OLDaily

The Future of Jobs Report 2018
World Economic Forum, 2018/09/25

I wouldn't necessarily expect 300 executives from the world's largest companies to have any special insights on the future of work (because they're pretty insulated from reality) but this report (147 page PDF) makes for surprisingly interesting, and occasionally insightful, reading. Some key points:

• "When determining job location decisions, companies overwhelmingly prioritize the availability of skilled local talent as their foremost consideration"
• "71% of total task hours are performed by humans, compared to 29% by machines. By 2022 this average is expected to have shifted to 58% task hours performed by humans and 42% by machines."
• "Global average skills stability—the proportion of core skills required to perform a job that will remain the same—is expected to be about 58%, meaning an average shift of 42% in required workforce skills over the 2018–2022 period."
• "Those most in need of reskilling and upskilling are least likely to receive such training."

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One Thing Missing in Most E-learning Courses
Tom Kuhlmann, The Rapid E-Learning Blog, 2018/09/25

I've been working on the design of my upcoming E-Learning 3.0 course, so I'm paying a bit more attention to instructional design articles than usual. So what's missing in most courses? It's a bit of a clickbait headline, isn't it? "What tends to be missing," writes Tom Kuhlmann, "is the more complex decision-making interactivity." By this he means activities that prompt hypothesis-formation and testing. I'm not sure it's that rare. But it's true that you won't find it in most rapid e-learning page-turners. " The obvious reason why we don’t do more of this in our courses is that it takes more time to build. The reality is that most clients seem satisfied with basic click-and-read type content." And that right there is the problem with a lot of corporate e-learning.

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When Education Research Training Is Like Giving a Power Saw to a 5th Grader
Frederick Hess, EducationNext, 2018/09/25

I've had my issues with education researchers too, but I don't think I've ever taken my criticism to this level. The issue, writes Frederick Hess, is that "Too many grad students are training to be education policy scholars in programs that cultivate expertise in research methods but not in the stuff of education." He should know, I guess. He studied at Harvard. "Putting impressive-sounding, attention-getting analytic tools in the hands of education researchers who don’t understand education is like putting a power saw in the hands of a fifth-grader. That saw is more likely to lead to an emergency room visit than to elegant carpentry. Competent education policy researchers need expertise in both methods and substance."

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Designing for Open Learning: An Interview with Gráinne Conole
Stefanie Panke, AACE Review, 2018/09/25

Brief interview with Gráinne Conole describing her approach to her new position in Dublin. "I have been lucky over the years in being involved in a wide variety of interesting research initiatives, but I am now keen to have a role where these research findings can make a difference in practice," she says.

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Where Will the Current State of Blogging and Social Media Take Us?
Jacky Alciné, jacky.wtf, 2018/09/25

This post wanders a bit and never really gets around to making its main point, but the core message is that it's better to own your own online presence (and, therefore, your own stuff) than it is to be forced to rely on content silos like Twitter and Instagram. I'm less about centralizing all your stuff in one single place (except, of course, in your offline backup storage, which you absolutely must have) and more about having your own node in a web of interconnected services. For example, I store 30,000 of so photos on Flickr, rather than my own website, but I can easily access them and use them on my website as needed, so, no problem. The other neat thing about this post is its use of a full range of #indieweb services. We'll see if my gRSShopper webmention shows up (might, might not).

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“Your Child Is the Product”: The Cost of Opting Out of Edtech
Henry Kronk, eLearning Inside, 2018/09/25

This article came out the same day as another on Why I'm Done With Chrome, which complains about the Google browser's new policy of automatically signing you in when you land on Google services. There's no opting out with Chrome, according to the article, and there's a high cost to students who opt out of G Suite for Education: "it goes without saying their child doesn’t have a personal Gmail account. They don’t use Google Docs, don’t have a YouTube account, don’t store files on Google Drive, don’t use Hangouts, and certainly don’t use apps downloaded from Google Play." The reason (in my view) why this becomes such a hardship is because, as I've found, the bad actors - the spammers and the spoofers and the scammers - make it impossible to run these services outside the major silos. Even something as simple as email is now very difficult to manage outside the major service providers.

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