OLDaily

What makes TikTok such a challenge? Look to the Cute Cat Theory.
an xiao mina, Medium, 2020/08/04

I gave a presentation not so long ago that concluded "remember, it's all just cat pictures." Not everyone in the audience (a roomful of military officers) was impressed. But I meant the point seriously, and this useful article makes a similar point with much more eloquence. "Behind every cute cat is the story of infrastructure— the cables on the ground, the data centers scattered around the world, the hardware we use to access this and the platforms on which we engage with content. With infrastructure comes advantage, and with advantage comes policy, politicking and power." And that's why the U.S. wants to steal TikTok, and why I, as a longtime TikTok user, stand opposed.

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The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free
Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs, 2020/08/04

I just finished Trevor Noah's excellent Born a Crime audio-book (over eight hours of cycling) and he makes a very similar point about crime: "crime succeeds because crime does the one thing the government doesn’t do: crime cares. Crime is grassroots. Crime looks for the young kids who need support and a lifting hand." It's the same with fake news and propaganda. And I have to wonder, if as a society we really wanted children to learn and be educated and know the truth, why do we make it so difficult and costly to obtain? As I've said numerous times: "Democracy dies behind a paywall."

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Experiment’s persistent failure in education inquiry, and why it keeps failing
Gary Thomas, British Educational Research Journal, 2020/08/04

The argument here - and I agree with it - is that "we haven’t as a community of inquiry learned the lessons of the past, and the putative improvement and purification of the experiment form is once again leaving us disappointed." The idea of the 'experiment' in education has ossified around the model of 'a comparison of groups', and this model has time and again failed to yield useful results. What follows in this article is a comprehensive and thorough presentation of the argument, including a detailed deconstruction of what proponents of the experimental form deem to be a 'true' experiment. But these are "as vulnerable to distortion as any other kind of research." Ultimately, "this model of intervene‐and‐test using the protocols of a particular kind of experiment is, in education, flawed, unable to meet this branch of experimentation’s own design expectations and unwilling to take seriously the significance of confounders which vitiate the legitimacy of its findings." Image: Vox.

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In higher education it’s student progress that counts—but prestige that gets measured
Christensen Institute, 2020/08/04

I think the headline is quite right - if, for example, you look at the rankings of the world's 'leading educational institutions' yopu'll find that one of the major parameters is the institution's 'reputation'. It has nothing to do with performance. The same with learning. "In higher education, the 'best' customers are elite, first-time, full-time students. They pay more; they are academically prepared; they graduate in high numbers; they demand immersive amenities; and their achievements, talents, and predominantly wealthy families contribute significantly to the prestige and reputation of the institution. The industries’ obsession with these students has been baked into the data infrastructure of higher education for decades." Quite so; how many studies have looked at what 'students' want or need? As opposed to 'everybody who learns'? So I agree with this article - the system of measurement should be changed.

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From Actionable Dashboards to Action Dashboards
David Wiley, iterating toward openness, 2020/08/04

This is David Wiley thinking aloud about dashboards. The core of his suggestion here is of an "action dashboard" which is "is a dashboard filled with specific actions a user might consider taking." It's not a bad idea to have links or buttons for specific actions on a dashboard (indeed, I wouldn't think of it as much of a dashboard without them). You should also have more open-ended controls (sliders, dials, etc.) to fine-tune specific parameters. But my main suggestion is to change perspective. Wiley describes a dashboard for faculty. I am much more interested in dashboards for learners. A  'personal learning environment' as contrasted with Wiley's 'personal teaching environment'.

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50 of the biggest social media questions answered
FutureLearn, 2020/08/04

This is a good frequently asked questions (FAQ) style article introducing social media to the uninitiated. There's nothing new here, but there's a lot of information in an accessible article and would be good as background material in an introductory digital literacies curriculum. Aside from the basic definitions, topics include online well-being, social media marketing, privacy and security, account management, and some projections for the future.

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Microsoft's announcement changes the future of learning - here's what you need to know
Toby Harris, Filtered, 2020/08/04

This article describes "the natural progression to provide an LMS structure that will underpin the informal learning already going on in Teams, supported by content from Microsoft Learn and LinkedIn Learning," while cautioning that the overall impact "won’t be enough to enable the aspects of an advanced learning culture that drive real capability change." Both parts of this are probably true, but where the biggest impact will be will be in corporate learning, as the plan is that Teams will replace the browser as the place where 'work gets done' and hence where learning is most effectively embedded. But let's not forget, Teams is built on Electron, which makes it a cross-platform HTML-CSS-Javascript running on Chromium. In the long run (in my view) it will integrate with the LMS the way a browser does, rather than attempt to replace it.

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