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OLDaily - Text Edition by Stephen Downes Oct 18, 2016
Immersive Virtual Reality: Online Education for the Next
Generation
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A fairly light read with a decent number of links, this
short article touts the potential of virtual reality (VR)
to reshape education. Of course, if past experience is any
guide, instead of creating simulations of ERs and
submarines, educators will use VR to simulate the typical
college lecture theatre. Anyhow, some references to
projects here include: Project Sansar
http://www.lindenlab.com/releases/linden-lab-invites-first-virtual-experience-creators-to-project-sansar-testing"
target="_blank, a VR creation platform; High Fidelity
https://highfidelity.io/" target="_blank open-source VR
platform; Facebook’s social VR
http://mashable.com/2016/04/13/facebook-social-vr-analysis/#ytvG2jCsGOq0"
target="_blank, and much more. See also CBC, In VR and AR,
Computers Adapt to Humans
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Equity, Resilience, and Achievements in High Performing
Asian Education Systems
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Many of the leaders in recent PISA and other academic tests
have been from east Asian countries. Why? This
month's special issue
Linkof
Frontiers of Education in China explores the quantitative
results with a set of (mostly) qualitative studies. They
are all well-written and accessible. The editorial
summarizes them nicely, and the first paragraph especially
should be required reading (a task I've made easier for you
by extracting and reformatting
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that paragraph). But do read the articles themselves; they
address issues such as equity in Japan (made possible in
part by rotating teachers from school to school each year),
civics education in Hong Kong (where teachers are expected
to model citizenship), changing administrative structures
in Shanghai (and the challenges to equity created by
marketplace approaches), hidden racism in Korea, and much
more. Image: Peking University
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Labeling fact-check articles in Google News
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I haven't been able to see this actually working yet, but
the promise of a 'fact check' option in Google News is
intriguing. For now, the actual fact checking will depend
on people, and it looks like fact-checking metadata (called
Claim Review Link will
have to be present in the news story. "Publishers who
create fact-checks and would like to see it appear with the
“Fact check” tag should use that markup in
fact-check articles." The Guardian reports
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"In Google News, fact check labels are visible in the
expanded story box on the Google News site, on both the iOS
and Android apps, and roll out for users in the US and UK
first." Presumably those are the places that need fact
checking the most. The Guardian also takes a swipe at
Facebook: "After sacking their trending topics news team,
the social media site was at the center of a storm when its
algorithm started promoting fake news
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/ug/29/facebook-fires-trending-topics-team-algorithm"
data-link-name="in body link." More on fact-checking in
Google's help
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XuetangX: A Look at China’s First and Biggest MOOC
Platform
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XuetangX Linkis one of the world's top
MOOC platforms with more than 5 million registrations. The
service is a modified ExX platform, so look-and-feel and
navigation will be familiar, even if the overall appearance
isn't. This article highlights some of the modifications
XuetangX has made, most notable support for mobile
learning. Consider, for example, the 'rain classroom': "my
class instruction PowerPoint can be viewed on
students’ phones in real time.... from a
teacher’s viewpoint, if you can use PowerPoint and
WeChat, you can play around with Rain Classroom." Plans for
the future include a XuetangX cloud service for
universities and a microdegrees program.
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So You Want to Learn Physics...
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This is an outline of a physics curriculum from first year
to graduate studies. It's useful in its own right, but it
makes me wonder whether someone could use something like
this to actually learn physics. Yes, they would have to be
very motivated, persistent, and have a lot of time. But it
would have been perfect for, say, someone like me when I
was working as a security guard in my early 20s. Now the
textbooks in this guide are Amazon.com and therefore
expensive - you'd want to replace the material with open
content. And there's no community, but maybe one could be
made or found. Could it be done? Image: Khan, Physics
Linkinverted.
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Copyright 2016 Stephen Downes
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License
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