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OLDaily

by Stephen Downes
Apr 26, 2017

The Essential Underpinnings Of Shifting to ‘Modern Learning’
Katrina Schwartz, KQED, 2017/04/26

It's nice to get an update of what Will Richardson and Bruce Dixon are up to these days. Still focused on schools, Richardson and Dixon have "catalogued the ingredients they believe are necessary to make the kind of change they hope all districts will embrace in a whote paper" (21 page PDF). " it is the modern learner’s newfound capability to take full control of his or her learning that is THE educational shift of our times," they write. "Create a vision for classrooms where innovation and inquiry are at the core instead of at the edges. Make time for regular discussions on what changes are happening, and reflect on how to make new systems and practices in school more sustainable."

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Creating learning experiences, and spaces, for future students
Lawrie Phipps, JISC, 2017/04/26

It could be that I was working on personal learning environments a decade too early. Take this as a description of the next generation learning environment, for example: "The business school’s intention is to create an online space that is less like a content repository and that becomes a dynamic, adaptive space where students take control of their own learning." Or from the OU: "It won’t look like anything. Instead, it’ll be a series of spaces and application programming interfaces (APIs) so that it won’t be a thing in itself."

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Digital Identities & Digital Citizenship: Houston, We Have a Problem
Bonnie Stewart, the theoryblog, 2017/04/26

I thought I had already posted this last week, but apparently not. I tweeted at the time, "I read this as Bonnie Stewart running smack-dab into 'groups versus networks' and opting for groups." Stewart summarizes, "digital identity, as a practice, operates counter to the collaboration and cooperation that need to be part of digital citizenship." Read the excellent 75 page slide deck pursuing that idea. There's a line of argumentation there to the effect that there is a duty of care that is not recognized by digital identity. Or to employ Chris Lott's "Explain it Like I am Five" version, "we don’t make a better society just by making ourselves better." I think this is an impoverished account of identity, digital or otherwise. The only way to make ourselves better is to make society better. It's not an ethical thing. It's not a citizenship thing. It's a practical thing.

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Un-Annotated
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, 2017/04/26

Audrey Watters has posted that she will now be blocking web annotations from Genius and those from Hypothes.is. These are web browser plugins that allow people to share comments on web pages as they browse. She writes, "This isn’t simply about trolls and bigots threatening me (although yes, that is a huge part of it); it’s about extracting value from my work and shifting it to another (for-profit) company which then gets to control (and monetize) the conversation." Here's the blocker script. 

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The rise and rise of Mastodon
Eugen Rochko, Medoum, 2017/04/26

The developer of Mastodon, Eugen Rochko, offers this update following an exciting month that found the distributed social network software suddenly discovered and (it seems) accepted by people around the world. How accepted? "At the time of writing, the Mastodon network includes more than 486,767 users spread out among more than a 1,212 instances." Now we have to expect that a certain number of users are just test users, but his Patreon support also went from $700 to $3000 a month in April, which is significant as well. 

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How to Thrive: Arianna Huffington Launches E-Learning Series
Lisa Tolin, NBC News, 2017/04/26

I thought at first that this might be a venture like Huffington Post, but when you follow from the press release to the online course pages you will see that it's hosted on LinkedIn Learning. There's a link to a free preview, but don't. Just don't. LinkedIn Learning is really expensive, and a one-hour Arianna Huffington course on 'discovering meditation and sleep' does not increase its value by any appreciable amount. LinkedIn also owns Lynda, another expensive monthly-subscription course site. Both are owned by Microsoft.

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