OLDaily

The Massively Open On Air Courses (MOOAC): Contextualizing MOOCs in Africa
Rebecca Yvonne Bayeck, e/merge Africa, YouTube, 2017/09/06

Education in Africa faces numerous challenges: infrastructure, affordances, teacher shortages and distance. MOOCs can be deployed to address these issues. But few African students actually attend MOOCs. Access to the internet is still very limited (about 9 percent) in Africa. So this presentation looks like an adaptation of MOOCs - open On Air Courses, delivering instruction over the radio. The presentation itself is about 20 minutes, with the remaining 35 minutes devoted to discussion. See more from the MOOCs in Africa video series in this playlist.

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I used to think social media was a force for good. Now the evidence says I was wrong
Matt Haig, The Guardian, 2017/09/06

This article conflates the social harm caused by social media ("the same tool that united us to topple dictators eventually tore us apart") with the personal harm caused by social media ("inspiring feelings of inadequacy, anxiety and self-loathing"). Maybe internet addition and filter bubbles have the same underlying pathology, but aside from both being associated with social media I don't see the connection. That weakens this article, because it's not enough to say that social media is bad in all kinds of ways; we need to be able to say why it is bad, in which way, so we can fix it. Because as bad as it is, social media fills a need. We use it to talk to each other. It's easy to say that this talk should be regulated, or attached to identities, or curated, but the way in which these are managed also counts.

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Mozilla and the Washington Post Are Reinventing Online Comments
Michael Deangelo, The Mozilla Blog, 2017/09/06

I had a look at the code and it looks like it's still a bit of a project to install. But I like the distributed approach ("every organization using Talk runs its own version of the software, and keeps its own data. ") and I like its approach to data ("Talk doesn’t contain any tracking, or digital surveillance.") I want to get a version running for OLDaily, because I think we need open and non-commercial forums where we can talk about this stuff. I also think it could work well with gRSShopper for MOOC and PLE development and deployment.

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Domain-Driven Design Reference: Definitions and Pattern Summaries
Eric Evans, 2017/09/06

This post is the very tip of a huge body of knowledge. At the beginning of the 20th century L.E.J (Bertus) Brouwer developed a theory of "intuitionist" mathematics incorporating the idea that math is a creation within the context of a Weltanschauung, or world view. In the late 20th-century rejection of logical positivism in favour of constructivist theories we see the development of alternative logics, including intuitionist, or constructivist, logic, where "constructive proofs correspond to functional programs and vice versa" related to a state space or model. This supports in turn a design methodology where "Multiple models are in play on any large project." This is the world of domain driven design (DDD).

What's key here is how this plays out in practice: "Model expressions, like any other phrase, only have meaning in context." Therefore, "Explicitly define the context within which a model applies... Recognize that a change in the language is a change to the model... Those who contribute in different ways must consciously engage those who touch the code in a dynamic exchange of model ideas through the ubiquitous language." Take this one step further and you get Command and Query Response Seqregation (CQRS) which allows us to use different data models which use the same data. My colleague Andriy Drozdyuk is presenting on this next week in Ottawa.

This is the logical, linguistic and computational foundation for constructivist, identity-based and community-based philosophies of education and society. It succeeds or fails because of its dependence on an ubiquitious language (hence the importance of Lakoff today). So long as this language requires an interpretation, it is vulnerable. The less contentious the interpretation the more stable the foundation. Ultimately, in my opinion, we have to push representation down, push it beyond representation, to a subsymbolic and directly accessible level.

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8 Ways UX Design Theory Transformed My Approach to Course Design
John Spencer, The Synapse, 2017/09/06

Nice article from John Spencer applying elements of user experience design (UX) to the design of online courses. I like the graphic (though it bothers me a little that the text does not follow the same order as the graphic). "UX design focuses on both on how we use digital tools and on how we inhabit digital spaces," writes Spencer. "It focuses on systems in a way that is deeply human. What does it feel like for people? What does it look like for them? What are their processes?"

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Where to find all of the slides, links, videos and tutorials from Wikimania 2017 (and what we learned from having a remote-first strategy)
Melody Kramer, Wikimedia Blg, 2017/09/06

I spent most of my time with this article analyzing the 'class photo' for signs of tribal identity (note: not a good thing). They have their own salute and appear to have mascots. The different versions of the salute look like they denote degrees of membership: there's the group that did it correctly (thumb and single forefinger forming a clear 'W'), the group that was sort of right (thumbs joined correctly but with all fingers being used to created a 'winged W'), the group that just got it wrong(crossed thumbs, for example), and the 'out there' group who made salutes using pinky fingers, metal-head hands, or hang-loose gestures. I also looked for diversity and didn't really find it (this session, at least, addresses it, and some of the built-in biases - see esp. 46:00 ff - I wonder why this was streamed to Facebook while some keynotes (but not the good talks) and many of the sessions went to Youtube (and some even to Wikimedia Commons!). And I'm surprised they would try to run a conference in Montreal (and streamed internationally) without simultaneous translation.

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