OLDaily

Putting the Meh in MOOCs
Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, 2021/12/07

Martin Weller reviews three papers for the GO-GN annual research review that leave him underwhelmed. "Overall, I was left with the feeling of 'is that it?'," he writes. "Next year marks a decade since 'The Year of the MOOC' and after all that disruption (sooo much disruption), and death of universities, what we actually have is less 'Massive' and more 'meh'." Well, yeah. But I think the problem isn't with MOOCs, it's with the nature of academic research. Working in small teams using very small data sets under 'reserach'-oriented publishing constraints, researchers can only study small instances and advance in small increments (if they advance at all).  "We have online courses that don’t revolutionise employment, don’t democratise education and whose pedagogy is flawed," writes Weller. Well, we have instances of those things. But these results hardly generalize.

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Online Learning Can Be Engaging and Effective
Howard Rheingold, Medium, 2021/12/07

"Untrained in the use of digital, networked media, educators at all levels around the world found themselves attempting to shoehorn their traditional curriculum into Zoom sessions," writes Howard Rheingold. But it doesn't have to be. In this longish article he describes how he "challenged myself as well as my learners to build a co-learning community in the 8 or 15 weeks we had together." The article covers the process with a fair degree of detail, and would be useful to people thinking of trying the same thing. Image: Faculty Focus.

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Fostering Students' Cognitive Achievement Through Employing Virtual Reality Laboratory (VRL)
Dian Ernawati, Jaslin Ikhsan, International Journal of Online and Biomedical Engineering, 2021/12/07

I studied titration and redox reactions in high school. Back then we'd use a pipette, into which we would inhale the liquid. Oh, for the days when safety meant nothing! Much safer methods are used today. But achieving precise measurements is still a skill that needs to be practiced to be learned (as we all learned watching Breaking Bad). This article looks at achieving that practice in VR using (heavy and clunky and, for me, too small) Oculus headsets. So did it work? Well, they remembered the names of things (hence showing 'cognitive achievement'). How about the practice? "Errors that arose during laboratory work due to reading data, turning faucets, or being contaminated by chemical materials were minimized."

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With Decentralized Identity, Your Reputation Travels With You Across Cyberspace
Scott Kominers, Jad Esber, Future, 2021/12/07

I'm sure that headline will not bring joy to a lot of people, though it would be really nice to move on from userid and password combinations. Here's the gist: "one’s crypto wallet would function as a sort of profile, similar to Facebook or LinkedIn. But unlike web2 profiles, decentralized identities are backed by hard evidence: a permanent, timestamped record of a person’s accomplishments, contributions, interests, and activities to date." Fine, but we don't want to have to show the equivalent of our driver's license or health care card top log on to a website. So decentralized ID is also going to have to support anonymized ID. It's not clear though that governments and advertisers are ready to allow that. Image: IBM.

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Ameca Humanoid Robot AI Platform
Engineered Arts, YouTube, 2021/12/07

First look at Ameca. Released just a few days ago, this video has become an instant meme. The focus is on the lifelike expressions of the android to be viral - check out the screaming robot head (lower right) and the disgruntled employee in the background. Still, it shows that robots don't have to be expressionless, and suggest a future where robots will be much more emotive and interactive. Still don't think they can be teachers?

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How Julien Codorniou built an enterprise software startup inside Facebook
Lizzy Lawrence, Protocol, 2021/12/07

This article discusses Workplace, an enterprise social media platform created by Facebook (now called Meta) Facebook’s Workplace leader,  Julien Codorniou, is leaving after 11 years, and in this article talks about the product’s success, and the uphill battle to create enterprise technology in a company called Facebook. Workplace, he says, was the only software as a service (SaaS) platform within Facebook, but now there's business messaging with WhatsApp Business and Messenger for Business, Portal for work, and  Oculus Business.

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