OLDaily

Feature Article
How to Help Students Succeed by Taking Ownership of Their Learning Online Through Personal Learning
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, 2020/07/31

This post is an unedited trascript of a presentation I gave that covers:

• The difference between ‘personalized learning’ and ‘personal learning’.

• Why personal learning is the preferred concept for student success.

• Key starting points for personal learning, objectives, learning processes and forms of evaluation that best suit personal learning.

• Strategies to implement personal learning in the form of support for remote teaching, online learning, and lifelong learning.

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Shattering the way L&D thinks about measurement
JD Dillon, Chief Learning Officer, 2020/07/31

I would like to see this article more as a starting point than as a final word on the subject. But as JD Dillon says, "The most well-known learning measurement models have been around for decades, and yet the industry continues to struggle with its measurement practices... most learning and development teams still cannot answer critical stakeholder questions." The measurement practices were developed before the age of digital data, writes Dillon, and they have not caught up with modern data strategy (for example, the the five key principles of good data). So what would good learning data look like? This article is, as I say, a good starting point. But as it notes, each learning initiative has to consider this question in its own contenxt, for its own purposes.

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The GPT-3 Architecture, on a Napkin
Daniel Dugas, Artificial Curiosity, 2020/07/31

I've been writing about GPT-3 fairly often over the last couple of weeks. I've mostly highlighted what it can do. If you're interested in how it can do what it does, then this accessible article is for you. It helps to have a bit of background in machine learning (ML), but honestly, you won't need it. Where this article is really useful is in helping you conceptualize what GPT-3 is doing under the hood - you won't be an expert but you'll be able to talk knowledgably about the type of processing it does. There's a lot to it - but at heart, it really boils down to counting strings of symbols and predicting which will come next.

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Learning as We Go: Principles for Effective Assessment During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Robin Lake, Lynn Olson, Center on Reinventing Public Education, 2020/07/31

This report (8 page PDF) offers a set of principles intended to inform the practice of assessment in the upcoming pandemic-complicated school year. Many of these recommendations would be suitable in any year, for example, 'do no harm' and 'engage parents as parters' (to which I always want to add, 'where possible', since parental engagement cannot be taken for granted for many students). Others would make good policy, like " Don’t use assessments for accountability unless they were designed and validated for that purpose." And finally, there is good advice about focusing on student's physical and emotional well-being. Overall, I think, the message is that assessment in this coming year will be secondary to other priorities. Maybe it should always be secondary. See also The Evidence Project.

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COL’s course on OER for Online Learning to be offered to 18,000 teachers in Trinidad and Tobago
Commonwealth of Learning, 2020/07/31

This is a success for the Commonwealth of Learning. "Following the initial success of its online course on OER for Online Learning, COL will be offering the course for up to 18,000 teachers in Trinidad and Tobago at the request of the Ministry of Education." This is the sort of thing open online learning was intended to support, and it's good to see it being used as a useful response to coronavirus.

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The Fast Track to AI with JavaScript and Serverless
Peter Elger, InfoQ, 2020/07/31

So I learned today that "cat detector systems are really the Hello World of AI." It was in the context of this talk (there's a transcript to read) on accessing AI services with simple Javascript applications. The main point you should read here (aside from the bit about cats) is that it can be done. It is being done. This is something I mentioned in a conversation yesterday, with reference to the OpenAI API. Here's how it works: it retrieves the image from a URL, and then sends it to the AI API (could be Amazon, Google, Microsoft - most companies have APIs these days) to process in an image recognition task. The API returns the verdict: 'cat' or 'not-cat' (and maybe a degree of confidence). The talk continues with a number of other examples of such services in action. "Serverless computing," concludes the author, "will increasingly become a standard enterprise development tool, and incorporating lots of AI components."

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Digital Literacy and Digital Didactics as the Basis for New Learning Models Development
Zhi-Jiang Liu, Natalia Tretyakova, Vladimir Fedorov, Marina Kharakhordina, International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning, 2020/07/31

This isn't the best of articles (15 page PDF) but it offers us a glimpse of thinking about digital literacies and online learning from a Russian perspective. After providing an overview of the concept in the context of a desire to improve educational outcomes, it provides a survey of digital literacy in Russia, comparing in particular teachers and professors (who do well) in comparison with the general population. On how to advance learning, the authors write (citing Ebba Ossiannilsson), "as the educational content is now freely proposed and available anytime, anywhere via the Internet, traditional educational formats are challenging. The main role of universities, apart from researches, is to provide unique learning opportunities in a stimulating environment."

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