OLDaily

Zoom’s earliest investors are betting millions on a better Zoom for schools
Natasha Mascarenhas, TechCrunch, 2020/09/30

More coverage of ClassEDU for Zoom (previously), the startup created by Blackboard founder Michael Chasen. It's very flattering coverage without  hint of criticism; even the darker sides are presented with a wink and a smile: "Less popular, Chasen jokes, is Class for Zoom’s ability to give teachers intel on if a student has Zoom as the primary app in use on their screen."

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A Surge in Online Learning Is Helping Revive Indigenous Languages
Lindsay VanSomeren, OneZero, 2020/09/30

One of the advantages of online learning is that, if applied equitably, it allows more marginalized voices to be heard, and in this case, heard in their own language. It's hard to over-emphasize the importance of that, as each language is a unique world view, and an important part of the diversity of perspectives we need to most fully understand the world. This article describes how indigenous people who are living elsewhere can still access learning resources that were more traditionally offered only in their own First Nation territory. But the key issue of broadband access must still be addressed. And it needs to be understood that online learning is only one of a range of supports that should be directed to address indigenous learning.

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Innovators Seek Zoom University 2.0
Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed, 2020/09/30

The venture capitalists have stepped into the emergency online learning picture and backed the most regressive possible expansion of Zoom. "ClassEDU announced last week that it has raised $16 million in seed funding to develop Class for Zoom -- a Zoom add-on that will give educators new features such as the ability to take class attendance, get data insights into student participation and issue interactive quizzes during class. Instructors will even be able to monitor the tabs that students open while in exam mode, making the software a potentially powerful proctoring tool. They can also control whether or not students can see each other and have the option to record lectures without showing any student faces. " Oh! My heart.

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To tell the truth sometimes it pays to lie
John F. Hulpke, Journal of Applied Learning & Teaching, 2020/09/30

This article (11 page PDF) is clever in many ways - sometimes too clever. You get your first hint of this when the author reminds to that the phrase 'to tell the truth' means (idiomatically) something like 'actually'. And though we are often told that all societies value honesty as an ethical virtue, the many ways we categorize lies says something else - why else would we have expressions like "white lies", “terminological inexactitude” and “economical with the truth”? Why is it OK to be "a little bit loose when talking abut weight"? According to the author, it is important to teach students about lying, and especially, to teach them when it is ethical (if ever), and how to decide. There are some great examples near the end of the article that will challenge readers who view the issue of lying as unequivocal. Image: India Times, Think you are good at lying? You could be a psychopath.

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Open Educational Resources and Practices in China: A Systematic Literature Review
Ahmed Tlili, Ronghuai Huang, Ting-Wen Chang, Fabio Nascimbeni, Daniel Burgos, Sustainability, 2020/09/30

This article is based on a formal literature review and so may be missing some useful primary sources, but any information we can get on OER in China is worth a look. "The findings show that several governmental, organizational, and institutional initiatives have been launched to facilitate OER adoption in China," including the Chinese Quality Course (CQC), the  the National Cultural Information Resources Sharing Project (NCIRSP), and the the Science Data Sharing Project (SDSP). Institutions such as the China Central Radio and Television University (CRTVU) and the Open University of Hong Kong (OUHK) have actively participated in OER. There have in addition been MOOCs platforms such as Xuetang online and CNMOOC. As well, while there has been work on open educational practices (OEP) in China, the authors did not find any systematic review of them. From a special issue of Sustainability on the future of open education.

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Invention Opportunity: Creating a Shared Reality
Tom Vander Ark, Getting Smart, 2020/09/30

I think Tom Vander Ark touches the mark in the identification of a problem but completely misses it in his analysis. The problem, he says, is "information gullies that have widened into canyons of difference with competing facts interpreted through tribal logic models and resulting in distinctly different realities." There's a point here. But he says "the fundamental problem is one of communication," and what we need is a "shared consensus view of reality, and to acknowledge basic facts," specifically, shared facts, shared values, and shared models. Not. Going. To Happen. The stakes are too high. The fundamental problem isn't communication, it's trust, and specifically, the lack of it. If we are to work together to form a society (and really, we should) then we need to secure our foundations with trust-free mechanisms to establish such basic elements as who said what, who owns what, and what happened.

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