OLDaily

Second Draft: A Continuum of Personalized Learning
Larry Cuban, Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice, 2018/09/27

This is one of those articles where a diagram would have helped a lot. Well, mostly because it would have shown how the idea of a 'continuum' here is incoherent. But still. Here's Larry Cuban's description of the continuum: "At one end of the continuum are teacher-centered lessons within the traditional age-graded school.... At the other end of the continuum are student-centered classrooms, programs, and schools." OK, so what's in between? Cuban clusters questions concerning the 'how' of personalized learning with the teacher-centered lessons. He positions the 'what' with the student-centred classrooms. There's nothing where students aren't in classrooms, there's no sense where the 'what' might be found in teacher-centered lessons, and when we start talking about competencies and modalities it becomes apparent that we have a jigsaw puzzle, not a continuum. You create a continuum when there's only one variable that changes; when you have multiple variables you build a matrix or a graph.

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How do Virtual Teams Collaborate in Online Learning Tasks in a MOOC?
Annemarie Spruijt, Amber Dailey-Hebert, Herco Fonteijn, Geraldine Clarebout, Daniëlle Verstegen, International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 2018/09/27

This is a fairly narrow study but I like the question and the issue of collaboration in MOOCs has certainly been raised as an issue before. This MOOC was called Problem-Based Learning: Principles and design. Students at the centre!  which meant that they couldn't get away without doing problem-based learning, which in turn pretty much requires the formation of collaborative groups. The authors observed 21 self-formed groups during the course. The results were organized along five themes: team formation and composition, team organization and leadership, task division and interaction, use of tools, and external factors. Based on the commentary I'd say the teams were a limited success, but the authors draw some recommendations for successful team formation in MOOCs.

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Defining OER-Enabled Pedagogy
David Wiley, John Levi Hilton III, International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 2018/09/27

I really think this is last year's issue, and that most people have moved on, but I would be remiss if I didn't document David Wiley's definition of OER-enabled pedagogy in this article. "We define OER-enabled pedagogy as the set of teaching and learning practices that are only possible or practical in the context of the 5R permissions which are characteristic of OER." As the authors note (in the very next sentence), pedagogy is not usually defined in terms of copyright. But the point here is that students learn by doing, and copyright rules (as amended by open licenses) define what you can (or cannot) do.

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Surprising Ways AI Can Improve eLearning Accessibility
Pamela Hogle, Learning Solutions, 2018/09/27

I don't thing the solutions are particularly "surprising" but I think the linkage between AI and accessibility is a good one. Pamela Hogle describes how AI can help with authoring, with translation and transcribing, with vision assistance (including reading and recognition), with voice commands, and with eye tracking to improve the VR experience, for example, through foveated rendering.

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Scientific Facts — Are they like Myths, Told through Fairytales and Spread by Gossip?
Anita de Waard, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2018/09/27

This paper caught my imagination despite myself, and then convinced me that the answer to the question in the headline is "yes". The key is in understanding the semantics in articles: "In stories and rhetoric, a statement exists not as a separate entity, but plays a role in the overarching narrative." When we look at scientific papers, this role is often signified by tense. In conclusions, the results are typically qualified ("It appears that..." or "One explanation may be..."). Over time, and in the wider community, this hypothesis is accepted. Then, in citing papers, the qualifiactions are dropped, and the conclusion is simply stated as a fact. "In short, scientific facts are based on a game of telephone between cited and citing authors. Besides being pulled from its experimental context, claims are often validated (and turned into ‘known facts’) by the simple act of being cited."

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