OLDaily

Florida School Tests AI as Virtual Tutor for Online Course
Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology, 2019/01/29

This article is a rewrite of a press release issued a few days ago from Cognii about a trial of an AI system at Florida International University that "can automatically grade students' open-response (short essay) answers and extract rich pedagogical insights and analytics to improve faculty members' productivity." There's no reference or indication of progress from Cognii's 2016 trial at Colorado State University. Of course, the real value of such a system is to help students themselves write better essays (though I'm not sure whether using an AI to assess your essay before submission would count as cheating). This was the sort of approach described by Cognii's Dee Kanejiya in a 2017 article.

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Podcasting Can Work in Any Subject
John Spencer, 2019/01/29

What makes this post work is that it not only extols the virtues of podcasting and explains how it can help develop skills across a number of disciplines, it also spends a lot of time suggesting really good and grade-appropriate podcasting project ideas for students from grades 3 to 12. Actually, a lot of these would be good podcasting ideas for adults as well. The article also has a podcast version (naturally) so you can listen while you work.

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Getting Found, Staying Found
Public Knowledge Project, 2019/01/29

This is a document published by the Public Knowledge Project (who make Open Journal Systems) to help open access journals publicize themselves. Of course, a lot of the advice is relevant for other open access projects in general. A note on navigation: it isn't obvious when you go to the document - there's no 'next page' or anything like that. I spend several minutes looking for the link to download the document before I realized that the menu on the left hand side is your only navigation. Here's the announcement (the links in which may also lead you astray, which is why I'm linking directly to the resource here).

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VR cameras on the space station for your virtual spacewalk
Emory Craig, Digital Bodies, 2019/01/29

OK, I admit, I'm linking to this because I love the idea of a virtual spacewalk and I want to try it as soon as I can! That said, reading through the article naturally brings to mind additional thoughts. Like: what if I want to move? How would they handle that? In space, you could move in a full 360x360 degree sphere of directions, presumable with some simple jet-pack controls (one of the reasons I like No Man's Sky so much is that it really allows you to move freely and fluidly through the environment). But capturing the video for this kind of movement would create a crazy amount of data! I imagine we would scale up to is, and full-motion VR would be quantified by some sort of 3d movement resolution scale. The lowest would be '2', which is what we get in Google Street View - forward and backward, or maybe '4', which is what we get at an intersection. Maybe '6' would also allow you to move up and down. And so on.

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New Message Manual to Improve and Create Consistent Communications in Education
Alesha Bishop, Getting Smart, 2019/01/29

According to this article, the Hewlett Foundation recently released Communicating a Shared Vision for Students and Education. I'm always wary of a 'shared vision' because in my experience there is no such thing. I'm also wary because this guide doesn't seem to be available online. The research for the document was gathered in documents by Hattaway Communication, including this one from 2017, and this one and this one from 2018. The documents are interesting because they give us a look behind the scenes of how a foundation's media messages are crafted. Reading them makes me wonder how much my own thinking may be been influenced by this marketing.

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