Laden...
[Home] [Top] [Archives] [Mobile] [About] [Threads] [Options]
by Stephen Downes
Mar 04, 2016
Istanbul
I'm in Istanbul. This is the Mosque of Suleiman the Magnificent seen in the evening, shrouded by fog. That's pretty much what happened to my Wednesday, so this is a pretty short newsletter.
Feature Article
The 2016 Look At The Future Of Online Learning
Stephen Downes, Mar 04, 2016.
When I was in university the predominate ethos was that we the faculty are the university. The reference in this recommendation to 'the faculty' in the third person is telling. The university has shifted in my lifetime from an institution in which the faculty collectively performed a valuable social service to one in which the faculty are employees, under increasingly tenuous employment conditions, and in some cases (notably sessionals and term lecturers) exploitative conditions. So the role of the faculty should indeed be rethought, though perhaps not in the manner intended.
Share |[Link] [Comment] [Tweet] 65113
A 2016 Look at the Future of Online Learning
Contact North, 2016/03/04
I suppose this two-page set of outlooks on the future of online learning (17 page PDF with both parts) is good so far as it goes, but I don't think it goes deep enough. This first part looks at technological and structural changes to online learning and is the stronger of the two. The second part looks at changing social and business models, and is substantially weaker. All predictions of the future are a form of opinion writing, by definition, since the future has not happened yet. But this piece would have been strengthened considerably with an underpinning in actual cases and examples. Anyhow. I wrote my own version of the article, responding point by point to the unnamed Contact North author. You can read it here.
Real Future: A Female eSports Champion Speaks Out About Harassment
Kevin Roose, Real Future, YouTube, 2016/03/04
Interesting video that touches on a number of interesting topics: online gaming, Twitch, Hearthstone, gender issues, and more. From the video summary: "Kevin Roose visits Hafu and learns what life is like for a female eSports celebrity, and what she thinks could help eSports solve its gender problem. Hafu Chan is a legend. For the past eight years, she's been a star in one of the most popular sports in the world: competitive video gaming, known as eSports. Hafu streams herself playing Hearthstone and other games on Twitch, where she has thousands of subscribers and a loyal fan base. But she says she's been turned off from competing because of sexists and trolls sending her nasty messages." Good comment near the end: the thing that could damage esports in the long term and its popularity in the mainstream is just its lack of diversity.
Project-based Learning gives Kindergarteners Agency
Paula Ford, Personalize Learning, 2016/03/03
I'm not sure what to make of this, but I thought I would share it, because their motivations are good, both in terms of project-nased learning, and also in terms of the project. "We have a global partnership with the Cheery Education Center in Kenya. Their plan was to decorate boxes, put them by classrooms and have the whole school bring in donations." They raised $470.
Connectivism in Learning Activity Design: Implications for Pedagogically-Based Technology Adoption in African Higher Education Contexts
Rita Ndagire Kizito, The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL), 2016/03/02
This is a "reflection on the process of designing learning activities that employ blogging in an experimental training intervention provides a unique context in which to try and infuse connectivist principles while outlining the challenges that surface." How does connectivism inform the work in this context? "The linkages between African-based technology adoption models to connectivism present very fundamental issues about design, the models that can be used, and what one should be aware of during the design and delivery processes."
Helping mainstream collaborative teaching and learning through the new CO-LAB project
Collaborative Education Lab, 2016/03/02
From the website: "CO-LAB is a new project launched in January 2016 which gives practitioners and policy makers the opportunity to experiment and better understand what Collaborative Teaching and Learning (CTL) means in policy and practice. The project aims to train teacher trainers, student teachers and teachers across Europe in how to integrate CTL into the 21st century classroom through a MOOC which will be open to all and available online in October 2016 on the European Schoolnet Academy." As an aside: this site has the longest URLs I've seen in a while.
Musings on the Economics of Commercial and Open Educational Resources
David Wiley, iterating toward openness, 2016/03/01
"The market for textbooks is distorted," argues Phil Hill. "There is absolutely no reason that a digital textbook rental should cost five times what a physical textbook rental costs." I would pause to observe that the use of the word 'distorted' implies there is some 'natural' state of the market, from which I guess we could infer what prices 'should' be, but of course there is no such thing. But I digress. Why do we think textbooks should be cheaper when they're digital. Davide Wiley argues, "When concrete expressions of ideas, knowledge, skills, and attitudes are converted from a physical into a digital format, this changes them from private goods back to being public goods, once again making them easier to share (ie., they are nonrivalrous and nonexcludable). But copyright law "changes these public goods into club goods, once again making them difficult to share." With club goods, you cannot even resell what you have purchased. "Publishers have worked hard to establish a licensing norm and copyright regime that insures that you never own any digital products – you simply license access to them." This prevents any secondary market of used digital texts from emerging, and keeps prices high. So used print texts end up costing less than digital texts.
