OLDaily

Feature Article
The Real Goal of Open Educational Resources
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, 2017/11/15

I continue to debate David Wiley in this post (skip if you're not interested). I believe the goal of OER is access for all. This is my goal, though I don't think it's just my goal. But it's not David Wiley's goal, and it bothers me when he says we should reframe our advocacy of OER to de-emphasize cost and access.

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Does Avoiding Social Media Limit An Alt-Ac Career?
Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed, 2017/11/15

The short answer to this is "no". I work in a building full of academics who are not university professors and who are almost invisible on social media in any professional sense. I know hundreds of others in other government, corporate and private research facilities. Their careers are doing just fine. Joshua Kim argues that social media is pretty essential, though. "Alternative academics, lacking many of the traditional disciplinary-based assets that bind traditional academics (journals, conferences, professional organizations etc.), have seemingly adopted social media our medium of communication, collaboration, and exchange." The key word here is seemingly. You can't judge the world by what you see on Twitter. You just can't. Image: University Affairs.

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Virtual Reality as Possibility Space
monika bielskyte, Medium, 2017/11/15

Here are some resources from a sidebar discussion on virtual reality in learning. The first, Virtual Reality as Possibility Space, suggests that "The advent of digital realities is an opportunity for us to rethink the way we could be experiencing information. We are leaving the glowing rectangular screens behind to step into computational space where the world is our desktop." But what there is isn't necessarily what we see. We need to ensure that our new VR worlds are humane, shared, collaboprative, and human. We project our ideas into the world (as in this world of dogs). And VR can project other people's images of reality back to us, creating and shaping those objects in our mind. As this third item notes, "Reality’s portrayal and depiction varies depending upon how it is being represented, and by who is doing or producing the representation of reality. It affects our ethical judgments about how to act and treat other people in the real world."

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Introducing Spirited Media 2.0
Chris Krewson, Medium, 2017/11/15

If you're not charging for content, and you're not running advertisements, then how are you going to make money with educational content (or any other content) in the future? Spirited Media answers this question with a three-part business model: it will sell memberships, it will have sponsored events, and it will offer consulting. All of these preserve the accessibility (and mobility) of content, and yet allow the company to trade on its reputation for knwoledge and insight in a way that offers specific services for compensation. If I were still in the local news game, that's what I'd be doing. And as a content provider in the future, something like this is probably my future business model. 

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The Neuroscience of Consciousness – with Anil Seth
Anil Seth, YouTube, 2017/11/15

This is a nice talk recommended as part of a collection of resources from Theodore Hoppe in a comment on my consciousness post and it prompted me to add a couple of paragraphs to the work. One is the idea that there are degrees of consciousness, and that the degree is proportional to the complexity of neural interactions taking place. There's a discussion of how the brain fills in perceptions with its own expectations - don't miss the video of the doggy university courtyard. Another is the idea that the human brain, as a neural network, is not a knowing system, but rather, a predictive system. I mentioned this back in September. I don't agree with the idea that prediction "is the brain trying to understand what causes our perceptions" - we don't need to involve causation to make predictions, but this isn't a comment about the content, just the way it's expressed.  It's a great talk, well worth the how to view it. You can also download this talk as audio and watch the Q&A. If you don't have an hour there's a short and poppy TED version.

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