OLDaily

2018 review of online learning
Tony Bates, Online learning adn distance education resources, 2018/12/24

I'll save a place in this post for the fift installment of this series, which is forthcoming, but here are the previous four:

• AI and synchronous online learning
• Open universities and open education
• Emerging technologies
• Weak leadership

For each of the different topics, Bates gives the following scores: "the hype factor (as the ‘media’ see it), what I think is the significance for online learning, (and) level of engagement about the topic on the part of readers of my blog." Even in retirement, Bates continues to be the most significant figure on online and distance learning in Canada, and his high-quality observations and reporting have yielded numerous nsights for all of us.

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Byrne’s Euclid
Nicholas Rougeux, 2018/12/24

I cited with approval recently the statement that mathematics is something that we as a society have created rather than discovered. To be sure, the structure of mathematics unfolds like origami, but it's still more like a language or art than anything else. That to me is the story that's told by Byrne's Euclid. The Euclidean Elements of course were the standard text for the teaching of geometry for some 2,000 years in the western world. This volume is a "reproduction of Oliver Byrne’s celebrated work from 1847 plus interactive diagrams, cross references, and posters designed by Nicholas Rougeux."

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Literally Just A Big List Of Facebook’s 2018 Scandals
Ryan Mac, Buzzfeed News, 2018/12/24

Like the title says. It has been more than two years since I quit Facebook - the impact was that views on my website went up, but that I was less connected with people. But that's changing now as more people leave Facebook. Anyhow, while for me 2018 was pretty quiet, for Facebook "2018 turned into 12 months of mea culpas, self-inflicted scandals, and screwups."

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That Isn’t a Mistake
Dan Meyer, dy/dan, 2018/12/24

I find it amazing that such a simple post can generate so much comment (75 connents as of this post), but it goes to show that discourse is about both content and building an audience over time. Mostly the latter, in this case. Dan Meyer is making the point that we should distinguish between errors made by accident (such a typo) and errors made as a result of some sort of miscomprehension (such as the pattern regognition error in the example), and that we should use the term "mistake" only to refer to the first. Well, I don't know whether "the vast majority of the work we label 'mistakes' is students doing exactly what they meant to do" and I'm sure Meyer doesn't either (there's certainly no reference to a study). But more to the point, what's to be gained by not calling both of these 'mistakes'? Teachers should be correcting for both carelessness and miscomprehension, and to suggest that "Actual mistakes are worth ~0% of the class’s time / energy / wall space for posters" is to misunderstand that education is about more than just concepts and cognition.

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The Homeostatic Fallacy and Misinformation Literacy
Michael Caulfield, Hapgood, 2018/12/24

This is a few days old but I want to make sure this item does not get lost in the shuffle. The idea here is that people have a natural 'set point' that they drift back to - new information, for example, is not likely to change one's core beliefs, which is (partially) why you cannot simply appeal to reason and evidence to (say) persuade a person to quit smoking. The purpose of misinformation, suggests Mike Caulfield, is to shift this set point in both individuals and society, so that we redefine what's reasonable and expected. Gradually, over time, trust in media or elections can be undermined,not by a single article, but through a constant barrage of background noise that gradually hifts our trust levels. This concept arises in other areas - the idea of the Overton Window, for example, or the propaganda technique of the Big Lie.

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Great Video Requires Talent and Lots of Fast, Reliable Storage
Andy Marken, Content Insider, 2018/12/24

This article arrived in my email as an issue of the Content Insider newsletter. I thought it offered a really good behind-the-scenes look at some of the elements of video production, which detail I haven't seen before. So I asked the author Andy Marken if he had a web copy I could share and he sent me this Google Docs link. It's a consideration of whether the cloud provides what's needed for 4K and 8K video production (short answer - probably not) and offers a look at some of the tech architecture involved in creating and storing this video.

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