OLDaily

What It Takes for Employees to Own and Drive Their Own Learning (A Lot!) – Part 1
Mirjam Neelen, Paul A. Kirschner, 3-Star Learning Experiences, 2018/02/06

I'm not sure yet where Mirjam Neelen & Paul A. Kirschner will take this discussion but it will be interesting to see. Interesting, I say, because there's p[lenty of evidence that employees can own and drive their own learning - not all, to be sure, but sufficiently many to say that it's not an anomaly. In this post we get a distinction between Self-Directed Learning (SDL) and Self-Regulated Learning (SRL). In SDL " individuals take initiative, with or without the help of others, in diagnosing their learning needs (etc.)", while SRL " is about the execution of a specific learning task and about managing the subsequent steps in a learning process." Also, the authors suggest that "we still need to clearly distinguish between ‘improving performance’ on the one hand and ‘learning’ on the other, as improving one’s performance doesn’t necessarily mean something has been learned." Stay tunesd for Part 2 next week.

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Educause Steps In to Save New Media Consortium
Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed, 2018/02/06

It's hard to imagine that the New Media Consortium ran up debts of half a million dollars, but that's what this article says. It also says Educause it picking up NMC's assets for a paltry $55K. Writing about the acquisition, Bryan Alexander suggests it was a " this is a bold and generous move" and that Educause is "playing the white knight, stepping up to rescue assets that many in the ed tech world value." It's interesting to note that it's the Horizon R

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Blogging With Young Students: Becky Versteeg’s Story
Kathleen Morris, The Edublogger, 2018/02/06

This article is part case study and part advertisement for their course. It introduces Becky Versteeg, a grade two teacher from Listowel, Ontario, Canada​. "Most of Becky’s students are 6 and 7 years old," writes Kathleen Morris. "Becky’s fantastic blog is called Team 2 Eagles." She has published 631 posts, received 1372 comments, and created and moderated more than 100 student blogs. " Since my students are 6 and 7 years old, a blog that is used as a digital learning portfolio is their first chance to communicate online," writes Versteeg. "I haven’t met a child yet who was not motivated to by this. They want to share, and they want their audience to like what they share. Since I require them to share their Grade 2 learning, they put a lot of effort into what they are learning every day!"

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Personalized Learning Is a Problem of Privilege
Paul France, EdSurge, 2018/02/06

Yes it's another rant against personalization but there are also some interesting things in this article. First is this: "We often conflate individualization with personalization." According to Paul France, 'individualization' means " to have the assistance of a complex technological algorithm to assign activities to children," which he says is " impersonal and dehumanizing" and " focuses on consumption of educational material instead of interaction with meaningful provocations." But what is 'personalization'?

We read " Tools that minimize complexity, make educators more powerful, connect individuals, or redefine learning tasks can contribute to a more personal learning environment." But that's personal learning, much like I define it, " making learning personal by amplifying our humanity, not limiting it." It appears that 'personalized' learning falls somewhere in between. "'Personalized learning” tools don’t fulfill real needs," writes France. "Rather, they serve perceived needs that have been fueled by privilege." Me, I'm happy to lump 'personalized' and 'individualized' together. But for those who need it, there's a distinction there.

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Identity in the Browser (Firefox)
Aza Raskin, 2018/02/06

(Update) Doug Belshaw wrote me on Mastodon: "Stephen, this Mozilla project you link to in the latest OL Daily is almost a decade old. Aza Raskin left *years* ago, and the work you cite led to the (now defunct) Mozilla Persona."

Longtime readers of OLDaily will remember I created something called mIDm back in 2004. The idea was to put an identifying URL in the browers so I could automatically log into sites. Three days later (literally!) the first proposals for OpenID were released and that's the direction the web went. OpenID was basically replaced by Google, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, which gives us the third party ID system we use today. It is not satisfying. See also: WebID and the W3C WebID Community Group.

As Aza Raskin writes in this post, "Your identity is too important to be owned by any one company. Your friends are too important to be owned by any one company." Mozilla, he writes, has been working on a browser-based alternative (yay!). The full discussion is here. The first draft of the protocol is here. "The browser user requests 'connection' to the site. The browser negotiates account setup, possibly disclosing some personal information about the user, and learns a userid-credential pair. On a subsequent visit, the browser notices that it does not have an active session, and automatically establishes one."

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