OLDaily

Learning Revolution - Recordings
Steve Hargadon, 2020/04/15

Steve Hargadon has been hosting online conferences longer than most people have been on the internet. This week he has been running the Learning Revolution miniconference. This page links to the recordings (the conference is run on Ning and Zoom). There's a follow-up conference slated for April 22. This page links to the conference recordings. Now it's a bit of a mixed bag, with presentations ranging from Evidence-based Strategies for Managing Habits to School-Wide Learning Commons to The Pandemic Educator - Retooling Education. There's more than enough to occupy a full day of viewing, so pick and choose and if a talk isn't working for you, move on to the next. See also: Muguel Guhlin.

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Tips for using Google Sheets for event programme planning
Martin Hawksey, MASHe, 2020/04/15

This is part of the content of a larger webinar (slides for which can be found here) describing how Alt hosted its OER20 online conference. This particular posts details how they used Google sheets to set up the conference programme. I thought it worked pretty well, though what I could have really used (and couldn't find) was an .ics file I could use to import the conference programme into my calendar.

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10 Fundamentals of Teaching Online for Faculty and Instructors
Tony Bates, Contact North, 2020/04/15

The whole world has suddenly discovered we need guides and courses to teach people how to teach online, but Tony Bates covered the territory pretty well in 2015, especially for traditional institution-based instructors. But of course newly minted online instructors probably won't take the time to read his full book, so this is a slimmed-down guide that weighs in as a brisk 37 page PDF.

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Gasta Goes Global
Gasta, 2020/04/15

Gasta in this case is basically Pecha Kucha, but with an Irish flavour. This online version wasn't exactly 'global', with presentations mostly from the British Isles, Canada, the U.S., and Maha Bali from Egypt. Though the presentations were brisk, the introductions weren't, and so the overall effect is mixed. The best bit was Sheila MacNeill suggesting that exams and proctoring present an attitude of distrust rather than care. Maha Bali also covered care, citing several times from bell hooks. Martin Weller talked about the fragility of the current system and the need for resiliance, and Tony Bates made some predictions. Here's the Twitter stream associated with the event. Here's the video on YouTube.

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OpenAI Microscope
Ludwig Schubert, Michael Petrov, Shan Carter, OpenAI, 2020/04/15

It will be pretty easy to get lost browsing this. From Open AI, here is a project called Microscope, "a collection of visualizations of every significant layer and neuron of eight important vision models. Microscope makes it easier to analyze the features that form inside these neural networks." These are models that, for example, take random images, and detect all sorts of dogs in them. They are also the sorts of models used to detect cars on the road. As the website explains, " When someone makes a claim like this, it’s useful if others can quickly explore those neurons, evaluating the claim and discovering new things."

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Finally We May Have a Path to the Fundamental Theory of Physics… and It’s Beautiful
Stephen Wolfram, 2020/04/15

I've always watched Stephen Wolfram with some interest. Being neither a mathematician nor a physicist, there's only so far I can go in interpreting this work. But here's what I'm seeing. In this particular article, Wolfram is defining simple graph manipulations to create complex graphs. This is an extension of the idea that the application of simple rules over and over again can result in complex structures. In this article, the method, applied to graphs, is used to derive a number of natural laws of physics. What this means intuitively is that we can imagine the universe as formed not only of simple particles like quarks and muons and such, but also out of simple interactions between those particles. That's what I get out of this article, at least. Your results may vary.

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