OLDaily

16 predictions for higher-ed edtech in 2021
Laura Ascione, eCampus News, 2021/01/04

Last year's predictions by everybody everywhere were wrong (heh). This year, 16 pundits offer 16 one-paragraph predictions. Most of the predictions were vacuous ("students will... face unique challenges", "the most successful tools in 2021... will be the ones that deliver real outcomes", "higher level of accountability and transparency", "putting education first", "a more effective, robust online learning experience", "increase in collaboration", "educators... will adapt new tools and technologies"). Many pundits predicted things that are already happening (chatbots, microcredentials, "institutions will seek digital solutions for student services", "remote student recruitment", hybrid learning models ). Others ranged from the self-serving ("integration of payments into their platforms") to the low-hanging fruit ("smaller, high value projects"). Some predictions ("increasing demand for workshops and seminars", "short to midterm financial instability") were worth noting.

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The Zoom Gaze
Autumm Caines, Real Life, 2021/01/04

Autumm Caines considers the question of 'Zoom fatigue' and traces it to the unrelenting stare of the camera using the analogy of the 'Zoom gaze', a concept that incorporates the idea of being treated as an object, subject to inspection, and required to consider (and adjust) the details of your appearance, behaviour and environment to meet the expectations of others. She borrows from the concepts of Laura Mulvey's “male gaze” and Toni Morrison's “white gaze” to arrive at this metaphor. As she runs through a long list of things Zoom users must take into account while online, two things struck me: first, that no shorter a list of things must be taken into account in personal face-to-face interactions (perhaps even more!), and second, that her list made me think of all the things that I (and probably other introverts) constantly review and think about in any face-to-face encounter (which is why face-to-face leaves us exhausted). So I suggest that maybe Caines isn't describing properties of Zoom videoconferencing, but rather, the properties of (some) Zoom users, and specifically, (what I'll call) 'Zoom introverts'.

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3 Grading Practices to Give up in the New Year
Janet Taylor, The Art of Education, 2021/01/04

The three practices are: assigning homework, deducting points for late assignments, and giving grades. I suppose it goes without saying that most schools and institutions would object if you did this. But Janet Taylor's argument generally boils down to the assertion that these would lead to students managing their own learning process. But, she says,"If you must assign a letter or percentage grade, save it for your summative assessment. Students can safely practice formative skills and then apply those skills." I don't think I disagree with any of this, but the hard part is getting from here to there.

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Semantic Interoperability and the Future of AI
2021/01/04

This is super-interesting but also super-difficult, especially when compressed into four longish paragraphs as in this post. But here's the gist: "symbolic AI codes human knowledge in the form of networks of relationships between concepts accompanied by rules (models, ontologies)," while by contrast a neural network "induces algorithms to recognize visual, linguistic or other forms from large masses of data." In 2021 these are beginning to merge, but there is no consistency on the symbolic side; "there is currently no way to code linguistic meaning in a uniform and computable way." So Pierre Levy proposes Information Economy MetaLanguage (IEML) "to translate any ontology and to connect all categories" into expressions called USLs (Uniform Semantic Locators). What that means in practice is introduced in this post as the Intlekt Editor for creating these expressions in IEML.

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My Online Education World, 1980-2020
Morten Flate Paulsen, 2021/01/04

Other people have written year-by-year histories of online and distance education, but this is written by someone who was there from the beginning and actually did the hands-on work. I first encountered Morten Flate Paulsen in the 90s on the DEOS mailing list where, working with people like Michael G. Moore and Peter Cookson, he was already sharing his fifteen years' experience. Although only complete to 1991 (with more promised in the new year) what I really like about this presentation is that, while this is a personal reflection, it's not self-promotion. It really feels like the focus is on other people, as Paulsen works with, connects with, and celebrates the many people who created the foundations of our field.

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