OLDaily

Feature Article
RSS and the Browser As Social Network
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, 2021/06/09

RSS survived being disappeared because it continued to perform a valuable service for the people that used it, and because platforms remained available to create and consume RSS content. It's less clear that it will survive being co-opted by the browser-as-social-network.

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Never taught
Doug Peterson, doug — off the record, 2021/06/09

Though there are many statues around the country to remind us of our history, I was never taught about residential schools and the effort to "remove the Indian" from Indigenous peoples in this country. And I never learned about the existence of mass unmarked graves of their children until this week. Statues don't teach people about the past, they help those in power obscure that past. Teaching needs to be an active, continuing and open process of growth, facing the past honestly and, where necessary, remorsefully. And as Doug Peterson says, "Just don’t let students leave your school saying they were never taught." As he adds, if your school district isn’t providing the resources, or you’re looking for more, the web resources https://www.fnmieao.com/students/ and https://etfofnmi.ca/ are good places to turn. Image: Whose Land.

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Challenging Conversations – Safe Spaces vs. Brave Spaces
Heather M. Ross, Educatus, 2021/06/09

I'm not really sure I would agree with the continuum offered here by Heather Ross but I'm not sure I have a viable alternative either. She contrasts the concept of 'safe spaces', which we see in education writing a lot, with what she calls 'brave spaces' and 'free spaces', where people can be, um, more expressive. "Brave spaces make room for all topics and opinions (like Free), but include providing students with the tools they need to navigate and contribute to those conversations," she writes. I wouldn't call hateful conversation 'free'. The opposite of 'safe' isn't 'free', it's 'harmful'. And to navigate such spaces it's not enough to be 'brave', you need to be 'protected'. Rethinking the continuum might lead us to rethink the conversation.

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the 2021 Changing Landscape of Online Education (CHLOE) report
Rhea Kelly, Campus Technology, 2021/06/09

This short post reports on the the 2021 Changing Landscape of Online Education (CHLOE) report (hidden behind a spamwall) from Quality Matters and Eduventures Research. As the diagram clearly shows, the one technology institutions really invested in was videoconferencing, "which is projected to reach 87 percent mainstream adoption by the end of 2021, compared to 51 percent in 2019." The only other thing of note was "assessment integrity", which means things like e-proctoring. From where I sit, that's an understandable but pretty unimaginative approach on the part of educational institutions.

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Canadians have changed, and so have their streaming habits
Jamie Gargatsougias, Think With Google, 2021/06/09

"One of the new behaviours here to stay," writes google, "is streaming digital video through connected TV (CTV) in the living room." Maybe. But far more relevant for our purposes is this factoid: " there are several categories seeing growth in watch hours.... watch time of travel, music, cooking, and education YouTube content on TV screens has each grown 45% year-over-year in Canada, as of December 2020." Of course this allows for a broad definition of 'educational'. And it's based on unreferenced "YouTube internal data."

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Rituals for hypergrowth: An inside look at how YouTube scaled
Shishir Mehrotra, Coda, 2021/06/09

This is very clever. Oh, not so much the content of the piece, though I admit it was enticing; I was pulled in by an 'everybody in tech is reading this' kind of post and attracted by the content. No, what's clever is the way this is effectively an advertisement for Coda, which presents itself as a platform that mixes document types and supports team self-organization. When you go to read sections of the post, you get a popup saying 'sign up for Coda with Google and you get $10 credit and the author gets $10. Clever. If you want to read the whole document without being blocked, scroll down to the bottom and follow the comment-enabled link, which is not actually comment-enabled unless you've signed up for Coda, but at least you can read the whole thing. The specific practices described in the article are relatively common and definitely not for everyone, but I have no doubt such a tightly regimented team - if everybody buys in - can be successful for a time. The same, I think, applies to Coda.

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