OLDaily

Online learning and (k-12) schools: creating an appropriate culture of learning online
Tony Bates, Online learning and distance education resources, 2021/01/18

"I define culture as the dominant values and beliefs that influence decision-making," writes Tony Bates, and to be frank, this is where my thinking diverges from his in this article. Oh sure, culture might include values and beliefs, but it's much more likely to include songs and myths, customs and folkways, shared jokes, jargon, and perspectives on like. And sure, culture might influence decision-making, but decision-making is really such a small part of life, and even where we're making decisions, they are much less likely to be informed by reasons and rationality than people suppose. The difference between Bates' view of culture and mine, maybe, is the difference between the culture at Eton and at the neighbourhood pub (that's perhaps an unfair comparison, but is intended to be evocative). Thus where Bates encourages mutual respect, I encourage conviviality, where he talks of openness and respect of diversity, I seek its active embrace. Etc. What Bates describes, I think, is the pre-existing dominant culture, but it's one I find more oppressive than enlightening.

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The Crisis in Education: Hannah Arendt
Jenny Mackness, Jenny Connected, 2021/01/18

I haven't studied the work of Hannah Arendt though I'm certainly familiar with the name and with the concept of 'the banality of evil'. It's worth noting for both scholars and educators that ordinary people can become enraptured with dogma such as fascism; certainly there is no shortance of examples of this. So I'm not really in a position to comment on Jenny Machnesses reading of Arendt, except to note that it raises some issues worth considering. Mackness sumarizes: "Educators cannot be non-authoritarian. They must protect the life of the child and protect the humanly built world... Education should in some sense be conservative (in the sense of conservation); it should cherish and protect 'the child against the world, and the world against the child, the new against the old, and the old against the new.'" Be sure to read through the comments, where she offers a lengthy addendum on the subject of authority in Arendt. See also these videos from the Virtual Reading Group on Arendt's Between Past and Future.

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Long-term effectiveness of immersive VR simulations in undergraduate science learning: lessons from a media-comparison study
Prajakt Pandea, Amalie Thit, Anja Elaine Sørensen, Biljana Mojsoska, Morten E. Moeller, Per Meyer Jepsen, Research in Learning Technology, 2021/01/18

Does the use and playback of head-mounted immersive virtual reality (iVR) simulations in a science course have an impact on student learning? It seems to me it would, but what does the research say? This study (24 page PDF) compares test results for students actually using iVR as compared to those merely watching the video playback. Not surprisingly, the iVR students outperformed their counterparts. This correlates with previous research mentioned in the article where students using iVR outperformed those using identical desktop simulations and text-based instruction. The study also considers the impact of iVR over time, in order to get past the novelty effect. All of that said, because of the very low sample size (n=24) the best we can say that iVR can improve student learning, not that it does.

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Lessons learned from six years of learning analytics at The Open University
Bart Rienties, JISC, 2021/01/18

The very first sentence below the headline made my eyes roll and things didn't get much better through the duratcion of this "gosh, aren't we great!" article. The 'lessons' are (quoted): start small, use evidence-based research to help share the narrative, and celebrate your successes. I can say that they probably didn't need a six-year analytics prrogram to learn those lessons. The article is mostly a prop for a pseudo-award given to OU last September by dataIQ, "membership business focused on the needs of data and analytics professionals" (and not to be confused with Dell DataIQ). The award, of course, is marketing, but I'm linking here just in case you're interested.

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Why a multiscreen classroom is the next big thing
Bob Wudeck, eSchool News, 2021/01/18

In what must be the understatement of the year, Bob Wudeck writes, "moving a traditional classroom that’s built for face-to-face delivery to a hybrid-remote environment where instructors are teaching to both students in the classroom and online, often simultaneously, will take more than simply a laptop and a video conferencing application." The gist of the article is that much larger screens will be required, so that "each student appears large, almost in human size, on the projector screen." It should go without saying that this is a really bad idea; students online should not be required to compete with live attendees for attention and engagement. But there's a link to a (paywalled, naturally) research article so it must be OK, right? Um. Still no.

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