OLDaily

Short Sims the Cover Story on the Industry's Flagship Publication
Clark Aldrich, 2019/01/08

Clark Aldrich sent me an email with this link and an outline of his new article on TD Magazine. It's a good article, and the page he provided also links to the examples in the article. I do confess though that I thought it a bit ironic to introduce an article on "short sims" with a quote from the developer of one of the longest and most complex of all the video games, Sid Meier. The quote is to the effect that "a game is a series of interesting choices." Which raises that question for me about agency: does it mean 'freedom to choose' or 'freedom to create'. In No Man's Sky, which I'm playing now, I make choices, yes, but mostly my days are spent building things, shaping my environment while I explore it.

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The Five Tool Scholar (Reprised)
Frederick Hess, Education Next, 2019/01/08

The five tools, according to Frederick Hess, are "disciplinary scholarship, policy analysis and popular writing, convening and shepherding collaborations, providing incisive commentary, and speaking in the public square." They compare to baseball's five tools: "a player who can run, field, throw, hit, and hit with power." But the only important things in baseball are (a) winning ball games, and (b) putting fans in the seats. The rest is for the baseball nerds (like me). I think Hess's list is similarly weak. In scholarship, what matters is (a) advancing knowledge, and (b) making people's lives better. The rest is for pundits and fans of inside baseball. (Note: this is a recycling of a similarly titled article from 2017)

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Advice requested on ‘Teaching in a Digital Age’
Tony Bates, Online learning and distance education resources, 2019/01/08

One of the big differences between Tony Bates's career and mine is that he publishes books and I don't. I don't have nearly enough patience to work with a book publisher (as various journal editors can attest). Too many people want me to say something different from what I intend. I just want to write down what I know and put it out there. Sometimes it's read and sometimes it's not. Either way is fine with me. Even with I make it open to the world for editing (as I did for the full E-Learning 3.0 set of papers) people mostly leave it alone.

Bates wrote 'Teaching in a Digital Age' a few years ago to wrap up what would have been an eminently successful career. Four years later Bates is still active, but the book is not a bit out of date (heck, I look at stuff I wrote last year and laugh at it). So what should he do? He considers a number of options, but would like readers to weigh in. Because he mentions me near the end of the post, I feel I should comment. But what could I add? I don't really revise previous work - I rethink each new iteration anew (this is also why I can't edit my stuff - it's like asking me to write the same paper over again, from scratch, as though it would somehow be better the second time).

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Moving Towards Sustainable Policy and Practice – A Five Level Framework for Online Learning Sustainability
Diogo Casanova, Linda Price, Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, 2019/01/08

I'm never sure when I read an article of this sort whether the main purpose is the categorization into five components, or the arrangement of them into a hierarchy. If the former, then this paper (20 page PDF) is an innocuous survey of factors influencing the sustainability of online learning. But if the latter, then we get the message that financial and institutional needs are far more important than the engagement an motivation of the person actually creating the resource.

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The “Grievance Studies” Hoax and the IRB Process
Steven D. Krause, 2019/01/08

I admit, I don't have a lot of patience with the Research Ethics Board (REB) (our version of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) discussed in the article). It's slow and it often feels like it's reviewing the research, not the ethics of what we're doing. But it is impossible not to be sympathetic with the purpose of the Board, which is to ensure that scientific research doesn't create harm. And that's what's wrong with the reserach conducted by James A. Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose and what hasn't really been made clear until now. It wasn't simply that they didn't consult their ethics board. It's that, under the guise of 'research', the study appears to have been designed to embarrass or humiliate its subjects. In so doing it discredits all research. And a review board would not have approved it. Image: Resnik, NIH. More: Inside Higher Ed, Daily Nous.

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