OLDaily

Over Sharing
Garett Sloane, Ad Age, 2018/03/05

This item comes in the context of reports that people are sharing less content through social media - "social sharing of content has been cut in half since 2015." It describes the phenomenon of people quitting Facebook because of fake news, relentless advertsing, and a general lack of value in a service that isn't even a record of anything. I quit Faacebook in September of 2016. There was a short-term impact on my connectivity but this effect has essentially disappeared. It helps that I publish on my own website, an it helps that I have smaller more personal communities I belong to. (Note: you might encounter a whitelist wall at Ad Age. Since I switched ad blockers from AdBlock Plus to Ublock Origin my problems with sites demanding I whitelist have ended).

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Open Educational Resources in TVET
UNEVOC, UNESCO, 2018/03/05

Simple but very useful OER source list: " On this page you find a commented list of platforms and services that provide or give access to openly licensed content for Technical and Vocational Education and Training." Three dozen sources are listed with short descriptions. More from UNEVOC. That is all.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? Turns out it’s just chance.
MIT Technology Review, 2018/03/05

I have always felt that great wealth is prima facie evidence of criminality. But this study (24 page PDF) suggests that another factor is involved: luck. It's certainly not intelligence, skill or hard work: there's no correlation between those factors and wealth. This article reportswork by Alessandro Pluchino and colleagues at the University of Catania in Italy. “It is evident that the most successful individuals are also the luckiest ones,” they say. “And the less successful individuals are also the unluckiest ones.”

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

What We Can Learn From Glosses And Research Into Glosses
Philip Kerr, Adaptive Learning in ELT, 2018/03/05

A gloss is "‘a brief definition or synonym, either in (your first or second language) which is provided with [a] text’ They can take many forms (e.g. annotations in the margin or at the foot a printed page), but electronic or CALL glossing is ‘an instant look-up capability – dictionary or linked’". It's where the term 'glossary' comes from. The question here is, do glosses help reading comprehension in language learning. But the more meta - and more interesting - question asks whether we can rely on meta-analyses to learn the answer to questions like the first question. "We need to be cautious about using meta-analyses and effect sizes... we cannot necessarily assume that the findings of meta-meta-analyses are educationally significant."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]