OLDaily

Taking Your Marbles and Going Home
Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates, 2021/04/26

I agree with Alex Usher's perspective in this post. In a nutshell, he argues that the ranking of countries based on their academic freedom is basically a way of imposing a western perspective on the definition of what a university (or at least a 'good' university) should be. And surely, as he says, "one can argue for academic freedom whilst at the same time i) acknowledging that current academic norms in North America and Europe have never been universal and even in our own geographic contexts are barely a century old, and ii) avoid the insulting implication that over half the world lacks 'proper' universities."

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My immediate reaction was one of stunned disbelief and shock
Julianne Moss, EduResearch Matters, 2021/04/26

You know you've missed the mark when a reviewer expressed such a visceral reaction of "stunned disbelief and shock" in response to your artwork. Julianne Moss, on reviewing the work, writes, " Issues of gender, class, identity, equity and ability are powerfully positioned—not for affirmative action, but to ‘other’ the very two groups of Australians that this resource is intended to be used by, students and teachers." Here's an F-2 resource, so you can judge for yourself, and here's the Good Society home page. Having looked through the site, I won't say she's wrong. It's intended "to support respectful relationships education in all Australian schools," but it's presented as if created by people who don't really understand or agree with the concept.

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Udemy, an Online Course Platform Where Anyone Can Teach, Keeps Raising Money. What's Next?
Jeffrey R. Young, EdSurge, 2021/04/26

This is a quick overview of Udemy, an online learning platform that allows anyone to create online courses, and hence, now has a catalogue of some 150,000 of them. Obviously, the quality varies. "As on other large platforms that host...  user-generated content, only a small number of creators end up making a living off the site, and a few of those end up as superstars within its system." But as Jeffrey Young writes, "the company has curated a library of 5,500 of its highest-rated technical and business courses and sells licenses to employers and others who want to offer those courses to their staff for professional development." This not only saves customers the trouble of searching and curating, it can also ensure continued support for the course (a problem I've experienced when I've signed up for Udemy courses).

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The Brain ‘Rotates’ Memories to Save Them From New Sensations
Jordana Cepelewicz, Quanta Magazine, 2021/04/26

The word 'rotate' here is a metaphor for what is actually happening, but it's a useful metaphor because it allows us to imagine the process in concrete terms (such as the rotated writing on the paper letter, illustrated). The idea is that the brain protects older perceptions from being 'overwritten' (again, a metaphor) by newer perceptions by 'rotating' them. This gives is a better mechanism to think of things like short- and long-term memory, and also to understand how new learning interacts with existing knowledge. Ultimately, this is probably just the leading edge of a wave of research that will be based on networks of diverse, rather than uniform, neurons.

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Pictory
2021/04/26

Just listed on Product Hunt, a product called Pictory offers to take long-form articles and videos and convert them into short-form social media posts and videos. The idea is that AI is first used to interpret or transcribe and then summarize the long-form media. After human editing, it is then assembled into shorter-form content for social media consumption and scheduled over, say, a month of releases. Never mind how well the AI performs of whether the videos are compelling (if the marketing video is any guide, they're not). Takes this as the starting point. The quality will get much better. When I talk about things like 'disposable OER' or 'single-use OER', this is what I'm talking about. I'd love to see it applied to my own talks one day.

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AI chatbot maker Juji jumps into higher education
Colin Wood, EdScoop, 2021/04/26

The lede here is "Juji, an AI-powered chatbot company that was co-founded by a former IBM Watson researcher, announced on Thursday the launch of a new virtual agent tailored for higher education." The article feels more like marketing than journalism (in journalism, you would talk to more than just the product developer, for example, and include reactions from potential customers and competitors, along with informed perspective putting it into the wider context).

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Connectivism: A Literature Review for the New Pathway of Pandemic Driven Education
Serkan Boyraz, Gürbüz Ocak, 2021/04/26

This is a review of literatire related to connectivism, though I wouldn't say that it applies specifically to the employment of connectivism during the pandemic as the title implies. I would say it's a reasonable accurate portrayal of connectivism in broad strokes, though I would probably quibble pedantically with many of the details. My major criticism would bee that I don't think it grasps sufficiently the idea of knowledge and learning as emergent phenomena, rather that replicated through transmission of content.

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Data Ethics of Power – A Human Approach to Big Data and AI
Gry Hasselbalch, Data Ethics, 2021/04/26

This is a theme that will sound familiar to educators. "Data ethics is not only about power—it also is power: 'Power for governments, companies, self-proclaimed experts and advisors and even academic disciplines to point out the problems and their solutions, to set the priorities for what role data technologies should play in our human lives and in society.'" It means that what we mean by data ethics has to be more than sets of rules and principles - it needs to be something that, as the article says, puts a human face on the subject. But what does that mean? Image: Venture Beat.

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