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OLWeekly ~ by Stephen Downes

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OLWeekly

by Stephen Downes
Mar 02, 2018

Presentation
Why Personal Learning
Stephen Downes, Feb 23, 2018, Moodle Moot 2018, Toronto, Ontario

In this presentation I examine the difference between personal and personalized learning, show how this informs the design of the personal learning environment, and draw from that the reasons for preferring personal learning.
Photo by Tim Bahula

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Creating Space For Equity In Making
Adam Reger, Blog – Remake Learning,

"Equitable access and diversity - along many different lines - have come to the forefront of many ongoing discussions within the maker movement," writes Adam Reger. What's interesting si that this article explores different types of diversity. For example, there is diversity of maker spaces - they don't all have to be 3D printers; " A makerspace could literally just be a space with scissors and some donated art supplies. It’s not things or stuff, it’s a mindset and a set of values." And for example, there are types of participation: " While many programs operate on a committed basis, asking students to pledge to a certain level of attendance, this can often weed out kids who are unable to commit for reasons beyond their control."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Volunteers Step in to Launch NMC Horizon Report Alternative
Dian Schaffhauser, THE Journal, 2018/03/02

As this article summarizes, an online conversation has been taking place all week about a potential replacement for the Horizon Report. Called FOECast (FOR for Future of Education) the week-long discussion has been centered around a Google Doc, in a Slack channel and on Twitter using the hashtag #FOECast. "The dream for FOECast, wrote (Bryan) Alexander, 'is to create something bold and new, a project drawing on the middle of the 21st century.'"

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Why the web has challenged scientists’ authority – and why they need to adapt
Andrew J. Hoffman, The Conversation, 2018/03/01

I'm not sure I agree with the premise of this article. Andrew J. Hoffman suggests that " Many Americans are ignoring the conclusions of scientists on a variety of issues including climate change and natural selection." The suggestion is based on a Pew study arguing that while Americans value scientific research, they often disagree on politicized issues such as evolution or climate change. I don't think they disagree with scientists per se. I think they disagree with what they are told about science. They distrust the messenger. This explains why they embrace what might be called "alternative science". I do think that the best response is for scientists to speak directly to the public about their work.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Social Media Use in 2018
Aaron Smith, Monica Anderson, Pew, 2018/03/01

Facebook and YouTube dominate, while younger users are embracing a wide range of platforms. Other services making the headlines: Pinterest, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagramm, LinkedIn. Interestingly, according to this Pew Report (17 page PDF), "Even as a majority of Americans now use social platforms of various kinds, a relatively large share of these users feel that they could give up social media without much difficulty." And not surprisingly, "just 3% of social media users indicate that they have a lot of trust in the information they find on these sites. And relatively few have confidence in these platforms to keep their personal information safe from bad actors."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

How ants build bridges using very simple rules
Jason Kottke, kottke.org, 2018/03/01

I love ants precisely because they are very simple things that can behave in very complex ways. And so I like this video. But I want to ask whether it's accurate to say "ants follow rules". When looking at their bridge-building behaviour, we could describe it normatively: "when it feels other ants walking on its back, it should freeze. In other words, a classic rule-based behaviour. But what if we described it observationally: "ants freeze when other ants walk on their backs." Now this could be the result of any number of causes, and not a rule at all. There is a danger in reducing behaviour to rules. Most behaviour isn't rule-based, and rule-based descriptions are abstractions that fail to explain most behaviour.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

The European Approach to Protecting Your Data
Tim Stahmer, Assorted Stuff, 2018/03/01

The the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) takes effect in May and online services are scrambling to prepare. The GDPR changes the game, requiring that services protect user privacy. GDPR "requires companies to obtain more specific consent from the user as well as explaining more clearly how their data will be used (and companies must also make it easy for users to withdraw their consent and are then required to delete the material they’ve collected." Stahmer offers some resources: "check out this rough guide to GDPR and/or this short summary directed at US corporations."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Learning analytics and magic beans
Colin Beer, Col's Weblog, 2018/03/01

Colin Beer describes "two broad trajectories that universities tend to take when implementing learning analytics." The first is "focused on measurement and broader performativity precepts and retention interventions." The second, which he says is at odds with the first, emphasizes learning, and recognizes "that retention is consequential to broader teaching, learning and engagement experiences for students." This is brought into focus by looking at the problem of student attrition. Beer writes, "Student attrition is only rarely caused by a single problem that an external agency like a university can assist with." So prediction isn't really a strength of predictive analytics, at least, not unless the prediction is being made within a closed system.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Digital detritus: 'Error' and the logic of opacity in social media content moderatio
Sarah T. Roberts, First Monday, 2018/03/01

