OLDaily

The death of the keynote
Doug Peterson, doug — off the record, 2021/03/25

I don't actually think keynotes are ending any time soon, and in fact, think that if anything out shift to online conferencing has magnified that impact. The reason for this is the relative decline in visibility of the other sessions at a conference (one conference I attended didn't even give the other papers a live stream). That's something I will address at a later date. Another reason is the even greater need to people to collect the different strands of a discipline to weave a compelling narrative. That, indeed, is what a good keynote does (in my view) and why, as Doug Peterson says, the keynote needs to be fresh and recently updated.

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The mess at Medium
Casey Newton, Platformer, 2021/03/25

I was actually a Medium subscriber for a while, since it was an affordable five dollars a month. When I unsubscribed, it wasn't because of the cost, it was because I wanted to send a message. Being served two-year old articles without dates on them was an actual disservice. This article (co-published with Report Door, and also on the Verge) looks at some of Medium's recent struggles and suggest that management is at fault. Maybe, but publishing is a difficult industry, something that educational content producers should note well. Education has little tolerance for advertising, and at an average cost of $40 per month, the content is less affordable. Historically, education has always needed a patron, either the wealthy (who keep it for themselves), corporations (who can resist the urge to advertise), or governments.

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A year later...
Alexandra Mihai, The Educationalist, 2021/03/25

A year in from the start of the pandemic a lot of people are looking at learning and learning design somewhat differently than they they were at the start. I think a good amount of this is the result of being foced oiut of their comfort zones, not only as instructors, but perhaps more crucially, as learners, as it became necessary for a lot of people to learn a lot in a hurry. So we get the sory if vision we see outlined by Alexandra Mihai more and more (quoted/paraphrased):

• "My purpose when working with faculty is not to teach them pedagogical methods (but instead) to help them make intentional and meaningful choices."
• "Learning design has become more flexible and nuanced. It’s more like a dialogue... not less rigorous, it’s just more context-sensitive and realistic."
• "Quality assurance and accreditation, among other internal policies, need to change to organically embed a diversity of delivery modes."

All true, and all seen as more common sense today, but would have been viewed as radical in instructional design a year ago.

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Human Nature
Neil Roughley, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2021/03/25

This is a pretty awful article, but the subject is really important and an encyclopedia entry is long overdue. The concept of 'human nature' is used in a wide variety of ways, from ethics to psychology to sociology to software design to (as we heard on CBC Spark today) innovation. Most appeals to human nature are misguided, either because the speaker is misinformed about humans, has confused innate properties with learned or cultural properties, or applied human nature to domains where it shouldn't be applied, such as (as Hume would argue) ethics. This article starts with a long digression about what counts as human, and to a lesser extent, that would count as human nature (not what is human nature, but what sort of things an appeal to human nature might be). The author also mires the discussion in ancient Greek philosophy long before thinking about what a 21st century discussion of human nature would look like. If your work involves an appeal to 'human nature' you should read this article, but I'm sure the Encyclopedia will be looking at a revision sooner rather than later. Image: Rutgers.

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