OLDaily

Recordings of Contact North/ATD’s Learning and Technology Conference now available
Tony Bates, Online learning and distance education resources, 2020/12/31

Tony Bates notes that "Contact North and the Association for Talent and Development have now made available video recordings of all the presentations at their virtual conference on December 8-9" and offers short summaries of "some jewels amongst them." Among those is a summary of my own talk, but I don't know what he thought because he says only that " this was not what I was expecting from Stephen." I'll take that as success! He also highlight's Phil Hill's talk (Hill is always excellent), Preeti Raman on blended learning, and Hewitt and Brett on skills, microlearning and emerging technologies. This article lists the entire set of downloads (scroll to the bottom); they're only available until March 19, 2021 but you can use the Video DownloadHelper Firefox plugin to download and save the webm recordings for later viewing.

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The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions: On Technology, Games-Based Learning, and Erasure
Joshua Jackson, Hybrid Pedagogy, 2020/12/31

The key argument in this post can be found somewhere near the middle: "The uncritical buy-in from administration to the idea of technology and games as a cure-all for all things that need to be cured distracts from questions of basic economic, social, and emotional inequity that plague public education." Well, I agree, which is why I take pains to argue for greater social equity (real reforms that improve public services and address income inequality, among other things) alongside educational technology. But attacking the "uncritical buy-in from administration" is to pick an easy target. There are many more subtle, critical and effective arguments for educational technology, arguments that take into account providing support to under-served populations. And honestly, I don't know why critics such as the author defend the old way of doing things when the old way is so demonstrably ineffective, as evidenced by the very poverty the author rails against.

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Go Language at 13 Years: Ecosystem, Evolution, and Future in Conversation with Steve Francia
Olimpiu Pop, Steve Francia, InfoQ, 2020/12/31

The Go programming language was developed by Google to handle back-end service mesh types of tasks, with the result that you probably won't recognize any of the list of the most popular applications written in it (except maybe Docker; other applications include Kubernetes (container management), Prometheus (monitoring system), Hugo, (a static site generator), Syncthing, (think Dropbox/ Google drive, but without the server), and InfluxDB (a time-series database). No matter. It has been a popular alternative to other languages like Ruby and Python, and as the article notes, is making inroads into the enterprise computing space dominated by Java. I haven't learned Go, but I'm considering using it for some back-end tasks.

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John Rawls: can liberalism's great philosopher come to the west's rescue again?
Julian Coman, The Guardian, 2020/12/31

Fifty years ago John Rawls published A Theory of Justice in which he asks, what sort of society would we all create if we had to agree on a social contract without knowing where in society we would end up; we could be very rich, or we could be among the most poor. The result was a definition of justice as fairness, which would allow each person to continue in, or improve, their position. This Guardian article is a retrospective and reassessment of the theory in 2021. There's no shortage of criticisms of the theory, most notably, the suggestion that Rawls assumes the sort of social justice he is trying to deduce. (Note: the Guardian has a spamwall asking you to register before reading the article; I did not register, I use a Firefox extension called Tranquility Reader that gives me a clutter-free reading experience; it doesn't always work on spamwalls, but it often works).

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Analysis: 2005-2011 Predictions for Digital Life 2020
Emily Vogels, Lee Rainie, Janna Quitney Anderson, Elon University, 2020/12/31

"How did experts expect 2020 to look when they were asked 10-15 years ago?" That's the question asked in this report (42 page PDF), and it focuses in on eight specific sets of predictions. I am one of them; scroll down, all the way to the bottom of the report and you'll find my discussion in section eight. In retrospect, my prediction in a Pew report (that we would begin to see the trend toward a more decentralized and do-it-yourself world) fared pretty well.

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Facebook’s Unknowable Megascale
John Gruber, Daring Fireball, 2020/12/31

John Gruber comments on a recent article in The Atlantic, Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine, with which he largely agrees. What makes Facebook worse than other social networks (like say 8kun) is inherent in its design. "Facebook’s addictiveness and toxicity are directly correlated," he writes, "This isn’t conjecture or speculation, we have proof." More, its addictiveness is based on an algorithm that tailors content to each one of its billion users. "This is the problem we, collectively, have not grasped. How do we regulate - via the law and/or social norms - a form of mass media with amorphous content?" Image: OneZero, The Modern World Has Finally Become Too Complex for Any of Us to Understand.

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CC Lightning Talks
Cable Green, YouTube, 2020/12/31

The 24 videos from last month's Creative Commons lightning talks are now available - each one is only 10 minutes long, which means you have 4 hours of high-quality viewing available. My contribution is located here.

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