OLDaily

Students as Coauthors of Learning: A Resources Guide
Tom Vander Ark, Getting Smart, 2021/07/29

A core element of community-based OER initiatives is the idea of students creating their own learning resources. Unsurprisingly, there isn't a lot of attention devoted to helping students do this, because most discussion of OER focuses on instructors as producers and users. This guide, while flawed in many ways, is a step in the right direction. For one thing, it offers links to a variety of resources. It also provides context and even some direction for teachers. I'm less enthused about the BEST self-directed learning rubric, which describes "the ability to plan, direct, and control one’s emotions, thoughts, and behaviors during a learning task." That may be useful for some people, but is orthogonal to the purpose of creating learning resources.

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Voice Content and Usability
Preston So, A List Apart, 2021/07/29

Interesting article outlining the new discipline of usability in voice interfaces. "As microcontent, voice content is unique because it’s an example of how content is experienced in time rather than in space... Because microcontent is fundamentally made up of isolated blobs with no relation to the channels where they’ll eventually end up, we need to ensure that our microcontent truly performs well as voice content—and that means focusing on the two most important traits of robust voice content: voice content legibility and voice content discoverability." This is a longish article with a lot of thought leading to these conclusion. If you do voice interfaces, don't miss this.

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Should We Teach Critical Thinking?
Miguel Guhlin, Around the Corner, 2021/07/29

The answer, of course, is "yes", but the observation is that we do not, in fact, teach critical thinking, at least, not to younger students. But I think that if recent evidence proves anything, it is that we should be teaching it. What I like about the approach described in this article is that it doesn't (like so many other popular posts) talk about finding and relying on the proper authorities. It instead follows Simon Bradley's and Nicole Price's Critical Thinking and offers a method outlining the sorts of questions people - anyone - can ask. "We are looking for inconsistencies. The things that will not stand up to reason need further investigation."

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Against Persuasion
Boston Review, 2021/07/29

Interesting argument: "His (Socrates's) politics of humility involved genuinely opening up the question under dispute, in such a way that neither party would be permitted to close it, to settle on an answer, unless the other answered the same. By contrast, our politics—of persuasion, tolerance, incentives, and punishment—is deeply uninquisitive." A long time ago I decided to cease attempting to persuade through argument, and instead to offer explanations for my thinking. I'm not always successful at this (for, after all, who doesn't want to be right?) but I've found that offering explanations allows people to have different beliefs and to help both me and themselves by asking me to make my explanations clearer.

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Producing OER with convOERter: First Evaluation and Feedback
Lubna Ali, Ulrik Schroeder, Lehrentwicklung by Openess – Open Educational Resources im Hochschulkontext, 2021/07/29

This is a good idea but I confess my attempts to use it resulted in utter failure. ConvOERter takes an existing PowerPoint presentation and replace all proproetary content with open content so the resulting slide show can be licensed as OER. The tool automates the process, extracting all the images and searching for replacements from open image libraries (for example: Flickr CC search). It's a really awkward interface (why would you use a modal?).  It then saves - well - something. In my case, it saved a bunch of XML files that I can't play as a slide show. It also failed to comple any of the image searches. But still, it's a good idea. This article is one of only a few English-language papers in this mostly German publication (120 page PDF). Image: HOOU.

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Aggregators aren't open-ended
Gordon Brander, Subconscious, Substack, 2021/07/29

I think there's merit to this post, though I thing it relies on questionable hypotheses to get to where we already are. The first hypothesis is the characterization of aggregators as systems that monopolize demand by consolidating it; Gordon Brander offers Facebook, Uber and Amazon as examples. The second is that aggregators have broken a natural law describing how technology evolves: "yesterday’s product becomes tomorrow’s component." But you can't make Facebook, Amazon or Uber a component, he argues. There's no way to defeat their network advantage. So where does this leave us? "What if we instead had a small tool that was personal, multiplayer, distributed, evolvable? Maybe this is just a niche category, or maybe it could be the basis for a new open-ended ecosystem?" Well that, I argue, is where we are - at least conceptually. It's what Indieweb and Solid and mastodon and (humbly) gRSShopper are all seeking to attain.

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