OLDaily

New biological data and knowledge in education
Ben Williamson, Code Acts in Education, 2021/09/08

There's a lot going on in this article as Ben Williamson describes two new research projects that are fraught with risk. The first is "a data-intensive, bioinformatics-driven approach to education remains in development" - basically, using a person's genome to identify their learning needs and potential. The second is a set of "'affect-aware" technologies to gauge and respond to student emotional states" that "aims to make ‘emotional life machine-readable, and to control, engineer, reshape and modulate human behaviour’". Writes Williamson, "New biologized knowledge, produced through complex technical apparatuses by new experts of both the data and life sciences, is being treated as increasingly authoritative."

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AI-Powered Tutor Uses Google Cloud to Generate Learning Activities
Rhea Kelly, Campus Technology, 2021/09/08

The headline pretty much says it all (which is what a good headline should do). Walden University, using "an AI-powered tutor named 'Julian,' taps into Google Cloud's AI and machine learning capabilities to generate a variety of on-demand learning activities." There's a link to a one-hour webinar, but it's locked behind a spamwall (there's also no way to fast-forward through instructions, introductions and other detritus). I think the limiting factor of the recommender is the same as for Microsoft's Start - a very limited selection of resources and types of resource. I also felt that the question-and-answer format used by the tutor was awkward and would feel very scripted to a student.

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B.C. students draft legislation to protect high school press freedom
Heidi Lee, J-Source, 2021/09/08

Count me as among those offering support for student press freedom, even at the high school level. Over the years we've seen countless efforts to censor student newspapers, and while in some cases the paper crossed the line, in the wide majority of cases administrations and school groups were simply trying to manage public perception. For example, when a "student newspaper, penned an editorial criticizing the Vancouver School Board for failing to involve students and teachers in its decision-making processes," the principal brought publication to a halt. There's no good justification for such a decision, and it tells students clearly that freedom of the press is a chimera. What sort of message does that send to students? Read the draft. Sign the petition.

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Introducing Microsoft Start
Liat Ben-Zur, Windows Blog, 2021/09/08

Microsoft has launched what appears to be its latest answer to Google News, Microsoft Start. Call me unimpressed. It's a rebranding of the MSN news feed (it even uses the same URL) and while it allows you to 'personalize' by selecting topics you like, it applies these indifferently (indeed, for sports I selected MLB, NHL and CFL and the page responded by showing me MLS and NFL scores exclusively). Now, maybe it will get better, but I'm not sure the service will get past its major hurdle, which is the lack of variety. For sources you get the usual commercial media outlets - and that's it. Compare that to my Feedly Leo AI-based recommender, which selects from my personally curated selection of a thousand sources with inputs ranging from blogs to academic journals, magazines, commercial sites, and everything in between, based on preferences I've stated as well as my actual reading patterns.

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Adult education and training in Europe: Building inclusive pathways to skills and qualifications
Eurydice, European Commission, 2021/09/08

This report (224 page PDF) "investigates current approaches to promoting lifelong learning, with a particular emphasis on policies and measures supporting adults with low levels of skills and qualifications to access learning opportunities." What I like is that it looks at adult education broadly, and not merely from the perspective of those who are already students. This is significant, because as the report says, "low-qualified adults participate less in education and training than those with higher levels of educational attainment." This was big news when the subject was MOOCs, but it's a trend in education generally, and should be a priority for online educators.

I found this article in the Canadian Society for the Study of Education (CSSE) news feed. It took a bit to find; here's the feed home page, and I had to view source to find the RSS feed. I've subscribed and am now the feed's sole subscriber on Feedly.

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