OLDaily

Coronavirus Response: People First, Economics Second
Josh Bersin, 2020/03/13

I want to call on the education technology community to heed this principle and this message. Now is not the time to be thinking about business opportunities. Right now there is a real need for what we're doing. Now is the time to think about the service we can offer. "Let’s slow down, accept the business interruption that’s going to take place, and take care of the people. If we do this the recovery will be faster, and our companies, lives, and entire society will be better off."

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Please do a bad job of putting your courses online
Rebecca Barrett-Fox, 2020/03/13

I want to endorse the overall message being offered by Rebecca Barrett-Fox in this post. "Release yourself from high expectations right now, because that’s the best way to help your students learn. If you are getting sucked into the pedagogy of online learning or just now discovering that there are some pretty awesome tools out there to support student online, stop. Stop now. Ask yourself: Do I really care about this? (Probably not, or else you would have explored it earlier.)" Don't let the best be the enemy of the good. Just get it done. Do what you can, under the circumstances, as well as resonably possible.

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A Design Guide for Building Offline First Apps
Hasura, 2020/03/13

The title belies how interesting this post actually is. One of the core problems when creating offline applications is synchronizing the data across different instances of the application. I've thought about this a lot in realtion to the concept of a PLE. This article describes four major approaches to resolving this problem with easy-to-follow explanations and diagrams. Even if you're not designing these applications, you may well find this to be an interesting discussion.

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Open ed as the anti-disruption
Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, 2020/03/13

Martin Weller's message in this post and accompanying presentation is that "Open practice is not about disrupting higher ed – It is an alternative model to the disruptive narrative." Her argues, "disruption is a poor model for education, and leaves a dangerous legacy... instead we should look for theories or approaches that promote aspects and values we want to see in higher ed, such as: cooperation, focused on problems, learner centric, seeking to support educators, a better fit with education (and) emphasise social justice."

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Pedagogy before technology, OK?
Philip J. Kerr, Adaptive Learning in ELT, 2020/03/13

'Pedagogy before technology' is an oft-repeated mantra, and I can see the appeal, but from where I sit it's often a plea to "let us keep doing what we have been doing, without any change." And this is to effectively dismiss the idea that technology brings with it affordances that enable us to do better: to reach more people, provide more accurate education, and better prepare them for whatever they may face. This article bases its mantra on the assertion that the benefits of technology are not proven; "Neither in language learning / teaching, nor in education more generally, is there any clear evidence of the necessary benefits of introducing educational technology."

But the scope, at least in this article, is sharply limited to the domain where a teacher uses technology in the classrom. Doing the same thing they have been doing. My challenge to teachers is: imagine you did not exist (which is the reality for hundreds of millions of potential students). Would people be better off, or not, without technology to help them learn? Think outside the bounds of what you are doing as an individual, and to what we can do collectively, as a society.

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