OLDaily

Bonfire
Bonfire, 2021/11/15

According to the web page, Bonfire is "working towards a future where communities can assemble their own social networks like lego blocks, to cultivate safe and private spaces while being interconnected with the rest of the 'fediverse' and the internet at wide on their own terms." To do this it implements ActivityPub along with a variety of other tools. Documentation is minimal to non-existent, and so Bonfire is still some distance away from widespread adoption. But I laud the ambition; it's an instantiation of the concept of 'community as consensus'. And the resources available - which can be loaded and tested in Docker - represent a significant commitment.

Web: [This Post]

Innovation in L&D and HR
Donald H. Taylor, 2021/11/15

This two part post (part one, part two) reports on Donald Taylor's People And Technology Innovation survey (PATI). It asked one core question of the 541 respondents : "Which HR/L&D issues are you looking to solve with innovative technologies?" As Taylor notes, respondents were self-selecting and  so the survey does not represent the overall population of L&D and HR professionals. Still, it's an interesting snapshot in which we see personalized learning and professional development among the top responses, with collaborative learning being much stronger in Europe than elsewhere.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Damasio & Immordino‐Yang - Role of emotion in learning
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, 2021/11/15

According to Antonio Damasio, "emotions play a central role in social cognition and decision-making." Indeed, the range of human responses across the affective domain play key roles; learning is not simply about knowledge and cognition (cognitive psychologists take note!). "Damasio’s important insight is that emotion, although pushed to the side as an object of scientific study, is always in the loop of reason. When we think emotions and reason are enmeshed. It not only regulates our lives, it regulates learning." Image from Domasio's TED talk.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Using ‘building blocks’ to develop digital education platforms cheaper and faster
Taskeen Adam, EdTechHub, 2021/11/15

The focus of this article is the use of building blocks to make educational technology cheaper and more accessible in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), but it's more than just that, summarizing a detailed report (119 page PDF) on the project and the concept in general. Do take the time to read the report. The idea of these 'building blocks' is that they are "open source, modular, interoperable pieces of code or software that can be (re)used to build or tailor platforms." They are platform-agnostic; "solutions that are not building blocks are plugins or application stores created for a specific platform (e.g., creating a feature for WordPress)." There's a ton of material here about the concept, evaluations of building block systems (OpenEMIS, DHIS2, Sunbird), deep dives on four countries (Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Kenya, South Sudan), stakeholders, risks, and recommendations.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

An End-to-End Data Pipeline for Managing Learning Analytics
Denis Gillet,, Sandy Ingram, Pedro Torres da Cunha, Joana Catarina Soares Machado, Juan Carlos Farah, International Conference on Information Technology Based Higher Education and Training, 2021/11/15

This paper (9 page PDF) proposes an end-to-end workflow for managing data in learning analytics. Probably the best part of it is the diagram, which summarizes the entire paper in one easy image. It's not clear from the article how much of it has been implemented, but certainly parts of it have been, as the authors describe features (such as custom algorithms) that currently exist. All in all, the paper provides a useful framework and a good foundation for future work.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

The relationship among motivation, self‑monitoring, self‑management, and learning strategies of MOOC learners
Meina Zhu, Min Young Doo, Journal of Computing in Higher Education, 2021/11/15

This study adapts Randy Garrison's Self-Directed learning (SDL) model to analyze the responses of 470 MOOC students (a tiny franction of the overall enrollment) to questions about self-monitoring and self-management during the course. Therefore, these results should be taken as a generalization only in the context of multiple studies of the same design. That said, the authors found "In the current study, self-monitoring and self-management did not influence the adoption of learning strategies," which may (in my view) be explained in terms of the direction offered by the MOOC itself.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]