OLDaily

Publisher paywall strategies for 2022: AI driving dynamic subscription technology
Freddy Mayhew, PressGazette, 2022/03/03

I've mentioned these before but I just want to say again that AI-driven paywalls have me pulling out my hair. I want to provide links only to open access resources. If you click a link in OLDaily and hit a paywall, I've failed. But paywalls these days are disguised; sometimes they appear invisible, depending on what the AI says, while at other times (when they think they've found a potential client) the barrier goes up. "Dynamic paywalls use an industry-standard “propensity to convert” score which, once reached, means a reader is likely to subscribe. Only then will they be prompted to pay." I personally think it's pretty deceptive. It certainly makes my job harder.

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How We Can Make Sense of Chaos
David S. Richeson, Quanta, 2022/03/03

The good part of this article is that in the first third or so it offers a nice way to think of an 'attractor'. I can easily picture a a function whose possible outputs can also be inputs, allowing us to repeatedly plug the outputs of the function back in as inputs, getting closer and closer to a value, which is the 'attractor'. Nice. But it lost me with this metaphor: "Much like a candymaker pulling taffy, it stretches that interval to twice its length, folds it in half, and sets it back on the original interval." This is the first use of the term 'interval' in the article, and I lose any sense of what, exactly, is being stretched. Or even what it means to 'stretch an interval'. It just shows how hard it is to write articles that explain things. I wish we could have in articles like this a way to test the concepts, the way I can test a concept by writing computer code. Seeing and manipulating the mathematical objects would make them easier to work with. At least for me.

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When Graphics Lower Learning
Patti Shank, eLearning Industry, 2022/03/03

The title here is a bit misleading. The idea is that, if you want people to learn X, the graphic should show X and not, say, "Y", and not, say, "X,Y,Z,Q,P,R". Some graphics don't do this. These graphics don't actually 'lower' learning. Rather, the result of using the graphic is that, on average, people learn less well than they would with clear graphics. Expressed properly, this is a good point about the need for clear and effective graphics. Where I have problems with such a discussion is when it verges into pseudoscience, for example describing how graphics place "high demands on working memory, which is needed to process new information but is limited." (I note with irony that the cognitive load discussion distracts from the main point of the article, and how the example used in the cognitive load discussion is completely different from the example used in the main article - clearly showing the author violating the very point she's trying to make).

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Higher Education in the melting pot: Emerging discourses of the 4IR and Decolonisation
Felix Maringe, AOSIS Books, 2022/03/03

This is an open access book studying "the epistemological, ontological, axiological and methodological assumptions behind the ideologies of decolonisation and the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR)" as they play out in the context of a changing educational system in South Africa. In particular, write the authors, "we are centrally concerned with how the powerful ideologies of the 4IR, and the imperatives of decolonisation confront or complement each other in development trajectories of post-colonial countries." Readers here will not be surprised that the authors find "the world (the social world in particular) is not as orderly as we assume it to be... The connectedness of things, even in their diverse and oppositional ways is the fabric that holds systems together (and)... Diversity and deviance are the chief architects of change and transformation, much more so than are similarity and compliance." From these starting points, the book offers an extended treatment of what decolonization looks like in education in South Africa. See also this short introductory video.

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Shaping skills and lifelong learning for the future of work
International Labour Office, 2022/03/03

This is a lengthy document (115 page PDF) that says essentially that a "new generation of skills and a lifelong learning ecosystem need to be jointly developed and implemented by governments and social partners to ensure a just and inclusive transition to a future of work that contributes to sustainable development in its economic, social and environmental dimensions." The report includes a fairly detailed analysis of changes in job markets expected as a result of automation, climate change, Covid, migration and demographics. It considers existing and future educational attainment goals, unemployment trends, informal employment, adult learning and skills mismatch. Much of it won't be new but we benefit from the report's international perspective, rather than a focus on one country.

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