OLDaily

EdTech is Driving Me Crazy, Too
Will Richardson, Modern Learners, 2018/06/19

The actual tl;dr for this post is probably something like: "Purveyors of ed tech are jumping whole hog on the socio-emotional learning bandwagon, but what if we attacked the mental health issues our kids are experiencing through a different lens, one that starts with the premise that we’re the ones that are broken, not the kids?" It's a good point. And Will Richardson suggests some ways of measuring socio-emotional feedback from a student's perspective, where they track us, "every time our 'narrow path' narrative makes them anxious or stressed, or every time we deny them the agency to pursue learning that matters to them, or hint at their value as humans by the test scores or GPAs they get, or whenever we deny them fundamental democratic rights, or refuse to act in ways that suggest that we are the problem and not them?"

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Annulab Debuts The First Learning Record Store (LRS) Plugin For Moodle
Moodle News, 2018/06/19

It's hard to believe this is only happening now - the first reference to xAPI in OLDaily was more than five years ago - but we now have a learning record store (LRS) plugin for Moodle. The slow pace is reflective of the industry as a whole - as Moodle News writes, "a few announcements by commercial LMS and learning platforms have turned LRS into fine add-ons, but they have remained academic fever dreams, far from the world-changing expectations."

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CIPPIC Supports Launch of Digital Rights Now Petition
Canadian Internet Policy & Public Interest Clinic, 2018/06/19

In Canada, " Tech Reset Canada, the Digital Justice Lab, and the Centre for Digital Rights have launched a petition calling for a national conversation about digital rights and human rights." According to the petition, "Such a strategy must include a public education campaign and a consultation process on digital rights, technology ethics, equitable access to the Internet, and the ways these issues impact our quality of life, the governance of our economy, and the safety of our democracy." This is a good time to have this national conversation, while we can. Image: Media Matters for Democracy.

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SkyHive, a Canadian Technology Company Leads the Way on the Future of Work
Cision, 2018/06/19

Here's the press release, with pointless adjectives and grandiose claimes edited out by me: "SkyHive appl(ies) a skills-based, as opposed to job-based, match of work opportunities.(It uses) machine learning to extrapolate the technical and soft skills possessed by job seekers, as well as the hiring needs of employers.” This is something I've been talking about for some time. If you're matched directly from competencies to jobs, why would you need badges or credentials? That said, a colleague reports that there's a lot of time-consuming profile-filling that leads only to bad results. So, maybe, not quite ready. Related: videos  SkyHive for Job Seekers and SkyHive for Employers; white paper SkyHive Overview.pdf (I keep wanting to call it SkyDive, as it reminds me of the What Color is your Parachute series).

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Distinguishing Between Factual and Opinion Statements in the News
Michael Barthel, Nami Sumida, Amy Mitchell, Jeffrey Gottfried, Pew, 2018/06/19

There's quite a bit of coverage online of this report that basicvally says that Americans are not good at distinguishing between news coverage and opinion. Here's Poynter, here's API, here's Knight.  Not surprisingly, "Americans’ level of education makes a difference. Indeed, those with more education are more likely to classify factual and opinion statements correctly." Respondants who trust the press are also more likely to distinguish properly between fact and opinion. This suggests some of the more interesting coverage of the report: learning from what makes people trust news media, and in particular, learning from how weather reports present complex, scientific and often uncertain news.

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IBM’s Project Debater is an AI that's ready to argue
Roberto Baldwin, Engadget, 2018/06/19

Are we ready for an AI that can replace politicians? This is Project Debater', an AI that " listened to four minutes of its human opponent's opening remarks, then parsed that data and created an argument that highlighted and attempted to debunk information shared by the opposing side." The ways this could be misused are legion, but IBM intends it as a force for good: " the real power of Project Debater will be its ability to present unbiased arguments, according to IBM researchers." The real test, however, will be when opponents berate it and call it a special snowflake.

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Virtual memory palaces: immersion aids recall
Amitabh Varshney, Eric Krokos, Catherine Plaisant, Virtual Reality, 2018/06/19

The research being cited (15 page PDF) is about a very specific technique: memory palaces. The idea of a memory palace is to create an image in your mind, and to then associate each element of the image with something you want to remember. In the study, virtual reality is used to create a memory palace. This story says "people recall information better when it is presented to them in a virtual environment, as opposed to a desktop computer." Donald Clark says "This points towards possible improvements in efficacy, compared to 2D screens and tablets." All true - but we need to remember that the recall of a list of facts is a very minor part of learning.

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How to Get Your Students Thinking Deeply With Photography
Raymond Yang, The Art of Education, 2018/06/19

People don't think of the camera as a type of technology, but of course it is, especially these days, and it has been an important tool in my learning technology toolkit for many years. So I appreciate this post on how to use photography to encourage students to think deeply about identity. I'm less a fan of the list of "the eight primary categories" listed. OK, so I resonate with some of the - age, social class, ability - but when I use the camera I see identity very very differently. And I look not only at individual identity but also collective or community identity. Place matters. One's relationship with nature matters. Food, history, architechure, commerce - these are all far deeper aspects of identity than the superficial properties listed in this post. And that's what I try to photograph.

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