OLDaily

The Top 5 Wake-Up Calls of 2019
Cara Quackenbush, Encoura, 2019/12/18

As usual I will limit my 'year end review' type links to a bare minimum. After all, we all just finished living through this past year, so I think we have a good idea of what happened. But I like the way this one framed the commentary as a set of 'wake-up calls'. Each of the five (enrollment, analytics, costs, technology and OPMs) has a page dedicated to issues and developments. Some times the art is a bit cute, but the issues raised are real.

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Whatever happened to 2019 – and online learning?
Tony Bates, Online learning and distance education resources, 2019/12/18

" Looking back," says Tony Bates with typical restraint, "it still looks quite a busy year, despite my efforts to cut down, but next year will be different!" Maybe, but I'll believe it when I see it. :) As usual, his observations are worth noting: "instructors and educators are still in control of education, but that control is beginning to slip away as uninformed politicians (e.g. Doug Ford in Ontario), commercial organizations (e.g. OPMs), and computer scientists (AI applications) begin to look for cost savings or ‘efficiencies’ through automation and/or online learning."

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Multitemporal Synapse
Stand Out Publishing, 2019/12/18

I remember once writing a post on how neural networks could detect events in time. I wish I could find it (I looked; I remember Matthias Melcher commented on it, if that helps). Anyhow, here is a very similar idea expressed in patent form (predating, as far as I can tell, my comment by a few years). Basically, you have a set of neurons that fire at different intervals of time after an event. "This allows, for example, a connection to be specified with a long-term (slow-learning) connection-strength, which will learn directly from a fast-forming connection-strength at the same synapse. The fast-forming connection quickly converges on transient responses, and just as quickly forgets them." Via Reddit.

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6 Reasons Why Higher Education Needs to Be Disrupted
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Becky Frankiewicz, Harvard Business Review, 2019/12/18

This is my last free read this month on the HBR website - a fact that in itself demonstrates what's so wrong with the way things work today. But I digress. The article makes the oft-stated claim that people enter higher education because they want jobs. But that's wrong. Nobody wants jobs. They want the things they can get from jobs - a place to live, a family to share it with, well-being, self-expression. And that - according to economists - is what capitalism should have delivered by (say) 2030. But instead, as Malcolm Harris writes, "all of society is strapped in riding shotgun on the semi-criminal, semi-pathological drive to consume the future in advance, with no virtuous end on the horizon." HBR at least gets it sort of right near the end of the article: "universities tend to increase rather than decrease inequality." But nothing they suggest will fix that. Nothing in the concept of the university will fix that. But until it's fixed, universities remain the problem, not the solution. And the statistics suggest that people are beginning to get this.

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136 Mindblowing & Groundbreaking Internet Videos
Jason Kottke, 2019/12/18

Jason Kottke links to Joe Sabia's list of 136 internet videos which he says “left some sort of impression on me since the dawn of the internet video explosion." The list is on Google Slides, which loads a bit awkwardly, which is why I'm using the Kottke link as the reference. I had seen many of the videos on the list, but many more qwere new to me. What they have in common si that they show how online video is in many ways a new medium, allowing huge swathes of creative content to exist that had never been seen before. And like Kottke, I would also add a few things - Wesch's The Machine is Us/ing Us leaps to mind, as do the hours-long hiking/biking/camping videos, as do Tiny Desk concerts, as does Joss Stone's Total World Tour, as does Where is Matt, as does the UQAM lip dub, as do fail videos and dashcams, and as do animated history videos.

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A behind the scenes look at xAPI adoption by our numbers
Tara Morey, Rustici Software, 2019/12/18

A lot of work is happening behind the scenes on things like learning record stores (LRS) and activity records. This report on xAPI adoption gives readers a sense of that work. That said, it's still early days. xAPI's growth, while better than linear, isn't exactly exponential yet. For many providers, SCORM provides enough data for now. And as the report notes, "there are still features that remain underutilized. Two main areas for the xAPI community to focus on improving are xAPI Profiles and xAPI statement signing."

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