OLDaily

What Will Online Learning Look Like in 10 Years? Zoom Has Some Ideas
Stephen Noonoo, EdSurge, 2021/09/16

So much of online learning takes place in environments like Zoom these days it would be a mistake to not think about where these are heading. This article gives us the perspective of three of education-focused Zoom employees at the recent company conference. What can we expect? "AI-powered translation is already in the works," the say (to which I say: it can't come soon enough). Also, more classroom management and instruction features, brought to you by Blackboard cofounder Michael Chasen (because the world doesn't have enough learning 'management' already). Also, augmented or VR integrations "offering 360-degree tours of museums or job sites like film sets." They also mention personalization, but nobody in the discussion seemed to know what that might mean.

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AECC launches course search platform
Viggo Stacey, The PIE News, 2021/09/16

AECC Global, an India-based student recruitment agency, has launched an online course search service, according to this article. "The platform features tens of thousands of courses from AECC university partners in key destination markets including Australia, UK, Canada, US, New Zealand and Ireland." There's no link to the service in the article, but this might be it - but if you do a search, you can't actually search for subjects, only a faceted search for full programs., or a 'career outcomes' search which again leads only to full programs. Here's a video. A service like this may be useful to someone planning to spend thousands of dollars (or lakhs of rupees) and years of commitment. But for everyone else, we need something much more fine-grained.

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Logic taking the University by storm
Juliette Marchant, Honi Soit, 2021/09/16

It's funny that the number of students enrolled in this course - 2200 - is almost exactly the same as we had in our first MOOC in 2008. But of course, all of these would have been for-credit tuition-paying students. And there's this: "In addition to the course lectures, there are 92 tutorial sections for the course, run by “a small army of passionate tutors." Now I wonder whether by 'passionate' they mean 'volunteer'. My own experience suggests that the very least, it means 'underpaid'. So the model we have here is of three professors, one of whom authored the course textbook, offloading the teaching to the tutors. Also, while the course lectures (featuring 'Seb and Inky') seem to be very similar to the ontology video I linked to yesterday, there is absolutely no sign of them on the open web. Which is sad, really, given the praise offered by students.

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Godzilla Eats All the Images Missing ALT Tags
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2021/09/16

For as long as alt tags existed, two things have been true: people have been saying we should use them, and people have not been using them. So it's no surprise to see aspects of both in this post, this time with reference to Twitter images. "Again casual check of 50 tweeted images. All but 3 of them lack alt image descriptions." Alan Levine describes a back-and-forth with various Twitter tools, with some interesting results (like the auto-generated Japanese alt text). And he concludes, "I am not ready to let bots do the work humans ought to be doing in the first place." From my perspective, though, we are so close to having AI that can generate image descriptions (in the right language, even) that I'm not ready to say that this is something people ought to be doing.

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Our evolved intuitions about privacy aren’t made for this era
Joe Greenis, Azim Shariffi, Psyche, 2021/09/16

"Our concern for privacy has its evolutionary roots in the need to maintain boundaries between the self and others, for safety and security," argues this article. I don't think that's true. Maybe we have some innate need for space, but privacy, properly so-called, is a very modern concept, and our attitudes vary a lot depending on where we were raised and what we learning. For example, I was raised in a small town where everybody knew my business. I learned at an early age that the best way to deal with secrets is to not have secrets. I still can't get used to the idea that we should close the curtains or lock the door. People who were raised in an environment where you can have secrets, or are engaged in activities where you should have secrets, have a very different outlook. We need to be careful about attributing attitudes and values to evolution. That's not how evolution works.

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Being there - that feeling we can't achieve online
Alastair Creelman, The corridor of uncertainty, 2021/09/16

"Feelings are worth more than quality," writes Alastair Creelman, quite acurately. "Even if there are billions of photos and films from all angles of, say, the Taj Mahal, I would still take at least a hundred more just to show that I have also been there." I have been to the Taj Mahal, genuinely the world's most beautiful building, but my photos are to remind me of that experience, not to show that I've been there. So, yeah, we would like to be there. I would like to be there. But it's scarce - time and space are scarce. Yesterday I took part in events in Britain, Montreal and Ottawa. Just a typical day. And 'being here' would have been impossible for all three. People pay a lot of money to 'be there', but money is scarce, and for many people the money isn't there at all. The choice isn't - and never has been - between being there or being online. The choice has always been between being online and not being there at all.

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An introduction to Social Listening
FutureLearn, 2021/09/16

It could be said that what I do here is a type of social listening, but from that perspective I would say that this article is a very superficial introduction to what is a much deeper practice. For example, in the section on 'why does social listening matter' there is an emphasis on customers and competitors. The discussion of tools is similarly based on finding "insights that can be used to identify possibilities for your company to expand and thrive." But to my mind real social listening is focused on wider purposes, including, ultimately, the social good, and the real value is in creating the space to see the world from multiple perspectives.

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