OLDaily

Online Mingling: Supporting Ad Hoc, Private Conversations at Virtual Conferences
Jaeyoon Song, Christoph Riedl, Thomas W. Malone, SSRN, 2020/08/10

Minglr is "an experimental software system developed to explore ways of supporting ad hoc, private videoconferences." The authors "We expect it to be useful for virtual conferences and many other kinds of online events, both business and social." The idea is that people log in during a conference, see a list of people who want to talk, or add themselves to the list. They can also select someone from the list and request a talk, and if accepted, they're placed in a private room. It's open source (MIT license) and available on GitHub. It's built on top of Jitsi (an open source video-conferencing environment) and written in Javascript. "We see potential uses in virtual classes, parties, and other kinds of social engagements."

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Teaching During a Pandemic
Greg Restall, Consequently, 2020/08/10

"The web of informal connections that’s sustained on campus, with students bumping into each other, of chance encounters in the library, or waiting in line for a coffee, or of just hanging out with other students, all these things are gone in the move to working online." So writes Greg Restall, who is teaching in Melbourne. This post describes what he has done to make up for this. "I’ll stay around online in the Zoom session for 15 to 30 minutes after class," he says. "I decided to do more help provide other means of connection," he adds, offering short informal one-on-one consulting with students. All very good, but these two things are not the same. "Students bumping into each other" is not the same as "extra sessions with the professor." Image: Lynda.

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Results from Top Hat’s COVID-19 Faculty Survey About Online Teaching
Kevin Kelly, PhilOnEdTech, 2020/08/10

The survey of university professors preparing to teach in the fall looks at preparations for online learning and their confidence about their institutions' plans. They've been taking training in how to teach online, though prioritizing how how to do it rather than equity issues (which actually makes sense to me). It's not clear how the respondents were chosen but it's doubtful the survey captured sessional, adjunct and other contingent faculty (now holding 70% of the positions) which probably explains why "those with the most higher ed teaching experience are over-represented." Actual training and levels of confidence are probably much lower than reported here, were we to include a fully representative sample.

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Sharing Indigenous Cultural Heritage Online: An Overview of GLAM Policies
Brigitte Vézina, Alexis Muscat, Creative Commons, 2020/08/10

One of the complexities of content licensing and reusable media is the status of culturally significant and indigenous works. As this article states, "Existing copyright law, steeped in Western concepts and values, does not adequately protect Indigenous traditional cultural expressions, nor does it sufficiently reflect or account for Indigenous cultural values." It's easy to be of two minds on the subject (especially for me, sitting comfortably as I do within the western culture and traditions). But as a way of getting at the thinking about this, consider the case of the stolen ceremonial shields from the Pueblo of Acoma. "They were considered living beings rather than works of art. Cultural patrimony, unlike possessions, is an aspect of a tribe’s identity as a people." The Pueblo were able to prevent the movement of one of the shields by having an arrest warrant issued, freezing it in place (for now) in a Paris auction house, but the traffic in artifacts continues, and questions persist about what things count as cultural expressions and who has the right to manage them.

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Service interface
Matthias Melcher, x28's New Blog, 2020/08/10

Commenting on my recent presentation, Matthias Melcher draws out the problem he finds with the current trend in personal productivity tools: "There is a service interface. There is a system that interacts with you, not a helping tool that you can wield like a hammer. It feels both pampering and patronizing, and more ‘push’ than ‘pull’." This describes personalization. By contrast, the alternative I propose, personal learning, might be seen as less attractive because the system does less for you. "Maybe 'Taking Ownership of Their Learning' (as in the presentation title) is unattractive when someone already feels 'owning' it because it was paid for?"

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