OLDaily

How Blockchain is Helping Dallas Students Tell Their Story
Tom Vander Ark, Getting Smart, 2019/02/19

This is a puff piece promoting Greenlight Credentials but it does offer one of the more compelling use cases for blockchain in education: "The benefit of a distributed ledger technology like Blockchain is that it allows employers and colleges to have instant verification of a multiple-source transcript." The key here is multiple-source. "Student profiles can host a range of evidences of learning including badges and a portfolio of artifacts." Of course, when you have multiple credentials in a single space, no one credential is special any more. Cue the crisis in academia.

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Alexa, Siri, and Google Don’t Understand a Word You Say
Josh Hendrickson, How-To Geek, 2019/02/19

OK, the headline in this story is very obviously true, but stay with me for a moment. Part way through Josh Hendrickson asserts, "you get a failure message such as 'I’m sorry, but I don’t know that.' It’s little more than sleight of hand magic to trick you into thinking it understands." Yes, quite so. But how would you be fooled into thinking it understands? Well, you aren't fooled, really. But you go along with it because it feels right to do it. But now, how do you know you aren't doing that with people, too? What if people don't 'really' understand each other - what if what we call 'understanding' is really me projecting understanding on you, and you projecting understanding on me? This is what I think actually happens. Which means we need to reframe statements like "machines don't understand".

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These Are the 24 Sounds Humans Use to Communicate Without Words
Lacy Schley, Discover, 2019/02/19

You will want first to visit the demonstration page and listen to a few dozen samples of sound combinations. There are more than 2000 so you probably won't hear them all. Then this Discover article offers a good summary of what you heard. The assertion here is that "there are at least 24 distinct ways that humans convey meaning without words." Here's the academic paper (server is currently overloaded). What I wonder is why there aren't words for these. I mean, instead of making a noise, why isn't there a word we utter that represents that emotion? The best we get are onomatopoeia like 'ugh' or 'aieeee'. But that doesn't really say it. Via Metafilter, via Open Culture.

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“Virtual Learning Environment Faculty Continuing Professional Development - Networked Learning Communities” A Critical Literature Review
Chris O Toole, Irish Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning, 2019/02/19

As the abstract says, "This paper presents the results of a small-scale research study examining the professional practice of Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) teachers, who are encouraged to network and learn, establish on-going relationships with both their fellow teachers and those in other institutions, share knowledge, experience, resources and foster good practice for continuing professional development (CPD)." 20 page PDF.

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The Quest to Topple Science-Stymying Academic Paywalls
Joi Ito, 2019/02/19

The lede is well and truly buried in this article, but here it is: "We are developing a new open source and modern publishing platform called PubPub and a global, distributed method of understanding public knowledge called Underlay." The PubPub code is open source and available on GitHub and is basically a Node.js-based content management system that looks and feels a lot like WordPress or Medium. Underlay is more interesting - its website says it is "a global, distributed graph of public knowledge... This is an attempt to replicate the richness of private knowledge graphs in a public, decentralized manner... We will work with other protocol layers to define the initial federation model, and decentralize the underlay with IPFS." So anyhow, I used PubPub to create what is now an empty journal (I'll accept submissions, but my approval process is arbitrary and capricious) and sent an email to Underlay, and I'll keep you up to date on everything.

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Canada OER Group – 2019 update
BC Campus, 2019/02/19

This is a quick set of short updates from the Canada OER Group, a collection of higher education institutions from across the country. It's nice to hear from Grande Prairie Regional College, where I used to teach: " Currently, 37 courses at Grande Prairie Regional College are taught using OERs, but Ed Tech is working toward growing that number. 'We’ve partnered with the Students’ Association to organize events and advertise our services and resources,' said Anna Gillis, GPRC Instructional Designer and an active proponent of OERs in the classroom."

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Digital Media: What Went Wrong
Edmund Lee, New York Times, Medium, 2019/02/19

The big news in digital media recently has been the waves of layoffs at such stalwarts as BuzzFeed, HuffPost, and Vice. These were companies people thought had figured out the news business. It prompted MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes to ask “What if there is literally no profitable model for digital news?” We see the same story in education, but moving at a slower pace.  It's described as a "nightmarish vision" in today's Inside Higher Ed. In today's edition of the Chronicle's The Edge, Scott Carlson outlines the same case with respect to higher education. "We have legacy institutions (Harvard, The New York Times) and upstarts (Coursera, Vice Media). Smart, intractable, and often underpaid people — professors and reporters — form the foundation of our industries."

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The Web Through a 30 Year Old Lens
Ton Zijlstra, Interdependent Thoughts, 2019/02/19

As I write right now the service is overloaded and unresponsive, so you may have to wait a few days before enjoying it. But it's worth the wait, because it's worth keeping in mind that a scant 30 years ago (for me, half a lifetime ago) the web was very different - text-only, filled with hyperlinks to other sites, and completely free of social networks and advertising.

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