OLDaily

The Great Google Hangouts Shutdown begins October 2019
Ron Amadeo, Ars Technica, 2019/01/23

In an announcement yesterday Google laid out the timeframe for shutting down Google Hangouts. To be clear, what's being shut down is the chat system. "Hangouts—which Google has recently retconned to 'Hangouts Classic'—is Google's most popular messaging app of all time. Ars Technica reports, "Hangouts Classic (the popular one) is shutting down. Today, Google announced the shutdown begins October 2019, when the company says it will 'start retiring' Hangouts Classic for GSuite customers. When, precisely, the shutdown happens for consumers is still up in the air." Meanwhile, according to the announcement, "Later this year, we'll transition classic Hangouts users on G Suite domains to Chat and Meet. As a first step, some changes are coming on April 16, 2019."

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Online peer assessment to improve students’ learning outcomes and soft skills
Daniela Amendola, Cristina Miceli, Italian Journal of Educational Technology, 2019/01/23

14 page PDF. This would seem to be unsurprising: "peer evaluation closely correlates with the grades the teacher assigned." Correlation improves if the number of assessors is increased to three. Also, "other conditions can significantly enhance the correlation between teacher and peer evaluations, such as random selection of assessors and assessees, peer assessment being  voluntary  instead  of  compulsory,  and  peer  raters  being  involved  in  developing  the  rating  criteria." The latter condition makes assessment more like following a recipe - you follow along the criteria and ask whether it was satisfied. Expert instructors, though, do this intuitively, without the need for a checklist, which leads me to wonder what the speed difference between peer assessors and expert assessment.

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Vox Media is acquiring The Coral Project
Sara Fischer, Axios, 2019/01/23

The Coral Project is "provides newsrooms with tools and technology to better manage their commenting sections." It's used by numerous newsrooms, including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, New York Magazine, Australia's Fairfax Media, and others. This is not the first of Mozilla's open source projects to be spun-off. Last August its Backpack product was transferred to Badgr (itself the end result of a spin-off project involving Concentric Sky). According to the report, Vox will continue to operate Corel as an open source project. We'll check back in ten years and see if that's still the case.

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