OLDaily

Presentation
What's Next For MOOCs
Stephen Downes, Dec 11, 2020, The Learning & Training Conference 2020, Online, via BeaconLive

This talk looks at the recent resurgence of MOOCs and describes this growth (despite claims that they are 'dead'), shows how they are providing access to micro-credentials and skills-based learning, and explains how they are and will be improving in terms of student engagement and completion, offering as a proposal the development of "micro-MOOCs" to provide greater access and flexibility for MOOC-based learning.

[Link] [Slides]

Presentation
A Personal Learning Platform
Stephen Downes, Dec 11, 2020, Lightning Talks, Online, via Jitsi

This is a short presentation for Creative Commons Lightning Talks giving an overview of the design philosophy behind my personal learning tool called gRSShopper (and therefore, my philosophy about how we should be thinking about the creation and use of OER in learning generally).

[Link] [Slides] [Audio]

Feature Article
A Personal Learning Platform
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, 2020/12/11

This is a short presentation for Creative Commons Lightning Talks giving an overview of the design philosophy behind my personal learning tool called gRSShopper (and therefore, my philosophy about how we should be thinking about the creation and use of OER in learning generally).

[Link] [Comment]

Networks and Biology: Wiring ourselves into a bad theory
Mark Johnson, Improvisation Blog, 2020/12/11

Readers know I've long advocated a network theory of learning, so it's natural that I would want to highlight here good arguments opposing that approach. I think this is one.  Mark Johnson writes, "If we designed our technology from the metaphor of the cell, rather than the metaphor of the network, we would have very different technology... This is the 'network' science we need. It is not a science of networks at all, but of dynamic processes of maintaining boundaries at all levels of organisation, from the brain and the liver through to consciousness, communication, technology and education." The problem with network theory, he explains, is that "instead of cooperating and organising themselves, the bruised egos of individual nodes compete against one another, each node seeing to be the loudest or the best, or 'clusters' of damaged souls reinforce pathological and explosive boundaries in politics." Image: Wikipedia.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Brutalist worksheets
Will Gourley, The Heart and Art of Teaching and Learning, 2020/12/11

Will Gourley borrows from the world of architecture to name a design trend in education: brutalism. Now this isn't a new trend, as evidenced by his references to worksheets created by the vertical foot on the photpocopier, but anyone taking courses online will immediately make the conceptual leap to digital technology, where brutalism in educational web architecture is the order of the day. "All that I ask," he wreites, "is that you resist the urge to hit the copy button without considering the content you intend to share with students. Will it make them feel insignificant and under-inspired? Then you might have a brutalist worksheet in your hands."

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Top 10 LXPs for 2020
Craig Weiss, 2020/12/11

The learning experience platform (LXP) is the answer to the question "what comes after the learning management system (LMS)?" They are (much) more predominate in corporate learning than in higher ed. In this post Craig Weiss summarizes his top 10 LXPs for the year. Top spot goes to EdCast - "By far the most feature-rich LXP on the market by a wide margin," according to Weiss.

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Virtual Research Environment 1.0 released
Open Preservation Foundation, 2020/12/11

The virtual research environment will be a gift to those researchers who spend more time configuring software than they do on actual research. "The VRE is a 'plug & play' virtual machine with a selection of open source digital preservation tools pre-installed... Apache Tika, Droid, JHOVE, VeraPDF, MediaInfo and ffmpeg/Handbrake." If those tools mean nothing to you, don't worry - the main point is that researchers can easily access esoteric tools like these. They are installed in a Vagrant environment, which is run on Oracle's Virtual Box - this is the set-up when I put gRSShopper into a box a couple of years ago. Here are the release notes - read these before downloading anything. Image: Research Data Netherlands (be sure to check this page as well).

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Scraped
Wendy M. Grossman, net.wars, 2020/12/11

This article concerns a court case between HiQ and LinkedIn that was heard in the U.S. last fall. Basically, HiQ was scraping LinkedIn's website, and based on its terms of use, LinkedIn wanted them to stop. As Wendy Grossman cynically says, "at its heart this case is about whether LinkedIn has an exclusive right to abuse its users' data or whether it has to share that right with any passing company with a scraping bot." The court sided with HiQ. But not so fast - there's another case being heard now in the supreme court, Van Buren v. United States, that questions whether the unauthorized use of a computer system (a) includes violating a terms of use agreement, and (b) constitutes criminal hacking. The right sort of ruling would not only bar HiQ from scraping LinkedIn, it would make it a crime! I can't really see it, but stranger things have come out of U.S. courts in the past.

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