OLDaily

To Carry the Weight
Julian Stodd, Julian Stodd's Learning Blog, 2019/11/21

This very short post contains an imge reading "why kindness counts". It caught my eye because (as I work on a paper on ethics and analytics) I'm thinking that cultivating our own sense of caring, of ethics, and yes, kindness, is probably more important than any set of principles or ethical duties. But what did Julian Stodd mean? The post says almost nothing. I did a Google search and found a few interesting things, but nothing that grabbed me. So I searched through Stodd's archives and found this post called A State of Kindness: A Shared Humanity. And that's what I was looking for. "We need," he writes, "a new State: a State that learns to be kind. Industry built on kindness. Leadership through community. And a State that celebrates difference as a chance to engage, to find a new path, a shared path to a shared humanity." Well said.

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MOOCs on the Rise in China
Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology, 2019/11/21

Campus Technology has picked up on the MOOCs-in-China story. "Unlike the focus in the United States on delivering a university-caliber education to people who are out of school, in China, MOOCs are specifically targeted to university students as a means for improving 'equity in higher ed.' According to Wu Yan, who leads China's Higher Education Department, 'MOOCs are critical to reform China's traditional, cramming teaching model.'" That makes the Chinese MOOCs closer to the original intent than anything that ever came out of Stanford.

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Platform teachers
Ben Williamson, Code Acts in Education, 2019/11/21

This is a detailed and useful look at Amazon's new Ignite platform selling teacher-produced learning materials (mentioned here a couple of weeks ago). "Amazon Ignite... represents the next-stage instantiation of the brand ambassador and the teacher as micro-influencer," writes Ben Williamson. "Teachers are not contracted as platform ambassadors, but invited to become self-branded sellers in a competitive marketplace, setting up shop as micro-edubusinesses." He also notes that "Amazon Ignite is ‘invitation-only’ and as such makes highly consequential decisions over the kinds of content and resources that can be purchased and used."

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The most dangerous report in higher education
Bryan Alexander, 2019/11/21

Bryan Alexander refers to an article in IHE describing a report by the start-up advising company Edmit predicting the (short) future of a number of U.S.-based colleges. The report was never published. On the one hand "we do have to wonder if such a report could have done harm to colleges already teetering on the financial brink." But on the other hand "students should have access to such information, given the important decisions they make about attendance." Asks Alexander, "is it unethical to block access to such reports from students deciding where to enroll?

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Ease into xAPI with ‘Starter’ Project, Cohort Learning
Megan Torrance, Pamela Hogle, Learning Solutions, 2019/11/21

According to this article, "The best way to learn about xAPI and discover what it can do for your organization is to jump in and create a project." This is true, I would content, of pretty much everything. What I wish the authors had done was to point to a set of tutorials that would allow readers to do that. Some of the implementations mentioned - extracting xAPI data from a Unity 3D game, generating xAPI statements from Amazon Alexa skills, capturing learning data from Vimeo, etc. - would be really good skills to learn. Alas, this article touts xAPI learning cohorts, where the cohorts break into teams, and where many participants choose not to do a cohort project. Isn't this what always happens in these learning projects? We know what the 'best way' is - but in practice, we dilute it, so we're pretending to learn, but not really learning. Ah, but I might sign up anyways. After all, it's free.

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Set Up An Email Newsletter To Share Your Blog Posts Using Mailchimp
Kathleen Morris, The Edublogger, 2019/11/21

This is exactly what I did for OLDaily, using MailChimp to create my newsletter from my RSS feed (previously I created the email directly and sent it myself; it was far cheaper but it was eventually blocked by too many anti-spam services). I'm OK with this as a solution, though as I say, it is expensive (which is why I don't really promote the email newsletter these days) and is a bit inflexible. Anyhow, this post explains the whole process.

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Learning to see, hear, respect, and empower every student
Remake Learning, 2019/11/21

Related to this post: I saw an exchange on Mastodon, which went something like this: "I see feature x was dropped; was this the result of user feedback or testing?"; "Yes it was." So why is that significant? It's typical of software design, which aims for the common middle, treating the wide range of users as a single entity. But a feature most people don't need might be the One Big Thing in a person's life. That's why you have to empower every student, not just most of them.

Just so, we have this post. "Chances are you probably felt disoriented, frustrated, ignored, hopeless.
Now imagine if this is what most of your learning experiences were like in life.... This is the reality for learners when they don’t see themselves, their communities, and their histories reflected in what they’re being taught.... In recognition of this reality, there’s been a growing interest among educators and advocates for approaches to teaching and learning that consider the culture and identity of the learner." It's not 'learning for most' but 'learning for all'.

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