First Monday this month is a special issue on feminist perspectives on digital labour. The collection includes this article, which looks at how social networks choose to accept or reject content for display. It's an opaque and ultimately conservative process. In a commercial service looking at a piece of content, "its value to the platform as a potentially revenue-generating commodity is actually the key criterion and the one to which all moderation decisions are ultimately reduced. The result is commercialized online spaces that have far less to offer in terms of political and democratic challenge to the status quo and which, in fact, may serve to reify and consolidate power rather than confront it." Which seems right to me.

I want to juxtapose this article with a recent post in Wired on How Trump Conquered Facebook Without Russian Ads. While it looks like good investigative journalism, it's an advertorial. It was actually written by Antonio García Martínez, a former Facebook employee "charged with turning Facebook data into money." How was this author and this subject selected by Wired? Software like NationBuilder, Custom Audiences, LookAlike Audiences and such are used by political campaigns to gather data and influence users. It costs a lot. And the people who buy products are the people who select the content we see on Faebook and in the pages of Wired. This too makes it hard to challenge the status quo and serves to reify and consolidate power. These are things educators using social networks should consider.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

OER Canvas
Sandra Schön, Javiera Atenas, Martin Ebner, Open Education Working Group, 2018/03/01

According to an email, "we have been working on a small project to provide to the Open Education Community a wide range of translated versions of the OER canvas. The Canvas is a tool developed to help educators and community to design OER or to convert teaching and learning materials into OER." The result can be viewed on this website. Here's the Englis one as a big PDF. I'm not a fan of the hand-drawn design, though I can understand how it would make the complex tool less intimidating. This sort of tool is a good idea in general, though, and falls under the heading of a 'scaffold' (not my terminology; read more about it here).

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Inside The Virtual Schools Lobby: 'I Trust Parents'
Anya Kamenetz, NPR, 2018/03/01

This is a nice bit of investigating reporting by Anya Kamenetz. She explores " a costly and bitter feud, pitting state authorities and mainstream charter school organizations on the one side, and virtual schools on the other." The way it's told here, the virtual charter schools have a very low success rate and their struggles "have split the charter school movement." In particular, they've launched a political campaign saying "that test scores and other accountability measures actually don't matter at all. What matters, they say, is parent choice." In this interview on EdSurge she says " It's pretty clear that if you can't make a case for your school based on students' performance, based on test scores, based on their learning advantage, all you have left is to say, "These schools should exist because parents want them.'"

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

How To Beat Procrastination (backed by science)
Darius Foroux, 2018/02/28

I'm just adding this link here so I remember to get around to reading this article later. Tomnorrow, maybe.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Exploring the Benefit Mindset
Robert Ward, Edutopia, 2018/02/28

I wouldn't say I buy into the Benefit Mindset as branded here but I learned a lot about managing to benefits while I was a program manager a few years ago and appeciate several aspects of the concept. The core idea is to examine a product or service from the perspective of the benefits it produces (as opposed to its function or output). A benefit can be financial (more revenue, lower costs) but if often non-financial (happiness, security, comfort, speed, style). This article, in my view, interprets the concept very narrowly: "Acceptance and affinity are especially important in the classroom... Feelings of community and collaboration make learning meaningful." These may be among the benefits of a classroom, but other people may be seeking much more tangible benefits.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

TILT Episode 001 – Brian Lamb and RRU’s LRNT 525 class
D'Arcy Norman, D'Arcy Norman Dot Net, 2018/02/27

Visit the link to listen to an episode 001 podcast, and stay for the vintage photo of 'the three amigos' in their halcyon days visiting in Vancouver. D'Arcy Norman writes, "I was fortunate to be invited to chat with Brian Lamb and Royal Roads University’s LRNT 525 class, nominally to talk about institutional change management and decision making, but it turned into a wide-ranging discussion of innovation and the tension between creativity and enterprise-scale."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

A Systematic Review of Second Language Learning with Mobile Technologies
Veronica Persson, Jalal Nouri, International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning, 2018/02/27

