OLDaily

Digital Learning Architectures of Participation
Nigel Ecclesfield, Fred Garnett, SlideShare, 2020/07/28

Truly awful slide design, but interesting and useful content based on a book by the two authors. "Let’s reconceptualise learning... using a model of informal e-learning," the suggest: "a) learner-centric (interest-driven) b) context-responsive (lifecycles model) c) large-scale system (learners as users)... Use personal curiosity to discover resources & collaborate using their personal technology." You really have to work to extract the content from this presentation, and a lot of it echoes themes we've seen in this newsletter, but it is a good overview of the topic.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

OpenAI technology, just an HTTPS call away
OpenAI, 2020/07/28

There are numerous educational examples of GPT-3 on the OpenAI API page. This is a beta of a service that will allow applications to send requests via API to the service and use their AI to perform tasks such as "semantic search, summarization, sentiment analysis, content generation, translation, and more." I've signed up for a beta account and if accepted will use the service to support MOOCs on gRSShopper and trying to auto-generate AI-authored open educational resources (OER). If that happens I'll be looking for collaborators, so stay tuned. Thanks to Adrian Hodge, working on his team's digital teaching toolkit at NYU Shanghai.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Twitter’s Security Woes Included Broad Access to User Accounts
Jordan Robertson, Kartikay Mehrotra, Kurt Wagner, Bloomberg, 2020/07/28

According to this report, Twitter had security problems even before its recent hack. "The controls were so porous that at one point in 2017 and 2018 some contractors made a kind of game out of creating bogus help-desk inquiries that allowed them to peek into celebrity accounts, including Beyonce’s, to track the stars’ personal data including their approximate locations." And this is the problem with surveillance: there are the official uses, which are bad enough, and then there are the uses by bad actors just for the lulz, which range from the creepy to the dangerous.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Research reports on Covid-19 and emergency remote learning/online learning
Tony Bates, Online learning and distance education resources, 2020/07/28

Summaries of two thirds of a dozen research studies of the pivot to online learning (or remote teaching) in the spring of 2020. Many of these studies have been cited in these pages. One of them, the Bozkurt, global outlook, will probably be a future 'classic' publication, says Tony Bates. Overall, he concludes, North American universities responded exceptionally well to the crisis. Also, while "many faculty and administrators do not believe that major changes to teaching and learning will result in the long run," Bates does not share that view. Neither do I. Minimally, it will be discovered that many things are easier and just as effective online, and if so, why would you go back?

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Teach Your Class Online - The Essentials
Meg Lamont, John Lanier, Stanford University, 2020/07/28

The title and description tell you all you need to know about the content: "It covers general guidelines for adapting your course to an online format, best practices for varied situations, common pitfalls in online course design, and how to troubleshoot student issues online." The videos cover teaching online, and not so much online course design. I liked the actual examples of class recordings in this five-session course, but I think the postage-stamp video could have been bigger, and that the instructors in a class on teaching your class online could have had better audio. Because the audio really matters online. The content covers quite a lot, though, and even if you disagree with the advice (which I did at points) trhe course raises a lot to think about, and helps frame online teaching quite well.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]