OLDaily

Instructional Strategies That Respond to Global Learners’ Needs in Massive Open Online Courses
Trang Phan, online learning, 2018/06/05

The first thing you need to dfo in a paper like this is identify the needs. These were organized into  three themes: language, content, and engagement. So far so good., Then they asked a few professors and instructional designers what sort of strategies they employed. Techniques described by the 1`5 participants included subtitles, multiple discussion venues, meet-and-greet, teaching assistants, and Power Point study guides. The instructors were "surprised at the tremendous volume of diversity among the population in regard to their age; their language, cultural, ethnic, and educational background; and their patterns of engagement in the course. The paper wasn't bad and happily stayed away from quantitative analysis, happily, but I felt it covered ground that has already been very well covered in the past.

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Do Student-Produced Videos Enhance Engagement and Learning in the Online Environment
Denise Stanley, Jenny Zhang, online learning, 2018/06/05

This looks from the title like it would be an interesting paper. Alas, the article (22 page PDF) based on a study of 113 managerial economics students misses the interesting questions and instead goes down the demographics rabbit-hole. I don't care whether the students are Hispanic; I do care whether they've ever had any video production experience (because if they haven't, that would really distract from the learning they might otherwise do). This also shows why the language used in the article is just wrong. The authors frequently refer to the "treatment and control sections". This isn't medicine. You're not doing drug trials. Things like context, previous experience, motivation and measurement matter. Research in education will not progress (and, indeed, will succeed only in misleading) if approached as though education is the cure for some disease.

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Microsoft to acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion
Microsoft, 2018/06/05

This is an announcement that will send shockwaves through the developer community. Here's the promise (we'll see if it's actually kept): " GitHub will retain its developer-first ethos and will operate independently to provide an open platform for all developers in all industries. Developers will continue to be able to use the programming languages, tools and operating systems of their choice for their projects — and will still be able to deploy their code to any operating system, any cloud and any device."

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The Pedagogy of Digital Discussion
Eric Sheninger, A Principal's Reflections, 2018/06/05

Many years ago I was in a discussion when I observed a person makinhg a contribuition based very clearly on one of these 'discussion strategies'. She had made the contribution because it was an interaction strategy, and not because it moved the conversation forward in any meaningful way. That's why I'm hestitant to unequivocally endorse the table of such strategies in this article. It's good to have the tools, yes, but using a tool needs to have a purpose; otherwise you're just hammering.

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Harnessing the Collective Intelligence of Humans and Machines
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, 2018/06/05

This is an overview of Thomas Malone's book Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together. Malone clearly builds on concepts like collective intelligence and the wisdom of crowds, defining a supermind as “a group of individuals acting in ways that seem intelligent.”  The interesting twist here is that the individuals in question might be both humans and computers. The machines undertake tasks requiring 'specialized intelligence' while humans undertake tasks requiring 'general intelligence'. “For the foreseeable future, therefore, there is another way of using IT that will be even more important than just creating better AI: creating groups of people and computers that, together, are far more collectively intelligent than was ever possible before,” writes Malone.

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What Advertising History Says About the Future of Fake News
Austan Goolsbee, New York Times, 2018/06/05

Advertising is the original fake news. And if we look at the history of advertising, it says nothing good about the future of news. "First, in all likelihood, fake news will spread, despite efforts to rein it in." But maybe there is hope. "As we are inundated with new, targeted, deceptive ads, we may get sick of them and, perhaps, stop finding them persuasive." But effectively leaves us with no news, or at best, pale 'Consumer Reports' versions of news.

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