OLDaily

Feature Article
Institutional Support for Personal Learning
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, 2020/12/14

This is an unedited automated transcription of a talk discussing institutional support for personal learning. It recaps some of the essential features of personal learning, describes the online host-provider framework, and then delves into a number of examples and models that illustrate the framework. It also digresses quite a bit.

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How to Create a Favicon That Changes Automatically
Carlo Martinucci, CSS-Tricks, 2020/12/14

This is a fun project you might try if you have time off in the next few weeks. The idea is to create a favicon that changes automatically. A favicon is the little image your website displays in the browser tab - mine is usually a sparrow head, but sometimes a gRSShopper logo. Changing the icon can be used to indicate unread content, or a number, or even the time. This article shows how to do it using plain Javascript and also using React. Fun!

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Some items from Andreessen Horowitz’s “Social strikes back” series
Daniel S. Christian, Learning Ecosystems, 2020/12/14

This post summarizes some of the contents of the current a16z newsletter from Andreessen Horowitz. My first reaction is to gush over how much I like the design of the newsletter. It's not something that would work everywhere, or even anywhere, else, but it sure works here. As for the content, the question is whether they make the case that "social" is not done, that it is moving beyond "the holy trinity" of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. And the answer is... maybe? "Not only are we seeing the rise of innovative new social networks... but having a social component has become a powerful acquisition and retention tool for every consumer product, across education, shopping, fitness, food, entertainment, and more." But is this monetized and marketed social what we want, or simply what we're getting?

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5 Things We've Learned About Virtual School During the Pandemic
Anya Kamenetz, KQED, 2020/12/14

Here's another list of lessons learned from the pandemic. I don't really think much of list - but everything I know on this subject is derived from what other people have written about it, so I'll add it to the list. The first item on the list is that "the digital divide is still big and complex". Well, yeah. But it's not just a digital divide, it's a socio-economic divide. The problem isn't technology, the problem is a lack of fair income distribution. The next is that "relationships are everything when it comes to keeping kids engaged remotely," which is by and large not true, otherwise we can't explain things like online games or TikTok. Another point talks about teachers "yelling through a mask and face shield to be heard by students over Zoom," which tells us nothing about virtual school, but everything about incompetent administration.

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Interdisciplinarity and Teamwork in Virtual Reality Design
Ole Molvig, Bobby Bodenheimer, The Journal of Interactive Technology & Pedagogy, 2020/12/14

I think overall that this is a good article, but not without flaws. One flaw is the use of Internet Archive to serve embedded examples, all of which timed out when I was trying to view them. This I think is a but of a misuse of Internet Archive. Second, the authors write, "Which fields is VR best suited for? Up to that point, it was reasonably common in computer science and psychology, and relatively rare elsewhere." That seems surprising to me. I've seen VR used widely in medical education, machine operations (like, say, helicopters), and military, as well as wide use in computer games. That said, I agree with the authors that "it is difficult to create even moderately rich and sophisticated environments, without the development expertise gleaned through exposure to the computer science curriculum," which suggests a need for the model described in the title. Image: Luca Mollica.

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Designing Branch: Sustainable Interaction Design Principles
Tom Jarrett, Branch, 2020/12/14

Branch is a magazine that focuses on environmentally responsible technology. This article, recommended by Adrian Cochrane on Mastodon, describes its approach to scaling back demand on the power grid when demand for an article increases. "We need to cut the noise and provide users with a calmer and more considered experience that allows them to choose what they look at rather than an algorithm deciding and auto-loading what might keep a user’s attention the longest.

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