OLDaily

Presentation
Conversation with Ross Dawson
Stephen Downes, Aug 31, 2020, The Virtual Excellence Show, Online, via Zoom

Virtual education expert Stephen Downes, who helped create the world's first Massively Open Online Course (MOOC), shares insights into the state and future of virtual learning for schools, universities, and everyone.

[Link] [Video]

Presentation
Being There: What Presence Means in a Digital World
Stephen Downes, Aug 31, 2020, CIET: EnPED 2020, Brazil, via video recording

To the extent that learning is a social activity it depends on presence, that is, it depends on the interaction and sense of commonality we have with other people. But presence doesn't need to be direct and personal; it can be mediated through objects and technologies. An author can speak to us through a book, a friend can speak to us through a telephone, an actor can convey meaning through cinema. But with each medium, the character of presence changes, as some affordances are amplified and others diminished. Which leads us to the question: what is the character of presence in digital media?

[Link] [Slides] [Video]

Presentation
Personal Learning: Taking Ownership of Learning Online: Part One
Stephen Downes, Aug 31, 2020, Continuing Education, Online, via Zoom

This is the first part of a longer presentation on personal learning. This part is directly addressed to learners, and describes the need for, and how to create, your own personal learning environment, with a focus on interactivity and usability. The text transcript is available here.

[Link] [Slides] [Audio]

Open is not forever: a study of vanished open access journals
Mikael Laakso, Lisa Matthias, Najko Jahn, arXiv, 2020/08/31

There's a good lesson in this article (31 page PDF). The authors find that 192 open access journals disappeared between 2000 and 2019 (they would even know about them were it not for the work of Internet Archive and the Keepers, which preserved some but by no means all of the vanished journals). The missing journals are from all disciplines (with social sciences and humanities especially vulnerable) and from all geographic locations.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

An Ode To RSS, A Vessel Of Freedom In Elearning
Cristian T. Duque, LMS Pulse, 2020/08/31

I have to agree with this: "There is probably no technology more beaten down, more discarded by 'innovators,' and yet more irreplaceable and urgent today than RSS." What would I do without RSS? I can't imagine keeping up properly by following people on Facebook or Twitter - so much noise, so little content. "In a world of algorithms thirsty to co-opt not just your data, but your experiences, where the mischievous interests seeking to divide and taking us into eschewing the old for old’s same seem to have won, being a user of RSS feels like wearing a badge of honor... without an algorithm deciding what is good for me and what isn’t. Without foolish commenters letting me know how I should feel." Image: Alan Levine.

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Not ‘Glorified Skype’
Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed, 2020/08/31

“When you take the experience out and go to all-remote learning, effectively what you have is a streaming video service that costs $58,000 a year,” Scott Galloway, professor of marketing at New York University, recently told CNN. OK, this is obviously exaggerated - you're definitely getting more than streaming video in online learning. But $58,000 worth of more? Here are some responses from Bryan Alexander's Twitter feed, and of course the existing model is defended, but (I have to say) not very well.

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Learning Analytics beyond the LMS: Enabling Connected Learning via Open Source Analytics in ‘the wild’
Kirsty Kitto, et.al., Australian Government Department of Education, Skills and Employment, 2020/08/31

This excellent report (55 page PDF) will introduce you to the Connected Learning Analytics (CLA) toolkit. This toolkit extends learning analytics beyond the LMS, and specifically, to a set of six social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress, GitHub, Trello, Slack). It is based on Kitto's work from 2018 developing the Connected Learning (CL) Recipe, released as open source on GitHub. The data is saved in a learning record store (LRS) using xAPI. It is converted yet again using a GraphQL schema to a form of spreadsheet that can be ingested by OnTask, a tool that helps provide personalized and actionable feedback to students. The report is written really clearly and will be accessible to almost everyone. A fine piece of work.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]