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OLWeekly
by Stephen Downes
Mar 04, 2016
Istanbul
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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.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/stephen_downes/25386422611/in/dateposted-public/"
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The 2016 Look At The Future Of Online Learning
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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.
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A 2016 Look at the Future of Online Learning
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I suppose this two-page set of outlooks on the future of
online learning (17 page PDF
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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
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Real Future: A Female eSports Champion Speaks Out About
Harassment
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Interesting video that touches on a number of interesting
topics: online gaming, Twitch Link
Hearthstone Linkgender
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
Linkis 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.
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Project-based Learning gives Kindergarteners Agency
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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.
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Connectivism in Learning Activity Design: Implications for
Pedagogically-Based Technology Adoption in African Higher
Education Contexts
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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."
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Helping mainstream collaborative teaching and learning
through the new CO-LAB project
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From the website: "CO-LAB Linkis 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
http://www.europeanschoolnetacademy.eu/." As an aside: this
site has the longest URLs I've seen in a while.
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Musings on the Economics of Commercial and Open Educational
Resources
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"The market for textbooks is distorted," argues Phil Hill
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"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
Linkand
nonexcludable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excludability"
data-versionurl="http://opencontent.org/blog/amber/cache/9e11954e003eb5530ea67370ca7080dd/"
data-versiondate="2016-02-29T17:12:41+00:00"
data-amber-behavior="). But copyright law "changes these
public goods into club goods
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_good"
data-versionurl="http://opencontent.org/blog/amber/cache/ba8d9feca2fa1709633551ce3311e249/"
data-versiondate="2016-02-29T17:17:46+00:00"
data-amber-behavior=", 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.
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2016 Lecture Capture Survey
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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
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Echo 360
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and Opencast
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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."
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The Linguistics of Mass Persuasion Part 2: Choose Your Own
Adventure
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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.
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Why Math Word Problems Fail — And How We Can Get Them
Right
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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 Linkis
trying to provoke. But I do like seeing how other
people solved Linkthe problem,
but as always, wish a pox on those who post a formula
without a word of explanation. Via David Wiley
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The 2 views of workplace learning: L&D and Employee
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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."
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10 reasons why 2015 is the year of the MOOC
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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.
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Seeking Evidence of Badge Evidence
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I am in agreement with Alan Levine: " being badged is a
passive act
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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 http://reclaimhosting.com/"
data-versionurl="http://web.archive.org/web/20160227161042/http://reclaimhosting.com/"
data-versiondate="2016-02-27T16:10:42+00:00"
data-amber-behavior=", 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.
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Copyright 2008 Stephen Downes
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