OLDaily

Mapping the scattered field of research on higher education. A correlated topic model of 17,000 articles, 1991–2018
Stijn Daenekindt, Jeroen Huisman, Higher Education, 2020/08/19

This is a really interesting article (17 page PDF) that consists of an automated analysis of some 17,000 research papers in higher education. The researchers identify 31 topics across these publications, and examine how they cluster with each other and wax or wane over time. "We find that scholarly attention to themes varies over time," write the authors, "the field of research on higher education is characterized by constantly occurring struggles over attention between different topics/themes." Meanwhile, "clustering is stable over time... the lack of change in the clustering of topics over time suggests that higher education researchers are ‘stuck on their island’." All of that sounds about right.

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What makes a good instructional video?
Brad Nguyen, Teach. Think. Blog., 2020/08/19

I'm not a fan of direct instruction, but I am a fan of this article. Brad Nguyen offers very straightforward and practical advice on what to do with online videos and conferencing, and what not to do (noteworthy: using pause points for guided practice, the difficulty of monitoring student work via video). This article is pretty basic, but there are also links to how to make instructional videos and more design principles. Via Mike Taylor.

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A Few Thinks L&D Should Steal From Marketing
Mike Taylor, Bublup, 2020/08/19

This is a bublup from Mike Taylor offering a quick set of resources on the topic in the title. The five things he identifies are (1) lizard brain, (2) attention, (3) first impressions, (4) power of stories, and (5) stories. Now these are all good things to identify. But it is particularly relevant here to remember that the purpose of marketing is to persuade, not (necessarily) to inform. So if there are lessons for education to be drawn for marketing, there are equally lessons to be drawn from unmarketing.

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Curiosity – My 1st 100 Days – Day 1
Julian Stodd, Julian Stodd's Learning Blog, 2020/08/19

Julian Stodd is starting a proiject called 'Curiosity – My 1st 100 Days'. He writes, "i am #WorkingOutLoud sharing part of a book that i am working on. I have no publication date yet, nor full commitment to publish it, but i am enjoying playing with it! It takes the same approach as my previous book ‘Social Leadership: My 1st 100 Days’, in being structured around 100 days of activity."

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The First Wave of GPT-3 Enabled Applications Offer a Preview of Our AI Future
Vivian Hu, InfoQ, 2020/08/19

It's hard to resist passing along GPT-3 stories. They have "stunned the 'developer twitter'." There's the one where a student created an absolutely fake blog that ran for two weeks. "He retired the project with one final, cryptic, self-written message. Titled 'What I would do with GPT-3 if I had no ethics,' it described his process as a hypothetical. The same day, he also posted a more straightforward confession on his real blog." Then there's the person who fed the "first 6 Fallacies of distributed computing to Shortly app which uses GPT3 to generate short stories from given prompts. It performed mind bogglingly good and generated additional 70 fallacies. Then there's FitnessAI Knowledge, which uses GPT-3 to answer fitness-related questions. Example: "Q: Is lifting my cat a good way to exercise? A: Lifting your cat is a great way to exercise. It's also a great way to get bitten."

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