OLDaily

Platforms vs. PhDs: How tech giants court and crush the people who study them
Issie Lapowsky, Protocol, 2021/03/19

This is a long and fascinating look at the tug of war between platforms (especially Facebook) and the researchers who study them. The hook is a story about a researcher who was collecting data being told she was scraping personal data without permission, only to realize later that by 'personal data' Facebook mean advertisers' public pages. "To Facebook, advertisers are users too, and important ones at that. Scraping advertiser data, even data Facebook makes public, and publishing it without the advertiser's consent is a violation of Facebook's rules." There's a lot more to this story, and the author tries to balance the interests of the platform - "after all, the Cambridge Analytica scandal ended up costing Facebook $5 billion in fines" - and the reality that "scraping is not a crime".

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Why You Matter: An Interview About a School-Wide Campaign Exploring Self-Worth
Jonathan Juravich, The Art of Education, 2021/03/19

I remember when Angela Maiers came out with the you matter manifesto something like ten years ago and has basically made a career of it (that's not a criticism; I'm always happy when people can make a good career out of an idea). I felt at the time (and still do) that it should have been "I matter". But I guess "you matter" has a resonance to it, as we read here about #WhyYouMatter, "a public art campaign empowering students to love and appreciate themselves." It's tempting to dismiss this as a 'self-esteem fad' but it's actually an important idea, which is why I list 'how to value yourself' as one of the things people really need to learn. Anyhow, this article describes the work of Georgina Rutherford and Laura Naar, two art teachers in Michigan, who "led the entire school through a project where students were asked to consider 'why they matter.'" See more on their website, whyyoumatter.org.

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Virtual reality in K‐12 and higher education: A systematic review of the literature from 2000 to 2019
Heng Luo, Gege Li, Qinna Feng, Yuqin Yang, Mingzhang Zuo, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 2021/03/19

I am sure that it is a complete coincidence that this article appeared in the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning the same day that ridiculous Times Higher Education article claimed educators are doing nothing in virtual reality (VR). In fact, over the last 20 years, as this article shows, a great deal of work has been done, and the technology and the discipline continues to progress. It's worth noting that "the majority of VR interventions reviewed in the present study were still enabled by computers or projectors and characterised by low levels of immersion, interaction, and imagination." There are good reasons for this, based on issues of cost and technology. Additionally, "VR interventions had a medium effect on learning, and the factors of discipline, level of immersion, and instructional design moderated the effectiveness of VR‐based instruction," which tells us that you don't get results simply by adding VR to a class. In particular, argue the authors, "researchers should shift their attention from VR technology to VR‐based instruction with a redefined focus on the effective integration of technology and theory."

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Educators are not risk averse and complacent
Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, 2021/03/19

One thing we saw with the onset of the pandemic was that educators were not prepared to use digital media and to teach online, this despite the twenty years of the development in the field they've had to learn and adapt, so there is an argument beyond anecdote to make that educators are risk averse and complacent. This observation aside, though, I am entirely in agreement with the tone and argument in this post, a criticism of a Times Higher Education article arguing that educators should jump on board with virtual reality. The context was a Fordham instructor who had a VR company create three learning scenarios for her, which she then tried out in her class on entrepreneurship. Every part of that context was (a) not original - I could point to dozens of similar experiments reported in the literature and the popular press, including work we're doing here at NRC, and (b) not scalable - most instructors can't just work with the president of a VR company, and can't indulge in the luxury of a technology rollout that stands a good chance of failing.

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From My to Me
Olia Lialina, Interface Critique, 2021/03/19

This is an article that speaks to me perhaps more than it should. It looks back at the early days of the World Wide Web - the first decade, before Web 2.0, back when it was 'my website', not 'about me' on someone else's web service. The core of that early web, writes Olia Lialina, wasn't the 'home page' per se, it was the link - and that's what's disappearing from today's web. What will the future look like? What will we say? "What? Address bar? Website? You could type? Was there a sort of typewriter? Delegating, adapting, forgetting." Great read; don't miss this.

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Google Chat's old Electron desktop app shutting down this month in favor of PWA
Abner Li, 9to5Google, 2021/03/19

This is the sort of thing that I ponder about. Why, I wonder, is Google switching from a stand-alone Electron app to a progressive web app (PWA) for its chat application? It bothers me, because the PWA won't run on Firefox. But then again, the Electron app was based on Chrome anyways, and ran on its own, and not inside a browser. Could it be related to size or performance of the Electron app? The article says, "The PWA is more secure with auto-updates ensuring users are always on the latest version. It’s also easier to distribute for admins and more widely available across desktop platforms." Anyhow, I created an OLDaily chat room (which I'll probably never use) and have been looking at the API to build a Google chat room bot (which tells me that PWAs, unlike Electron apps, can much more easily serve as a platform. for ads, data collection, and other integration).

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