This article (23 page PDF) is "a systematic literature review of the research done in mobile assisted second language learning (MASLL) published since 2010." 54 articles were selected for review. The review breaks down the studies by type of review, technologies used, mobile applications used, hardware, pedagogical practices, and learning impact. "All of them agree on the positive impact of mobile devices for enhancing the L2 (second language) learning process," write the authors. In general, mobile devices are used "as a tool to improve vocabulary learning and general skills development, underrepresenting how mobile technologies can improve the reading, writing, listening and oral skills."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Smart Makerspace: A Web Platform Implementation
Gabriel Licks, Adriano Teixeira, Kris Luyten, International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning, 2018/02/27

The idea of a 'smart makerspace' is that it is a space for making things (software, designs, products, whatever) supported with a type of web assistant or guide to help people get past the initial challenge of making things with new technology. This was the idea behind AutoDesk's Smart Makerspace (more) and also Harvard's Guerilla Makerspace. The current project (17 page PDF) seeks to overcome some limitations inherent in these projects, providing "instead of a workbench, a web platform that runs in the user’s laptop for accompanying the maker tasks. It also goes around some issues identified in the previous implementation, related to having the need of separate power-tools and a workbench for each user."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Diverse responses to open education
Henry Trotter, University World News, 2018/02/27

This post is mostly a summary of the recently released Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) project report Adoption and Impact of OER in the Global South (610 page PDF). 610 pages! Who was it that was asserting that the web has killed long-form reading? Also contributing as publishers were African Minds and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). The 16-chapter volume was edited by Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams and Patricia B. Arinto and contains case studies from Africa, Asia and South America along with a final chapter with conclusions and recommendations. If nothing else, do take the time to read the final chapter, which focuses on social inclusion. "OER creation as a form of empowerment for educators and students from the Global South is fostered by professional development, membership in a community of practice and personal qualities and motivations related to personal histories as well as professional identities." (p.587)

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Instagram is killing the way we experience art
Anne Quito, Quartzy, 2018/02/27

This article isn't recommending that you leave your phone behind, but it does say you should leave it in your pocket and look at the art for a while before pulling it out to take a photo. Maybe for all of 17 seconds? That's how long we spent in 2001, before we all had smartphones. As someone who spent a lot of time in galleries both before and after digital photography, I prefer 'after' much more. I get to have a memory of the visit, and not merely the fuzzy one in my brain that erodes away over time.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Village in Dharwad district gets modern anganwadi
The Times of India, 2018/02/26

Wikipedia defines 'anganwadi' as a centre that provides "supplementary nutrition, non-formal pre-school education, nutrition and health education, immunization, health check-up and referral services." India has more than a million of them. This article describes the development of a modern solar-powered anganwadi. This project enhances the traditional model "a focal area for immunization, gender sensitization and maternal care. It also aims to enhance the learning environment through an e-learning module and skill enhancement program for women." There's a lot to be said for this model: it's practical, community-based and integrates health, education, and support.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Five Ways That Science is Culture
Umair Haque, Medium, 2018/02/26

I studied the history and philosophy of science for many years and, of course, have been a practicing researcher since 2001. This gives me a good perspective on Umair Haque's topic, and I would underline what he says. It's accurate. Where does culture intervene in science (and especially education)?

assigning people into groups (national, racial, social) to study our choice of variables, such as 'intelligence' or 'skills' our description of 'all other things being equal' (aka ceteris paribus) the conditions (of, say, 'success') we use to test our hypothesis the correspondence between sample and population

In all, Haque summarizes, " Categories, variables, conditions, tests — no matter how 'hard'” the science we are doing is, these will contain values and judgments, which are cultural assumptions."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Media Literacy Is About Where To Spend Your Trust. But You Have To Spend It Somewhere.
Michael Caulfield, Hapgood, 2018/02/26

The central message of this post from Michael Caulfield is that you have to trust someone, but the question is, whom? And I can accept that, though the phrase "trust but verify" springs to mind. But I really dislike the idea of trust as currency, which is the other core message of this post. That aside, he also says, "our problem is not gullibility, but rather the gullibility of cynics," using three examples of unwarranted doubt. But one of those involves Canada's National Post, which is most definitely not a trustworthy source. Another involves the Mayo Clinic - "they make money off of patients so they want to portray regular hospitals as working” - which strikes me as a good reason to distrust the U.S. hospital system. Even the academic article is questionable. Compared with the hundreds of cites other articles about birds, biologists, and indigenous knowledge get, 34 cites really is "meh" and a good reason to be sceptical. Ultimately, if nobody is trustworthy, you don't have to trust anyone.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

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Copyright 2018 Stephen Downes Contact: stephen@downes.ca

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