OLDaily

It was my time, I guess
Doug Peterson, doug — off the record, 2021/11/01

Like Doug Peterson, I also received my Windows 11 upgrade over the weekend, and I also experienced the frustration of taskbar and start window settings that I cannot change. The taskbar I could live with, I suppose, but there was far too little space in the start window for the range of applications I use on a daily basis. As noted, there was no way to change this (I even did some registry editing but none of the proffered solutions worked) so I just set up a folder with shortcuts (which also seem to be discontinued) as a temporary start window. Worst of all, I found that clicking on 'help' in Windows 11 would take me to Windows 10 help on the MC website. Microsoft's web documentation continues to be an unmitigated disaster.

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IEEE to Standardize xAPI v2.0 as an International Standard
Advanced Distributed Learning, 2021/11/01

The Experience API (xAPI) is a specification describing how activity records are authored in order to be collected in a learning record store. It was developed in 2013 by the U.S. government standards group Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL). According to this article, IEEE will be converting xAPI into a standard, much as it did for Learning Object Metadata (LOM) and various other standards. This is generally seen as a Good Thing, however, I note that when IEEE develops these standards it takes them out of the public domain and clamps them down behind a paywall. However, "the new xAPI v2.0 standard will also be IEEE’s first open source standard, using a new process intended to expand opportunities for dynamic collaborations to accelerate the development and promulgation of technical standards." So, good. Related: Datasim, using xAPI.

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10 eLearning WordPress Themes
The Blog Herald, 2021/11/01

I haven't tried out any of these and probably won't, since I don't really spend a lot of time doing work in WordPress. That said, it's well worth taking note of the emergence of WordPress themes that emulate the functionality of a learning management system (LMS) so you can, say, "organize all your content such as lessons, courses, quizzes, and other learning-related content," or easily upload demonstrations, or "set up a grade book for students". They're not free, but they're not expensive either, and while they're probably not suitable for large institution, they could be just the thing for a stand-alone course.

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INDRA
Benjamin M. Gyori, ‪John A. Bachman, 2021/11/01

As I work on building the graph element in my online course (more on that in the future) I am guided in part by examples like this. That's not to say I could ever build such technology myself, but the vision here suggests a path forward in the design of online learning quite unlike the narrative sequence that dominates today. This is the Integrated Network and Dynamical Reasoning Assembler (INDRA), which "draws on natural language processing systems and structured databases to collect mechanistic and causal assertions... and assembles them into various modeling formalisms including causal graphs and dynamical models." One one level, we can imagine working with these graphs and models as learning content. But even more, we can imagine using tools like INDRA to produce (and test, and talk about) these graphs and models as an educational activity. See more at INDRA Labs.

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