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Presentation
Open Learning, Open Networks - Online Learning in 2020
Stephen Downes, Nov 02, 2020, https://numerique2020.teluq.ca/en/program/guest-speaker2/, Online, to Teluq, via Zoom

In this talk Stephen Downes outlines his experience working on projects using on new approaches and new technologies that will help governments and institutions build an open learning infrastructure: distributed social networks, cloud infrastructures and virtualization, immersive reality, and personal learning environments. He will describe steps that can be taken now to create accessible and engaging open online learning and outline some of the new tools that will be available to educators and developers in the coming years.

[Slides] [Audio]

Feature Article
Open Learning, Open Networks - Online Learning in 2020
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, 2020/11/03

In this talk Stephen Downes outlines his experience working on projects using on new approaches and new technologies that will help governments and institutions build an open learning infrastructure: distributed social networks, cloud infrastructures and virtualization, immersive reality, and personal learning environments. He will describe steps that can be taken now to create accessible and engaging open online learning and outline some of the new tools that will be available to educators and developers in the coming years. For transcript, audio and video please see https://www.downes.ca/presentation/533

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Yours Metaphorically, the VLE…
Digital Learning Dispatches, 2020/11/03

My great contribution to the world of VLE/LMS metaphors is that one time in 2015 I quipped that the LMS is a bus. Ah well. At least I didn't make such a blatantly wrong prediction as "The VLE is dead." At least, I don't think I did. Though I could be forgiven for identifying how it has morphed over time from 'course tools' to 'learning experience platform'. Anyhow, this article draws from a paper in JIME surveying the various metaphors that have been used over the years. Anyhow, this is a fun romp through the literature on LMS metaphors, not too deep, concluding that "At this point in time, if we were to use a metaphor to characterise the VLE, it would be a limpet," that is, "a marine mollusk with a shallow conical shell and a broad muscular foot, found clinging tightly to rocks."

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Educause Identifies Top IT Issues for an Uncertain Future
Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology, Campus Technology, 2020/11/03

This article summarizes (from a conference presentation) an Educause report released yesterday on the Educause website. Because of the uncertainty around so many things, they actually created three scenarios for different schools in different situations and identified different sets of issues for each scenario. The three scenarios are 'restore', 'evolve' and 'transform'. The report notes that 'restore' and 'evolve' overlap quite a bit - the difference is that 'evolve' ranks student success as more important, while 'restore' ranks (probably out of necessity) financial health as more important. Meanwhile, in the 'transform' scenario, institutional culture takes top priority, with issues of alignment following. And of course, cost management sneaks into this scenario as well (and I expect financial exigency will be the major issue no matter what for educational issues in the years following the pandemic).

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Skills aren’t soft or hard — they’re durable or perishable
Matthew J. Daniel, Chief Learning Officer, 2020/11/03

This article offers an alternative to the classification of skills as 'soft skills' and 'hard skills'. It's an especially attractive alternative to 'hard skills' thought of as content knowledge and the place where we ought to put most of our efforts. Matthew Daniel uses the tree as a metaphor to introduce is to 'durable' (formerly 'soft') skills and perishable (formerly 'hard') skills. "If we only train team members for perishable skills such as how to use the latest version of a platform or how to navigate our newest process," says Daniel, " we’re ultimately limiting how effectively our talent can move between roles and job families... The heavy focus on short-term ROI and the delivery of narrow skill sets oft-evangelized in L&D circles may well be the very source of the “skills shortage” industries face today.\"

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The Evolution of the OPM: It’s Time for a Change
Kat Merritt, Blackboard Blog, 2020/11/03

When Blackboard says it's time for a change, something is up. And what's up is the Online Program Management (OPM) company. These were companies that took over the burden of managing online programs for colleges and universities in exchange for a percentage of the tuition. This worked well when it appeared colleges and universities would never go online. But then came the pandemic and suddenly OPM contracts were toxic assets. But it's a brew that has been stewing for some time. " The revenue-share model came before more than 16% of all postsecondary students were enrolled exclusively in online programs. It came before 85% of students were considered non-traditional. In the last five years alone, an additional 1.5 million students have chosen to study exclusively online." And that was before the pandemic. Now of course this is a marketing blog, so we have Blackboard saying they have the answer. But institutions should think carefully before signing contracts contracting out their core business.

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Sync
UBC Launchpad, 2020/11/03

I haven't actually tried this, but the description in ProductHunt was compelling, and I can think of numerous educational activities. Basically, the idea is that a group of people get together to watch a YouTube stream (ideally, a live stream, but it could be an Office rerun). In the sidebar is a video chat, so people can see each other reacting in real time to what they're all watching. What I really like is that it was put together by a bunch of students at UBC. Now if it were MIT or Stanford, there's be an institutional press release, a commercialization plan, and a declaration that they invented video chat. Instead, here the focus is on the activity and the sharing. And it's the sort of thing that could be a lot of fun, especially if you can save and share the chats. As of right now, Sync is 100% free (no ads) and open source.

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Dealing with Psychopaths and Narcissists during Agile Change
Erich Bühler, InfoQ, 2020/11/03

I am not a psychologist and so I'm not in a position to recommend this article as advice. But I found it compelling reading, having encountered my own share of bad actors over the years, which means you get to read about it in this newsletter. :) And right now, especially with everything changing around us, this sort of discussion is essential to have. What if the problems you face aren't processes or technology, but people? This article is framed around the Agile software development methodology and directed toward consultants, but it feels to me like the discussion could be applied to most management and decision-making processes generally, and of course, to the workplace of every teacher, online or off.

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AI pioneer Geoff Hinton: “Deep learning is going to be able to do everything”
Karen Hao, MIT Technology Review, 2020/11/03

I quoted this article in my talk today, well at least, I quoted the headline. And I asked the question: what are we humans going to do? And when you think of it, if AI does everything, then we will have just one job: to train AI. We will all need to become teachers, modeling and demonstrating best practices, ethical behaviour, reasoned judgement, and the like. We've already seen what happens when we use our own bad behaviour to train AI. So we're going to have to get our act together.

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Play “What’s The Rule?” to Develop Computational Thinking
W. Ian O'Byrne, 2020/11/03

This is a neat idea and I wish Ian O'Byrne had added more examples to his short article or perhaps done a search to find examples where the same thing is applied elsewhere (it matches the oft-cited example from Sesame Street, "which of these things does not belong?", though I confess, other examples are hard to find). The idea is to present children with a scenario (or adults, with more complex scenarios) and to ask them, "what's the rule?" I would also ask, "what's the pattern" or as in the Sesame Street case, "what's the classification scheme?" The idea is to get people to derive their own rules (patterns, classifications, etc) as practice for new environments when pre-existing rules (etc) might not have been previously defined. And I would extend this along the line of my own critical literacies principles, asking (for example) "what is being valued here?" or "what inference is the person making?" or "how would we describe the logic of change being applied here?" Because, you know, in all reasoning, recognition precedes critique.

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