OLDaily

American Idle
Eugine Wei, Remains of the Day, 2021/02/24

This is a long post on TikTok but it's filled with a ton of good bits and accords quite well with my own experience on the platform (though tbh there are no videos of me dancing on TikTok). What makes TikTok great, writes Eugene Weim is that it enables creativity and not just consumption. "After using TikTok, it does feel odd to go through Instagram and not be able to grab anyone's photo to remix," he writes. "They explicitly lower the barrier to the literal remixing of everyone else's content." The result is a slew of totally new social media phenomena, such as the reaction video, or the duet. "TikTok's Duet feature belongs in the social media hall of fame of primitives alongside features like Follow and the Like button." Then there's TikTok's 'For You Page' (FYP), supported by an exceptional AI that not only promotes well-established creators, but is equally likely to lift a complete unknown into meme status. There's a lot more; this article is to me a pretty definitive snapshot of what TikTok is today.

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MENA Higher Education Pedagogy, Technology and the Refugee Experience
Diana D. Woolis, Center for Learning in Practice, 2021/02/24

This study (48 page PDF) of the provision of online learning to refugee students in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is at once unsurprising and illustrative. As the authors write, "Refugee and displaced learners are the 'canary in the coal mine.' That is to say, their experiences reveal the larger weaknesses across the education ecosystem." Thus we see a general lack of preparedness in the education sector, including especially a lack of training in instructional design and online teaching on the part of university instructors, alongside the ubiquitous concerns about the lack of reliable infrastructure (power, bandwidth), difficulties in assessment, and resistance on the part of both students and administrators to digital learning methodologies. Good report, though.

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Don’t Go Down the Rabbit Hole
Aaron Davis, Read Write Collect, 2021/02/24

One of my main criticisms of Mike Caulfield's approach to critical literacy is his emphasis on authenticating the source of news or information. That's the core of his 'four moves' algorithm: "stop, investigate the source, find better coverage, and trace claims, quotes, and media back to the original context." And that, I think, is the sense of advice to not 'go down the rabbit hole' in this NY Times article summarized by Aaron Davis. "It’s often counterproductive to engage directly with content from an unknown source, and people can be led astray by false information," writes Charlie Warzel. I disagree. If you're not willing to look at what an unknown source has to say, you're going to miss most of what could be said on any given topic. Yes, there are flakes. But there are also expressions of lived experience from the disenfranchised, the marginalized, and the silenced. And this is as true in a subject like online learning is it is in news and politics - maybe even more true. What's important isn't finding sources to trust, but rather, hearing a diversity of sources, watching them interact with each other, and testing their ideas against our own experience.

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Rawls at 100
Joshua Cohen, Boston Review, 2021/02/24

There's a lot of John Rawls in contemporary online learning theory and practice, though it takes being fluent in his philosophy to see the connection. This volume of Boston Review, which celebrates Rawls's 100th birthday, will help with that. The articles are short(ish) and accessible, and get to the heart of diverse elements of his writing, from the discussion of the Kantian 'respect for persons' in Vivian Gornik's piece, to a discussion of social justice by three authors, to a celebration of baseball by John Rawls himself.

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The hot new thing in tech: speaking into your phone
Kaya Yurieff, Rishi Iyengar, CNN, 2021/02/24

If it's on CNN, I guess it's a trend, right? Or perhaps it's just more of the marketing money behind Clubhouse. Either way, it should be noted here in OLDaily as A Thing, just in case there are educational applications. If it is a thing, there should be a wave of blog posts over the summer, a bunch of studies in the fall and a wave of academic papers later in 2022 and 2023. I'm predicting more of a ripple than a wave (as I guess my tone might suggest) because while sending voice messages is a lot easier than writing and can work between a small group of friends, it takes time to listen to them, even with the playback sped up, which means they're going to be less effective for larger groups such as learning cohorts. Somebody will no doubt suggest that they could be used to record lectures, but we have that already; they're called podcasts.

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Let’s talk about all that ed-tech money
Goldie Blumenstyk, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2021/02/24

There are record numbers of investments into digital education technology, writes Goldie Blumenstyk, some of it even in the form of SPACs, “blank check” companies "created to raise money from investors in public markets even before it’s specified what businesses the company will own and operate," but there isn't a corresponding investment in infrastructure and resources to study the impact. It's a circle of gridlock, she writes, where "most companies and investors won’t fund that kind of research unless customers insist on seeing such information before they buy. And most colleges don’t make those demands." Image: Chronicle.

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Complex or clickbait?: The problematic Media Bias Chart
Candice Benjes-Small, Nathan Elwood, ACRLog, 2021/02/24

I have discussed the Media Bias Chart in the past, offering the criticism that it normalized far-right sites and depicted the conservitive corporate press as 'neutral'. Here are my comments. This article offers a far more comprehensive critique, describing its origins and many of the criticisms that have been offered over the years. It notes quite accurately that the chart confirms a false equivalence between the radical right and the moderate left, and that it elevates some very questionable publications to the status of viable alternatives to (say) CNN or the BBC. The problem of misinformation is undermining not only democracy, but science and education in general, and charts like this are a part of it. We can help by providing the tools and skills people need to ferrit out scams in the news media and take a reality-based path forward. Pictured is the current Media Bias Chart with my commentary overlaid.

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How to Use RSS Feeds
Helen Blunden, Activate Learning Solutions, 2021/02/24

This statement could be taken right out of my own playbook. "Are RSS Feeds Still Relevant?" asks Helen Blunden. "To many people, I’m may be a bit of an old fashioned kook because I still use them religiously but the truth is, I wouldn’t be finding great content and sharing it to you if I was just relying on my social networks such as Twitter and LinkedIn to serve this content up to me." Same here. True, I have other sources - newsletters, web searches, contacts, and yes, social media. But RSS is at the heart of my newsletter.

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