OLDaily

A broken paradigm? What education needs to learn from evidence-based medicine
Lucinda McKnight, Andy Morgan, Journal of Education Policy, 2019/02/22

I'm not sure how long this SlideShare version of the paper, but you should download it while you can;  Microsoft will ak you login to download, but the ResearchGate download works). Here's the paywall version ($US43/hour, if you can believe it, and they wonder why people hate publishers). Here's the gist: a lot of people are promoting evidence-based education, which is drawn from evidence-based medicine, but they aren't as quick to took at the problems being found in evidence-based medicine. "There is no pure, superior version of scientifically produced truth in the form of the RCT or meta-analysis, as medicine well knows.  EBM has not yet fixed the problems it set out to solve... There is no excuse for education to continue to pretend that this superior truth, and a matching, neat, statistical evidence-based solution exist."

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Facebook Is Killing Onavo, Its Spyware VPN App
Andrew Heinzman, How-To Geek, 2019/02/22

For those who missed it: "Facebook offered a free VPN app called Onavo on the Apple App Store and Google Play. Unsurprisingly, Facebook spied on everyone who used that app. This has been going on for a few years, and it’s had real-world implications. According to Buzzfeed, data obtained by Onovo is the primary reason why Facebook bought WhatsApp."

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Roots of Empathy
Allie Alayan, AACE Review, 2019/02/22

I'm not sure whether a baby counts as educational technology, but I'm going to accept the wide definition in order to link to this short item about the development of empathy being implemented in classrooms. It "is designed for teaching empathy to children between the ages of 5 to 13. Observing the emotional state of an infant is used to promote positive emotional and social development in children." No word on whether an artificial baby would result in the same learning outcomes.

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Shift Happens 2
Jamai Blivin, Merrilea Mayo,, Innovate+Education, 2019/02/22

There's a lot happening in this report (48 page PDF) and I have to say that if your focus is traditional higher education then you had better take notice, because if these authors are right (and they probably are) then the outsode wprld is about to overwhelm you. "In this new ecosystem, learning has become incrementalized, increments of different sizes have become credentials, and each increment is both gated and signaled by passing an assessment, rather than a credit hour of seat time or a semester of enrollment." Once we begin down this path, there's no turning back, especially as the definition of 'assessment' becomes very broad indeed.

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School Your Target Audience with Customer Training Software
Christopher Pappas, MarTech Advisor, 2019/02/22

The case study just briefly mentioned at the beginning - Samsung Nation - is the most interesting part of the article (I will admit that as a Samsung user since the S3 I had never heard of Samsung Nation). The point here is that companies are turning to e-learning for customer support. Not a new story. The purpose of the article is to convince readers that they need an 'eLMS' (Extended LMS) to do this. They are specifically "intended for external partner training. This includes sales channels, vendors, franchisees, and, of course, customers." I wouldn't follow the advice in the article, though. Putting an eLMS on your 'wish list' might be something you do, but it's certainly not the first thing you do.

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