OLDaily

Creating and Using Rubrics for Assessment
University of Wisconsin, 2021/05/25

This is a useful resource worth sharing from the University of Wisconsin. It's a collection of dozens of rubrics providing guidelines for assessing everything from e-portfolios to video projects to research process. Via Educational Technology and Mobile Learning, which comments, "You can use these resources to help you organize your video conferences and assess their effectivity as learning tools. They evaluate areas related to the organization of talking time, interruptions, technical problems, speaking skills, visual aids and many more."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

A16z is betting $20 million on Maven, an ed tech and creator economy mashup
Penelope Blackwell, Protocol, 2021/05/25

Udemy founder Gagan Biyani founded has launched a new company, Maven, which is focused on cohort-based learning. It's a natural sep forward from Udemy, which was based on self-paced learning in courses that were (to my experience anyway) long-abandoned by their creators. In Maven, "the students join and move through content at the same pace, but much of the learning happens peer-to-peer as the students share their experiences over the web." It's hard not to be surprised at the naivety of the funders. "The team at Maven is on to something huge with cohort-based courses," said a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Really? I can't imagine cohort-based courses haven't been tried until now! Imagine what they'll think of other innovations, like limiting access and charging high tuition! Via Daniel Christian.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

WritingHTML: An Open Online “course” (or not?) Launched in 1994
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2021/05/25

"It was never really a 'course'," writes Alan Levine, "but it was a series of lessons, offered freely and openly online, that many people used, others remixed or added to it, and mostly, I was able to 'teach' people I never met, knew, or knew I was teaching." To me, that makes it a course, and marks it as one of the earliest open online courses on the internet (at the same time I was working on MUDs and wouldn't start on the web until 1995).

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Back to the Future of Education
OECD, 2021/05/25

This is a report issued earlier this year offering four scenarios describing possible futures of learning. There is an open access version but it's quite hard to find on the web site; here's the direct link, and note that you have to click on the table of contents to the left to view the different sections. It's OECD so of course the full privatization of education is on the table, but at least other possibilities are considered. Here are the four scenarios:

1. Schooling extended: an intensification of the current front-end, massive schooling model
2. Education outsourced: an outsourcing of schooling and resulting surge of learning markets
3. Schools as learning hubs: a re-purposing of schooling and transformation of schools
4. Learn-as-you-go: the end of school-based learning and demise of schooling.

As Tom Worthington says, "We are likely to see a little of all of these and a lot of some." He also suggests that "school campuses will remain much as they are for younger students, while those for older students will become more like learning hubs."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Can Machines Control Our Brains?
R. Douglas Fields, Quanta, 2021/05/25

I have written here from time to time about thought-controlled machine interfaces. This article looks at the question of what happens if the control goes the other way. We're a long way away from being able to implant thoughts into people, but we can definitely influence behaviour - "Laser beams, ultrasound, electromagnetic pulses, mild alternating and direct current stimulation and other methods now allow access to, and manipulation of, electrical activity in the brain." And the people looking into this are exactly the people you don't want looking into this, people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. It's not all bad. Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) can "restore vision and hearing, generate synthetic speech, and help treat disorders like obsessive-compulsive disorder, addiction and Parkinson’s disease." But there's nothing to fear more, I think, than that uncontrollable voice in your head sending you advertising messages or worse.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]