OLDaily

Feature Article
How to Learn Using Technology
Stephen Downes, Revista Educadores, 2020/02/13

This short article was published in Spanish in January. I argue that there is a distinctive way to learn using technology. It's different from learning with textbooks or learning with classroom instruction. In these, the focus is on understanding and remembering. It is content based. The learning objective is defined as mastery of this body of knowledge. Learning with technology, by contrast, is outcome based. It is defined in terms of skills or competencies, as how to achieve a certain outcome using technology as a tool. In this post, I outline the steps.

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Web Browsers Are Silencing Annoying Notification Popups
Chris Hoffman, How-To Geek, 2020/02/13

To this I can only say: finally! The idea that websites could send notifications was a good one - if we opted into them. That's how I keep tabs on what's up at Mastodon. But "the problem isn’t the notification option itself. It’s how pushy the notification request is. Web browsers should have cracked down on these popups years ago." In the future, these popups asking you to give permission will be relegated to much lower prominance, and can be turned off entirely if you want. Sort of - Firefox does this right away, Google will do it only if you're constantly refusinbg permission, while the other browsers will do it in the future.

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The adoption of a social learning system: Intrinsic value in the UTAUT model
Hager Khechine, Benoit Raymond, Marc Augier, British Journal of Educational Technology, 2020/02/13

Normally I would not post a link to a paywalled paper, but just had to post it, having found the front matter of this British Journal of Educational Technology paper so laughable, especially in the light of the post I just wrote on educational research. Here, for example, is what we read in "what is known": "The unified theory of acceptance and use of technology is an approved model that explains the intention to use and the effective use of technology." You can read about UTAUT here; it purports to be an update on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). I wondered, what is it about UTAUT that is 'known', and what does it mean to be an 'approved model'? We also 'know' that "There is little knowledge about what makes students’ willing to use social media tools for learning." I get the idea that traditional journal publication is about building on previous knowledge, just like in the real sciences, but it is important to make sure the 'knowledge' is actually knowledge. Anyhow, I couldn't read the Sacred Texts themselves, because I could not offer the dinari.

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Getting Acquainted With Svelte, the New Framework on the Block
Tristram Tolliday, CSS-Tricks, 2020/02/13

I spent a couple of hours with this article, so I feel duty-bound to pass it along, tyhough I don't really recommend it. Its purpose is to introduce Svelte, a new Javascript framework (best compared with Vue, Angular or React). You can run Svelte using NPM, which is what I did. Now on the plus side, the article was easy to follow, explains the advantage of Svelte really clearly, and I got it running in just a few moments. But: some of the instructions were unclear, the "real-world example of an everyday use case" was not intuitive, some code was Linux-only, and the code in the article was different from the code in the example. But Svelte itself is really interesting, and I do recommend exploring it, but maybe starting from here or maybe here, and not this article.

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