OLDaily

Feature Article
Recommendations for Good Practice Using AI in Learning
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, 2021/05/20

This is intended to be a quick and accessible summary you can give to management. Let me know if I've missed anything important.

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Twitter LinkedIn Digital Publishing Platforms 7 mins read “Stop whining and start fighting”: How publishers can build sustainable businesses in the era of platforms
Faisal Kalim, What's New in Publishing, 2021/05/20

As always, I contend that the future of media is in many ways the future of education, so this article about how online media companies can survive the threat of big tech (you know: Google, Amazon, Apple and the rest) is useful and relevant. Author Faisal Kalim recommends a symbiotic approach: pushing back where necessary, innovating while possible, and yet taking advantage of big tech in areas where they excel. This plays out in some specific recommendations: not depending on advertising, taking control of your own data, leveraging their technologies, and using their platforms to find stuff, to connect, to share. When I look at my own practices, this all seems pretty familiar, with the exception that I also include ethics in the mix. I don't require moral perfection, but I do reject working with some platforms (notably Facebook and Apple) for ethical reasons.

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My Top Ten Learning Tools for 2021
Helen Blunden, Activate Learning, 2021/05/20

This list from Helen Blunden has some items that I think will be new to people and that offer insights into the future directions of learning online. One such item is one I use as well, Feedly pro with the AI recommender called Leo. Another is similar to something I use: while she uses FitBut I am content using Strava. But the purpose is the same: "it’s helping me improve a part of my life". She also mentions Nulia, an application that watches how you use Microsoft products and recommends training based on your level of use. And iTalki, a language learning app that schedules practice conversations with native speakers. And then there are the usual: a search engine, video player, blogging app, podcast receiver, events app and social media.

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How to deconstruct the world
Peter Salmon, Psyche, 2021/05/20

What I like about this article is that it provides a step-by-step description (or deconstruction, if you will) of Jacques Derrida's philosophical method: consider how the text or object is regarded, look at the relation between different interpretations, look for contradictions, find what the text seems to advocate and look in the opposite direction.

It's worth nothing that this for me is what happens almost in an instant any time I look at or read something. And - reading 'against the grain' of this article, if you will - what Derrida's method means to me is not a way of comprehending or understanding texts or constructions. They're almost incidental. The method itself becomes a way of life, a way of seeing and understanding the world. And that is how I see the world; I don't just see a street light, for example, I see what it illuminates, what its placement means, the material and background of its construction, who made it, what its design signifies, and the rest. I see all this instantly, through force of habit drawn from years of deliberate practice.

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The move to micro-credentials exposes the deficiencies of existing credentials
David Boud, Trina Jorre de St Jorre, Journal of Teaching and Learning for Graduate Employability, 2021/05/20

This (3 page PDF) is one of four articles in a special issue on badges and microcredentials in the Journal of Teaching and Learning for Graduate Employability. The concern in this paper is that "If  assessment of current course units does not enable a determination that learning outcomes have been met... then they cannot become micro-credentials because they do not meet the minimum requirements of adequacy." Microcredentials map to specific skills or competencies; course evaluations do not. It's a good statement of the problem, but of course this discussion could have been carried forward much further. Image: Algonquin College, Microcredentials.

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Four paradigms in learning analytics: Why paradigm convergence matters
Ryan S. Baker, Dragan Gašević, Shamya Karumbaiah, Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence, 2021/05/20

This paper begins with the observation that "learning analytics is quite splintered for such a young community," pointing to the variety of conferences in the field as an example. This, it argues, is "due to deeper differences in how different researchers view the fundamental nature of science and indeed, reality." Hence, we have four distinctive perspectives on learning analytics (quoted):

• Reductionism - breaking down those phenomena into their constituent components and then analyzing the relationship between those components
• Dialectic -  goal of understanding phenomena as wholes, or understanding systems as systems,
• Existentialism - phenomena should be understood as the participants themselves understand them
• Essentialism - that meaning is inherent in the universe, as it is in, for example, mathematics

This diversity of approaches is not inherently bad, however, the paper argues "there needs to be greater collaboration across researchers from different intellectual paradigms – a move towards inter-paradigmatic work." And the authors "call for a better understanding, within each of us, of how our philosophical stances impact our research and practice."

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