OLDaily

Metaverse - a look into the possible abyss
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, 2022/01/03

I've already linked to the first two parts of this series, so I may as well cover part 3. In this post Donald Clark questions the web3-metaverse land grab. "The libertarian roots of Silicon Valley have outgrown their teenage years. They’re now greedy adults - they want it all." We've seen this scenario play out before, with the dot.com land rush, the Second Life land rush, and most recently, the NFT land rush. Before that it was casinos and forex and similarly greasy online enterprises. The new web3 world, notes Clark, is much more sophisticated than any of these. It will be of a lot of use. But let's not pretend that libertarianism will do anything other than make the rich people richer. To make web3 work, it will need to be owned - and managed - by the community. Not by Facebook.

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A CC Only Google Images Bookmarklet By Request
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2022/01/03

"Everybody should blog," says Ben Werdmüller. Alan Levine is an example of this. One thing spawn another spawns another and we find ourselves advancing the state of the art as a whole one step at a time. And so we have his Google Creative Commons Image Search bookmarklet (and a whole article describing its creation). The bookmarklet is nice; the example he sets is even nicer. See also this follow-up post.

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What Is “Presence” in VR, and Why Is it So Important?
Sydney Butler, How-To Geek, 2022/01/03

I've always defined 'presence' informally as 'the feeling there's a real person at the other end'. Educators will be familiar with the concept of presence as described by Anderson, Archer and Garrison. This article describes 'presence' as "a feeling of being in a place other than where you are." presence is "the secret sauce that makes modern VR magical." What's significant is that presence isn't created by the medium, it's created by the perceiver. So we don't need 100% fidelity to generate presence, just enough of the key ingredients needed to convince the mind that we're some place talking to someone. This article looks a bit at what those ingredients are, like image stability and refresh rate.

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Online Learning Can Be Engaging and Effective
Howard Rheingold, Medium, 2022/01/03

Those of us who have been working in online learning for a long time know it can be engaging and effective, provided certain conditions apply. And Howard Rheingold has working in it for longer than most. "Online learning done badly is often the reason for negative outcomes," he writes. Characteristics of what Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown call A New Culture of Learning, he writes, is that "it is learner-centered, social and peer-to-peer, inquiry based, collaborative, cooperative, playful, networked." And these take new skills, what he calls "the metaskills of co-learning, blended learning, and informed use of social media." I agree, and this has been my experience as well. There's more detail in this article, worth a look if your first foray into 'remote learning' has been less than ideal. Image: Walden.

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The speed of science
Saloni Dattani, Nathaniel Bechhofer, Works in progress, 2022/01/03

As I read this article I can think of all the reasons why this idealistic proposal wouldn't work. But that makes it none the less compelling. I think that a domain like education especially would benefit from what might be thought of as open cooperative research. Dattani & Bechhofer's main point here isn't so much to standardize research (at least on my reading) as it is to divide the work and open it up so it can scale. If, then, standards emerge, they would emerge organically, through practice, rather than by fiat by organizations (with an agenda to promote) declaring this to define 'evidence' and that to define 'outcomes'. But there's more - like beginning the publication process and declaring the methodology before the study is carried out, for example, so there's no bias toward publishing favourable results.

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In 1953, a Telephone-Company Executive Predicts the Rise of Modern Smartphones and Video Calls
Colin Marshall, Open Culture, 2022/01/03

This is just a short article featuring a dead-on prediction about the future of telephones from 1953. I'm sure it's not the only one. The main point, made here by Colin Marshall, is that "in all human history, not a single piece of technology has actually come out of nowhere." That's a point worth keeping in mind the next time you read about some 'breakthrough' invention. The breakthrough is mostly in the marketing.

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