OLDaily

Introduction to OBS
Stephen Downes, YouTube, 2021/02/08

I am critical enough of other people that it seems only fair that I should hold myself to account when I hand in a turkey. Well, I have two for you. A couple of weeks ago I did a video introducing viewers to Open Broadcasting Systems, and while it was a little rough around the edges, it went fairly well. The same cannot be said of the video I did last week, Introduction to Audacity, nor the one I did today, Introduction to Mailing Lists. In both cases, I had technical problems, commands I thought would work didn't work, I couldn't remember how to do things (like, say, create a new 'audience' in MailChimp (turns out you have to list 'all audiences', and only then do you see the button)). Now I like to have some realism in my presentations, so people can see how even experts sometimes struggle with the tech - that's why I created a 'Stephen Follows Instructions' video series. But this is failure beyond that. So anyhow, I'm feeling a bit chastened, and being called out for it in OLDaily serves me right.

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The Chegg Situation is Worse Than You Think
Michael Feldstein, e-Literate, 2021/02/08

Here's Michael Feldstein talking about Chegg, a website that helps students cheat on their assignments: "If we’ve reached the point where 'to chegg' is considered to be a legitimate verb in the English language, that’s another indication of just how widespread the problem is." But we should look at it another way. Imagine you gave students an assignment to find some web resource, and the site that helped them, Google, became a verb. Is it Google's fault, or is it yours, for creating such a silly assignment? Here's Feldstein again: "the fact remains that the publishers sold the textbooks to students... and then sold the homework answers to Chegg so that Chegg could sell those to students as well." And all of this exists because universities have outsources so much of the business to companies that create and sell standardized question sets, forcing one to ask, just who is it that doing the cheating here?

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Rethinking higher education in Africa
Aisha Schnellmann, Blog On Learning & Development, 2021/02/08

Here's the short version: "Gordon Adomdza, Associate Professor at Ashesi University in Ghana, explains why we need to educate the next generation to be ethical and entrepreneurial leaders." It is also "to equip our youth with the skills, knowledge, and mindset they need to solve complex systemic problems such as poverty and inequitable access to healthcare." I personally would prefer to see people learn to be able to work cooperatively rather than  entrepreneurially, but there's an element of this perspective that remains valuable, namely, being "not afraid to question the status quo" and being "motivated to solve problems innovatively, creating value from limited resources."

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Podcasting. Doing it Right. Doing it Wrong. As if Binaries Exist.
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2021/02/08

This is some good advice on podcasting from Alan Levine. Here are the main takeaways from a very rich post: "Record, but not to the cloud. Recording locally lets you get higher quality sound. Set recording options (these are the ones in your settings, when logged in). Record a separate audio file for each participant (so yes, you get a separate audio). Optimize for 3rd party video editor (I believe this gets best quality)." Nothing better than getting specific advice (in a world where 'advice' usually means 'use a good microphone').

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How to Help Students Think for Themselves
Erin Corrigan-Smith, Middleweb, 2021/02/08

This article is a book review of A Teacher's Guide to Philosophy for Children, and while no doubt well-intentioned, this book would have served a much wider purpose had it been an open access online resource rather than being an expensive eBook. Erin Corrigan Smith describes it as "a short, comprehensive approach to coaching and engaging students in the process of thinking for themselves." This too is valuable, and I would certainly hope thinking for oneself is not limited to philosophical questions. Looking at the chapter headings gives me cause for concern, though: they include such things as "Thinking Development, Emotional Intelligence and Spiritual Intelligence, The Seven Steps to Philosophical Inquiry: Lesson Plan, and The Three Stages of Development." None of this was part of the philosophy (or philosophical method) that I studied, and I wonder is there isn't another agenda at work in the book. But I can't tell, because (again) it's not open access. What would be better? Lesson plans and resources from the Center for Philosophy for Children at the University of Washington, where you can view the resources and discuss them openly.

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What WebRTC means for you
Eric Rescorla, The Mozilla Blog, 2021/02/08

"Simply put," writes Eric Rescorla, "WebRTC is videoconferencing (VC) in a Web browser, with no download: you just go to a Web site and make a call." Preliminary versions of WebRTC have existed for a while, but as we read here, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) finally published the standards just two weeks ago. " The upshot of this is that it’s possible to write a very basic VC system in a very small number of lines of code," writes Rescorla. Here's more on how to get started. What this means is that we won't be restricted to a small number of videoconferencing services for very much longer. Any web application will be able to build web conferencing right into it. Anyhow, the article includes many more details (including why web conferencing sometimes only works on Chrome) and is worth a look. Image: Hive Streaming.

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The Role of Consequence in Learning
Julian Stodd, Julian Stodd's Learning Blog, 2021/02/08

This is a good discussion of the concept of consequences. It all sounds behaviorist at first, with a typology of different sorts of formal and informal consequences, but Julian Stodd also introduces the notion of projected consequences, which are those consequences a person might imagine are the case, but may or may not actually be the case. He also makes the point that people trust the experience of consequences much more than the description of consequences. He argues, "our challenge (as educators) is to create the conditions for learning in which the application of consequence is clear, but also consistent." We may control the rules, but we don't really control the social side of it, and we certainly don't control projected consequences.

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