2016 Lecture Capture Survey
Unattributed, Duke University, 2016/03/01
The context of this article is mostly to serve as a platform to introduce Duke's own lecture capture product, but it's still a useful view of a dozen or so competing products - you can see them all listed in the 'Categories' list to the right. Click on them to find overviews of such products as Cattura, Echo 360, and Opencast. Interestingly, according to the author, "many vendors are working hard to replace the term 'lecture capture' with terms like 'academic video' that call to mind flipped classes, supplementary teaching modules created outside class, and recordings that are more highly produced and edited rather than automated recordings of a lecturer standing at the front of a room."
The Linguistics of Mass Persuasion Part 2: Choose Your Own Adventure
Chi Luu, JSTOR Daily, 2016/03/01
It's always appropriate to restate these points: "In the realm of political persuasion, sophisticated language use can be very effective in swaying an audience. We are encouraged to 'choose' out of a limited set of choices, to fill in obvious information, to resolve the cliffhanger in an already fully-framed narrative—all without necessarily being aware of it. As we engage with politics, it’s important to remember how powerful words can ultimately be, and how easily we can be persuaded by them." What's important is that it's not only in politics where word selection is used to sway or limit choices. Advertisers work with this all the time, and so do educators.
Why Math Word Problems Fail — And How We Can Get Them Right
AK Whitney, Noodle, 2016/02/29
In school I struggled with math. My problems in math centered around applying memorized formulae to specific problems. Word problems weren't a special case for me, but even as I solved the problems here my main difficulty lay in retrieving from memory the right formula for this and that. It's because I don't think mathematically, at least, not beyond a certain level. I agree with the argument in this post that word problems should be more realistic. Counting the sequins in an Oscar dress is the sort of thing we can imagine doing (mind you, as a former restaurant employee, I can also imagine buying 60 cantaloupes). I wish the article said more about the state of mind the Expii website is trying to provoke. But I do like seeing how other people solved the problem, but as always, wish a pox on those who post a formula without a word of explanation. Via David Wiley.
The 2 views of workplace learning: L&D and Employee
Jan Hart, Learning in the Modern Workplace, 2016/02/29
I really like the diagram that comes with this article (though it could be more readable). It focuses on the very different attitudes employees have toward learning as compared to the traditional learning and development view. Employees use Google to learn something, and they learn a job by doing the job. Workplaces classes and e-learning are things to be avoided if possible and endured if necessary. "In summary then, employees are now well ahead of the game! 'Learning' for them is something they just do as part of everyday work, and they are not enthused by “learning solutions” that are thrust upon that don’t fit well with the way they now work."
10 reasons why 2015 is the year of the MOOC
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, 2016/02/29
I like this counter to the oft-spoken sentiment that MOOCs are dead. Here are Donald Clark's ten reasons: demand is massive, MOOC learners are motivated to learn, secondary school students are taking MOOCs, educators are taking MOOCs, MOOCs are a stepping stone to greater achievements, MOOC research is focusing on learner experience, the learning design of MOOCs is progressing (for example, in coding MOOCs), MOOCs respond to real needs, there are increasingly good examples such as the Dementia MOOC. What, that's only nine? Clark left out point number 4. Oh well, nine is good enough.
Seeking Evidence of Badge Evidence
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2016/02/29
I am in agreement with Alan Levine: " being badged is a passive act, even with blockchain secure authority, it is done to you. As important, is what you do yourself, in active tense, to demonstrate your own evidence. Get badged, yes, that’s one part of showing what you have done. But get out there, get a domain, and show the world what you can do. That is evidence." Nobody would care what I have to say if all they saw were a few badges. But once I put my papers and articles out there, then they seen, and they decide for themselves whether I'm worth reading.
This newsletter is sent only at the request of subscribers. If you would like to unsubscribe, Click here.
Know a friend who might enjoy this newsletter? Feel free to forward OLDaily to your colleagues. If you received this issue from a friend and would like a free subscription of your own, you can join our mailing list. Click here to subscribe.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Downes Contact: [email protected]
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Laden...
Laden...
