OLDaily

Minecraft: Education Edition Across the Australian Curriculum
Microsoft Education Blog, 2021/11/02

There has been a lot attention paid to Facebook being renamed to Meta and its corresponding focus on developing a metaverse. What is overlooked in this, I think, is the fact that Facebook is trying to catch up with other competitors. As Ethan Zuckerberg argues, the idea (and technology) for the metaverse has been around for a long time. We have Roblox out there aiming at a billion users with plans to "increase  investment  in  the  creator  community." And here we have Microsoft's Minecraft making inroads into Australian education. It isn't hard to build the 3D part of the metaverse, especially when you're building clunky heavy headsets like the Oculus. The hard part is building the content and the community and the network. But who would trust Facebook with that? Who?

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How Mister Rogers Connected the Neighborhood
Gregg Behr, Ryan Rydzewski, Connected Learning Alliance, 2021/11/02

This post is marketing for Remake Learning but I liked its take on Mister Rogers and wanted to pass that part along. The idea here is that Fred Rogers would start with something simple - a spoon, say - and with a child-centered activity - using the spoon to dig, say - and then extend that idea through the rest of the neighbourhood, drawing connections between the core concepts important to children and the things communities do. "Spoons become more than passing intrigues. They become musical instruments, a spark for artistic expression, and even possible career paths." It's an intriguing idea, and I'm not surprised that the private foundations employed it to market their own project.

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Reflexive and Reflective Thinking Practices: What’s the Difference?
Tom Barrett, 2021/11/02

My first thought on reading this was that this is a made-up distinction, but before actually writing that, I looked it up on Google, and I guess it's a thing. Here's the distinction, as described by Tom Barrett: "Reflection focuses on your thoughts, feelings, and actions... on the other hand, reflexive thinking is a way of being in the world that involves noticing patterns in your experience." Here's a reference from the University of Warwick, and here it is discussed in Wikipedia as a social theory, describing where "theories in a discipline should apply equally to the discipline itself." So - combining all this - 'reflexive thinking' is thinking about your thinking in such a way as to inform your thinking itself. Now to me there's still a sense in which this is a made-up distinction. It's hard for me to imagine focusing on my thoughts, feelings, and actions without informing my future thinking.

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A Tale of Two Software
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2021/11/02

Alan Levine draws a distinction between one software, which is open source, and another, which is "'free' software owned by one of the biggest commercial firms in the biz." The open source software is Discourse while the commercial software is Flipgrid, which was absorbed by Microsoft in 2018. The 'tale' here isn't surprising: the support for the open source software was immediate and useful, while the commercial software threw up some access barriers that were pointless and confusing. My own observation is that both Microsoft and Google have been trying to collect all these social applications under 'teams' or 'workplaces' such that people must 'belong' to one in order to access the application. The business model here is that the organization or institution that created the team or workspace will pay a subscription fee.

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Convert Almost Any Webpage Into RSS Feed With Inoreader’s Web Feeds
Inoreader blog, 2021/11/02

I've been testing the Feedly version of this for a few weeks now (the best use is to convert the ADL news page) but I'm glad to see the feature on other services as well. What I would really like to see is for these services to simply convert the page to a feed that any other service could use. It's a pro feature on both Inoreader and Feedly. Via Aaron Davis.

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