OLDaily

Research Review Summer 2020
Rob Farrow, Global OER Graduate Network, 2020/09/04

This (38 page PDF) is a collection of almost two dozen reviews authored mostly by PhD candidates and post-Docs of recent academic publications in the field of open and distance learning. The reviews aren't long, ranging between one and two pages, and therefore can't address the papers in depth, but they do offer useful summaries and even from time to time some necessary criticism (my favourite: the review by Paco Iniesto wondering why Open Learning: The Journal of Open and Distance Learning​ is not an open journal, given its name). It's a good idea and I'm hoping the review series lasts longer than its seed funding from the Hewlett Foundation - this is, after all, something universities should be doing as part of their core mandates.

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How OCAD’s Dori Tunstall is rewriting the rules of design education
Doreen Lorenzo, Fast Company, 2020/09/04

This is an interview with Dori Tunstall, dean of the faculty of design at Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCAD University) in Toronto. It's a good look at some modern learning practices ("to bring serendipitous interaction and learning into these digital platforms, with the understanding that our students will be logging in from different places, speak different languages, and have different cognitive abilities") and the importance of addressing historic injustices in design ("let’s say you want to experience diverse designers. You don’t find them in our textbooks. You don’t find them in the official histories"). Tunstall addresses directly the need for decolonization in design, and I really like her overview of "respectful design" summarized in the last paragraph.

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Digital Transformation: It’s Time
Diana Oblinger, EDUCAUSE Review, 2020/09/04

Digital Transformation, says Diana Oblinger, "is not defined by the technology alone but, instead, places more emphasis on the impact of technology on education." It's an institutional response to increasingly urgent financial pressures, the change in the college experience created by the need for remote learning, and the ongoing uncertainty we all face today. It considers three questions: what can we stop doing? How can we reach people where they are? And how can we become more resilient? These are good questions. Oblinger's answers (she discusses each in detail) are almost all management and process-oriented, with automation playing a major role. What I wish she would address more is how all of this impacts the individuals involved, many of whom will lose positions or see their roles reduced. It's funny how the need to sustain the institution becomes a lot less pressing for those soon to be no longer affiliated with it. Via Helge Scherlund.

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3 advantages of consent-based decision making
Doug Belshaw, Open Thinkering, 2020/09/04

In the past I've defined community as consensus; would be be as good to define community as consent. I'm not sure. The difference between consensus and consent, according to this article, is that in the former, everyone agrees, and in the latter, nobody disagrees. This, writes Doug Belshaw, allows for a ‘range of tolerance’, which is "the difference between someone having a personal preference versus them objecting to something." Maybe, but the challenge with consent is voice - when you explicitly ask everyone "do you agree?" then everyone has a voice. But when silence is consent, it creates an incentive for the powerful to encourage silence. People have to be fully informed, and there has to be a powerful and safe way to express dissent, otherwise the principle of consent does not work. Image: Network Weaver.

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'We're Living The News': Student Journalists Are Owning The College Reopening Story
Elissa Nadworny, Lauren Migaki, NPR, 2020/09/04

As is so often the case, student journalists are showing how the story should be covered. "Their editorials haven't held back. One headline from students at the University of Kansas read, KU must reverse course now on campus reopening; another, from the student-run newspaper at the University of Notre Dame, declared, Don't make us write obituaries." So much better than the sanitized language of 'toggle terms' that more professional pundits have been using. This is an NPR story, so there's audio as well as text.

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Challenges and contexts in establishing adaptive learning in higher education: findings from a Delphi study
Victoria Mirata, Franziska Hirt, Per Bergamin, Christo van der Westhuizen, International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 2020/09/04

This study (25 page PDF) uses "a four-stage Delphi design to empirically identify, categorise, and prioritise the challenges of adaptive learning raised and rated by experts from two universities with different organisational and socioeconomic contexts." I would argue that if your data consists of 'expert opinions' then your study isn't 'empirical', no matter what method is used. That said, these issues are still worth considering. It's a pretty comprehensive list, and the authors organize it into three dimensions: technology, teaching and learning, and organisation. "The interesting finding," write the authors, "was that most of the similarities between the universities were found at the organisational level. In particular, the common challenges related to institutional commitment and required resources were highly ranked by both panels."

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The Internet as we know it
Wendy M. Grossman, net.wars, 2020/09/04

If you can get past the user-hostile colour scheme (pro tip: use Firefox's Reader View to make it readable) this is a fairly intelligent view of the challenges facing the internet 'as we know it'. The danger isn't so much splintering so much as it is centralization and control. This is something that started with the mobile internet, which has largely been tightly controlled, and extends to proposals for a new internet protocol (IP) policy that would "shift control of the internet, both its development and its operation, to countries and the centralized telecommunications powers." Wendy Grossman writes, "This is a crucial threat to the interoperable bedrock of 'the network of all networks'. As the Internet Society explains, it is that cooperative architecture 'with no central authority' that made the Internet so successful. This is the first principle that built the Internet as we know it."

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Robot Teachers, Racist Algorithms, and Disaster Pedagogy
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, 2020/09/04

This is Audrey Watters speaking to a class of students about the ed tech industry and especially about the use of algorithms to surveil and to predict outcomes. She covers some of the more recent events, including Ofqual's ill-conceived notion that student grades should be adjusted based on the history of the school they attend. But it makes me think - isn't this what we do anyways? The algorithms magnify and weaponize the bias, but the bias is there nonetheless. Even without AI, elite institutions somehow manage to admit more students from private upper-class schools, no matter what their grades. Even without AI, exam proctors are going to regard the darker skinned students with more suspicion. We need to look at AI in a way Watters doesn't usually, unfortunately, and that is, as a way to expose and redress bias and prejudice, as opposed to merely magnifying it. Because just going back to the way things were is just not an option for so many people.

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Reciprocity of Openness
Maha Bali, Reflecting Allowed, 2020/09/04

Maha Bali describes at length some of the benefits of sharing she experienced firsthand while creating a set of resources on community-building online, including a playlist of all the videos. "More than any personal benefit that came to me from enjoying time spent with friends, to learning new ideas for my courses, to saving time explaining stuff because it’s all online…. what makes me truly happy is to see people benefiting from these activities and hear their feedback on how useful they are to them," she writes. I agree - doing something that matters to other people is one of the best experiences there is.

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Information
Pieter Adriaans, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2020/09/04

This is a substantial revision of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on 'information' and useful as a reference to what is a central concept in information technology and online learning. The important distinction made in this article is between 'qualitative' (or 'semantic') theories of information, and 'quantitative' theories. The latter are concepts used in fields like data transmission (where 'information' would be what is encoded in the data stream). The former are more commonly associated with knowledge and belief (and therefore learning). More. My own use of the term is generally semantic, and subjectively oriented, where (with Dretske, 1981) the quantity of information in a transmission is the reduction of uncertainty produced in the receiver by the transmission.

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Parsiq
Parsiq, 2020/09/04

This product describes itself as 'the Zapier of blockchain'. The idea is that users can connect blockchain data to events and services, so that if something happens in a blockchain, something else can be triggered, like (say) a telegram message, or Slack notification. The key here is that they don't have to write any code; they simply select options in the application and they're done. It will be more interesting when the service works the other way, so that actions from external services can be easily recorded on a blockchain. This, though, would be more involved, because the blockchain isn't free to use. This service won't be either. But it's still worth taking note.

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