OLDaily

That Native App Is Probably Just an Old Web Browser
Chris Hoffman, How-To Geek, 2019/08/15

As this article says, "Many of the applications you run on Windows, Mac, and even Linux consist of outdated pieces of Chromium, the engine that forms the basis for Google Chrome." I cvovered this in a presentation a few months ago called Electron Express. This article suggests that these browser instances are out of date, but this is true of any application. More of an issue is the size and speed of Electron-based applications, but the ones I use (such as, say, Visual Studio Code) run just fine. To me, the larger issue is how to merge desktop and mobile applications, and how to synchronize data across applications.

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How is Digitalisation Affecting the Flexibility and Openness of Higher Education Provision? Results of a Global Survey Using a New Conceptual Model
Dominic Orr, Martin Weller, Rob Farrow, Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2019/08/15

The purpose of this exercise was to find out "how to represent the implementation of digital technology in such a way that it captures the wide range of practice globally." This article, a summary of a larger report (65 page PDF), has two major parts. The first is the development of the open, online, flexible and technology-enhanced (OOFAT) modes of learning model, which is used to structure the survey. The second is the application of the model to a survey of more than 69 responses from higher education providers. According to the authors, "The ‘disruption’ model of technological change in education, which promotes one universal revolution in application does not seem to be borne out, but rather a mixed economy with diverse approaches to OOFAT is observed." But given the study's purpose and design, it's hard to see how any other result could have been obtained.

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Everything Old is New Again: Textbooks, The Printing Press, The Internet, and OER
David Wiley, iterating toward openness, 2019/08/15

David Wiley writes, "The failure of the internet to broadly transform teaching has led me to wonder – what was the impact of the prior transformative communications technology – the printing press – on teaching?" It's a good question. The answer, unsurpriusingly, is 'textbooks', and Wiley notes that "the key components of the modern textbook story have been in place for literally hundreds of years." Before textbooks, there was dictation, where a faculty member would read the textbook aloud while students copied it. How different is this from WordPress plugins for online book publishing and online annotation? What could we be doing instead? Wiley suggests (and I wholeheartedly agree) is practice. Practice with feedback, with reflection. "Providing students with lots of online interactive practice is absolutely one of the ways we should be leveraging the affordances of the internet in support of student learning. But – particularly when it comes to OER – we aren’t.

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How far will digital video go?
Bryan Alexander, 2019/08/15

"It seems at this point that we’re wading into a rising wave of total video," writes Bryan Alexander. "How far do you think the screens and cameras will rise?" He considers a scenario he calls 'total video'. In this, "let’s envision video as our default setting in life.  In this future we prefer to communicate through video, as opposed to all other mechanisms." In a certain sense, in my view, we can define the upper reach of video as 1:1 - each hour of video watched by one person for one hour. Otherwise, either we get unwatched video (more video produced than we can consume), or we get more than one person watching a video (less video produced than we can consume). But we can increase this maximum artificially - by video compression, for example, or by including artificial intelligences as legitimate viewers of video (in which case, there is no upper limit to the production of video).

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A Simple Chat App With React, Node and WebSocket
Dan Kaufhold, BitLab, Medium, 2019/08/15

Just for fun, I recorded a video of myself working through this article and trying to recreate the chat app it describes how to build. Did it work? If you watch the hour-long video you can find out! You can view the video here. Is this useful? If it is, let me know, and I'll do some more videos like it. Update: I didn't record the video at a high enough resolution to make the text readable. So - imagine you are watching this, and let me know whether you would find it useful.

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