OLDaily

Maker Spaces and Virtual Learning: Ed Tech Leader Q&A
Alyson Klein, Education Week, 2020/02/18

The first part of this article describes a maker-space initiative at the he Lenoir City School District near Knoxville, Tennessee. It sounds nice. "Engineering volunteers—many of whom live in a nearby retirement village—come out at least once a week to help students use the equipment and place engineering lessons in a real world context." The interesting bit is where virtual learning fits in. The students wanted to take advanced placement (AP), participate in the band or honors chorus, and be part of the STEM academy, and the didn't have time for all their required courses, so "the district started allowing them to take some of these required courses for graduation online." The unfortunate bit is that they also started charging the students money for this. This is where state (or provincial) support should come in, so these can be accessible to all students.

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Scientists, Stop Thinking Explaining Science Will Fix Things. It Won’t.
Aaron Davis, Read Write Collect, 2020/02/18

Aaron Davis comments, "I’m learning to better challenge scientists’ assumptions about how communication works. The deficit model, I’ve found, is difficult to unlearn. It’s very logical, and my hunch is that it comes naturally to scientists ... But the obstacles faced by science communicators are not epistemological but cultural. The skills required are not those of a university lecturer but a rhetorician." Indeed, as this article notes, "The takeaway is clear: Increasing science literacy alone won’t change minds. In fact, well-meaning attempts by scientists to inform the public might even backfire." The key here is that this is true not only for scientific communication, but learning generally.

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Let's Start an Epidemic
Doc Norton, InfoQ, 2020/02/18

This might be review for a lot of readers, but this discussion of how events propagate through network is important to understand. "Doc Norton explores how things like disease, politics, and even moods travel through social networks, discussing the impact people have on others."

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Microsoft Threatens To Change the LXP Market: EdCast and Others Respond
Josh Bersin, 2020/02/18

According to this article, " the Office 365 team is getting very focused on the corporate learning market. This $240 billion space is wide open for Microsoft and they are beginning to understand how their tools (plus the connections to LinkedIn Learning) can play." I ahve to agree. Even without LinkedIn Learning (which can be expensive) there's a lot Microsoft can do to help Office 365 support learning. For example, Microsoft Cortex "indexes all the documents and interactions happening in the company (using Office 365 Graph) and shows you trending topics, people most affiliated as experts, and documents most relevant to a topic." Also, "LinkedIn has announced that they are building a Learning Experience Platform, which is likely to look like an 'open edition' of Microsoft Learning."

Josh Bersin also describes in this article how competitors are responding. For example,  EdCast "just announced its Open Skills Cloud," a system tghat looks a lot like the LPSS engine we were building at NRC a few years ago. "The system automatically creates a skills ontology (and can injest other skills models), finds related skills, and then uses this information to tag and recommend content." And learning experience platforms (LXP) "are now becoming intelligent content platforms that connect learning and content to work." But they all need to remember: learning is not a search problem. These systems will need to support creativity tools, interaction and learning community.

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Doc Searls on Internet as Commons, Enclosures, Institutional Erosion, and Humanity
Ton Zijlstra, Interdependent Thoughts, 2020/02/18

David Wiley's comments from yesterday notwithstanding, there are still some important things to take away from the Doc Searls article, and specifically, as Ton Zijlstra notes, the ways the commons - or the public goods - are being enclosed, that is, essentially converted from public to private ownership. Points of enclosure include service provisioning, 5G, censorship, the advertising-supported commercial Internet, protectionism, digital colonialism, our forgotten past, and algorithmic opacity. Now this is a mélange of issues including some from a free-wheeling libertarian perspective, but the danger, I think, is real. Yesterday I said that OER don't need regulation, and that's true. But they need protection, as do all our other public goods, because it's too easy to destroy them.

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