and where they publish
(sadly, mostly in mainstream pubs). Then (around the
halfway mark) there's a set of "critical lenses" (I don't
like the term 'lens' employed in this way - it implies
there's something 'real' that's being interpreted).
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How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016
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Sadly, it really is like this. "Wait, I learned OOP in
college, I thought that was good? -So was Java before being
bought by Oracle. I mean, OOP was good back in the days,
and it still has its uses today, but now everyone is
realising modifying states is equivalent to kicking babies,
so now everyone is moving to immutable objects and
functional programming." Sigh. Read the whole thing. Every
reference is real. I think.
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Initial xAPI/Caliper Comparison
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xAPI and Caliper are systems for recording student
activities, offered by ADL and IMS respectively. There are
ongoing discussions between the two organizations regarding
how the overlap and/or interoperate. They note "Caliper and
xAPI have very different origins. The core xAPI is to
enable any type of experience and evidence tracking, both
electronic and physical performance and not limited to just
web-based courses (as is the case for SCORM). Caliper
is the manifestation of the IMS Learning Analytics
Framework and the Sensor API and Metric Profile(s) are the
first two components of that framework. xAPI and
Caliper are NOT equivalent. Adoption should not be
‘one-or-the-other’, instead it is a
‘horses-for-courses’ decision." This document
offers an excellent table-based comparison of the two
specifications.
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Contextual Cognition in Social Simulation
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I have mentioned context a lot over the years and never
taken the time to discuss it properly. This chapter (22
page PDF Link is
far from a complete discussion but offers a good first
look, especially with respect to related concepts such as
"tacit knowledge (Polanyi 1966), the frame problem in AI
(McCarthy and Hayes 1969), framing in psychology (Goffman
1974), and the “situation” (Barwise and Perry
1983)." For me, context is essential for determining the
salience of relevant factors; salience, in turn, defines
what will count as 'similar' for the purpose of cognition.
This paper looks in particular at the impact of context in
social simulation; "very few social or cognitive
simulations represent any of the processes for dealing with
such context-dependency." Given that we are often not even
consciously aware of contextual factors, how would we model
contextual cognition? You can't just learn something (a
model, say), you also have to learn where it works best.
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What’s Wrong with MOOCs: One-Size-Fits-All Syndrome
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Jim Shimabukuro disc usses a recent initiative by the
Malaysian government to implement MOOCs in that country.
"The Malaysian government is taking steps to “make 30
per cent of higher education courses available as massive
open online courses (or MOOCs) by 2020” (Financial
Review
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2 Oct. 2016)." His concern is that the initiatiuve is
relying on a single MOOC platform - OpenLearn, based in
Australia - to offer the materials. This is too narrow, he
says. "The bottom line is that a MOOC, any MOOC,
isn’t a place. Instead, it’s a manifestation of
a pedagogy that’s continually reconstructed by the
individual participants, teacher and students. It exists
not in the world out there but within each
participant’s mind. As such, its shape and form are
limited only by the individual’s imagination. Thus,
to artificially and arbitrarily confine its form is
counterintuitive." That was how we developed MOOCs
originally, and where they should return again in the long
term.
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Copyright 2016 Stephen Downes
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