OLDaily

Relationships Can Be the Solution, Even to Difficult Challenges
edCircuit, 2018/01/25

I don't think that "healing" is the right response to the school shootings that are a weekly event in the United States. I think the response should be anger and rage and a determination not to "heal" until the technologies that enable these senseless slaughters are eliminated from society. Relationships? Sure, but only if they lead to political action that removes firearms from society. Any of these posts that focuses on thoughts and prayers and healing and relationships is actually creating more victims by somehow making it acceptable that this slaughter continues. If you are in educationm don't write about this issue unless you are writing about how to combat a use of technology that would in any other case be abhorrant and an outrage.

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PLATO and the History of Education Technology (That Wasn't)
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, 2018/01/25

My history intersects with that of Plato, but this intersection is short. Plato was, indeed, a computer0aided instruction (CAI) system, even as late as the 1990s when I looked at it. That made it innovative (though by 1990, not that innovative). But what it wasn't, in any way sense or form was open. A school like ours would invest either in Plato or in the internet; there wasn't a middle ground. Which means, I think, we need to ask where Plato fits in the history of instructional technology. Any number of people were creating mainframe 'teaching machines'. To my mind, the really important  instructional technology advances were communications technologies such as Usenet and email, and sharing technologies such as FTP, Gopher, and the web. I tried to convince the Plato representatives to release an internet version of the software. But there was no future in that, I was told.

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Why true equity in learning depends on proactive, not reactive, design
Julia Freeland Fisher, Christensen Institute, 2018/01/25

Julia Freeland Fisher did not hear my pitch for affordances, not outcomes, in innovation, but there is an overlap between what she says in her column here and what I said yesterday." The risk of oversimplifying personalized learning on the front end is that we may fail to successfully leverage what works, for which students, in specific circumstances; especially in light of messy human relationships, political dynamics, and histories of discrimination," she writes. The focus of her article is on the idea of designing for accessibility from the outset. But if you weren't interested in affordances, you wouldn't be interested in accessibility. Or so I claim.

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Every study we could find on what automation will do to jobs, in one chart
Erin Winick, Technology Review, 2018/01/25

When you are preparing students for jobs of the future, what are you preparing them for? It's unlikely you know. "No one agrees. Predictions range from optimistic to devastating, differing by tens of millions of jobs even when comparing similar time frames."

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A Network of Experts: From Content Curation to Insight Curation
Joe Arets, Bob Danna, Charles Jennings, Laci Loew, Chief Learning Officer, 2018/01/25

This is a pretty interesting article and is worth reading in its own right. But I want to digress in this post with a comment that is really only periphrial to the article. The author writes, "evidence suggests that teams containing or connected to experts always outperform even the best and brightest of individual experts, particularly when enabled with software or technology." Yes. I have no reason to doubt this. The team outperforns the individual. If they're doing the same thing. My experience with teams is that they want to do the wrong thing very well. I find myself working alone a lot because the team wants to work with much more traditional (even 'folk') versions of knowledge and learning, notions that have to my mind long since been discredited. This to my mind is why diversity and autonomy are so vital to networks.

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Implement OAuth in 15 minutes with Firebase
Michael Dowden, Martine Dowden, Michael McGinnis, O'Reilly, 2018/01/25

This is a glimpse at the underpinnings of the modern web. OAuth allows you to use your login from one website on another website. When you see those boxes saying 'log in with Google' or 'log in with Facebook' you're seeing OAuth. Firebase is a no-SQL database application. It allows for free-form data storage. The article is "a start-to-finish example with Angular and Typescript." Angulay is a Javascript framework that manages web applications. Typescript is a type of Javascript that compiles to Javacript (confusing? Javascript has an awkward and wordy syntax, so Typescript makes it a lot easier to create Javascript code). What makes all this work in 15 minutes is that " Firebase is a Google product, you already have a developer account by virtue of signing up for Firebase. Therefore, Firebase requires no manual creation of API keys for OAuth."

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Knewton Releases $44 Adaptive Digital Textbooks
Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology, 2018/01/25

OK, there's some merit to the idea of selling software-enhanced textbooks directly to students. But I am sceptical as to whether these represent an advanced on the 'programmed texts' of the 1970s. Additionally, the $44 covers only a two year license, rendering them useless for future reference.

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