OLDaily

Why I’m Not Too Worried About Learning Loss
John Spencer, 2022/01/19

Like John Spencer, I'm much less worried about 'learning loss' than many others in the field. Why? As Spencer says, "it can help to ask, “What do students need in the long run?” instead of focusing entirely on single learning standards or benchmark test results." If we're just focused on catching up with content knowledge, we may be doing more harm than good. Students need to develop a wider range of skills, they need time for deeper learning, and they need time for play. The pandemic - in my view - has given them space to realize (as Spencer says) that they're not working for the teacher, they're working for themselves.

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Can't finish my master's thesis. What to do?
TheManveru, Reddit, 2022/01/19

Good thread with what I think is a pretty typical problem and a lot of good advice in what to do. Long story short: the student is working at a company as part of his Master's Thesis, he's doing an AI project, and it's not going well, and he's having doubts about the whole thing. Most people are telling him to get his academic guidance from his professorial supervisor, not his boss at the company. That's the thing with these theses: they're usually in areas the students are really interested in (they were for me) and if they go south it can feel like an existential crisis. But in fact, there's no real need to advance the state of the art with a thesis (much less a Masters thesis).

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Map of New Brunswick with Indigenous place names highlights continued presence
Oscar Baker III, CBC News, 2022/01/19

I was at a meeting this afternoon where the age-old question of what counts as an 'educational resource' came up. As usual, I said 'anything can be an educational resource' and encouraged people to think of educational uses or features as 'properties' of the resource, rather than defining what type of resource it is. A case in point is this map. To my mind, it's a great educational resource, making it clear how the original indigenous population of New Brunswick regarded the land. But it also serves other purposes, for example, "highlighting the continued presence of Indigenous people in New Brunswick." And maybe even it will lead eventually to some places being renamed so they reflect less the province's colonial conquests and more the land and the people the way it was.

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Teach in the Metaverse
Frame, 2022/01/19

Jennifer Gonzalez talks about "an emerging group of tools is trying to bridge that gap, using VR technology to create online spaces that feel more three-dimensional, allowing participants to move through virtual spaces as if they are physically in a room together." One such is Frame, featured here, which looks a lot like the VR rooms of old, but accessible through your browser or through a VR headset. Though that said I don't really see the point of creating a virtual environment that looks like an office or auditorium. There's a free tier, so you can go in and play and maybe make something more creative.

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Should bad science be censored on social media?
Rachel Schraer, BBC News, 2022/01/19

The article references (but doesn't link to) a new report from the British Royal Society (100 page PDF) that asserts "governments and social media platforms should not rely on content removal as a solution to online scientific misinformation" (p.10). Instead, "The UK Government should invest in lifelong, nationwide, information literacy initiatives" (p. 21). Now if you read the BBC article, you would read "the report authors believe, social media sites should adjust their algorithms to prevent it going viral - and stop people making money off false claims." That's not what it says.

The closest we get to that is a remark in the foreward by Frank Kelly saying "we will need to see legislation which can address the incentives of business models that shape the algorithms determining the spread of content." But this sentiment is found nowhere in the recommendations. And that's the problem. If regulation and even censorship for accuracy in media are being considered, then state and commercial media are, arguably, equally in need of regulation. A better approach, generally, is open access, support for media plurality, and better media literacy. Which is what the Royal Society report actually says (see especially their extended discussion on this pp. 62-28).

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