OLDaily

The Stories We Were Told about Education Technology (2019)
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, 2019/12/25

Audrey Watters has amassed an impressive list of ed tech failures of one sort or another for the year and comments, "So much innovation and 'edsurgency.' And if we’re not careful, if we do not hold these entrepreneurs and barkers and politicians accountable, if we do not remember their failures and falsehoods, then we will find that all this will just repeat itself on into the next decade." The list is enough to keep anyone humble.

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@bluesky
Tim Bray, Ongoing, 2019/12/25

These are reflections from Tim Bray (who knows a thing or two about protocols) on Twitter's @Bluesky proposal to create a decentralized social network. Will it work? he asks. Probably not. There are too many things that can't be fixed via the protocol alone - things like "the messy political mechanisms behind our imperfect but essential legal and regulatory frameworks." But maybe it could work, he says, with carefully designed APIs and the sort of AI-based indirection proposed by Stephen Wolfram. And there needs to be some mechanism to define 'verifiable or not' in the network's algorithms, he says. It's a long shot, he argues. But is it worth trying? Absolutely.

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Teaching online is different: Critical perspectives from the literature
Caitriona Ní Shé, et.al., Dublin City University, 2019/12/25

This is a good paper (43 page PDF) but because of its methodology - a systematic literature review - it reflects a fairly narrow perspective and feels ten years out of date. According to its publicity it "emphasises the importance of interpersonal skills and having a compassionate approach for effective teaching online" but I found this a bit incongruent with its discussion of the roles of an online teacher (and, again, this is a discussion long since past - see my own work in this area from a decade ago). The best bit of the report is the table of key factors that impact on professional development (pp.56-57, pdf p.29) which, it seems to me, could be interpreted also as key factors that impact on learning online. Via Robert Gibson.

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