OLDaily

Ballerina for Full-Stack Developers: A Guide to Creating Backend APIs
Imesha Sudasingha, InfoQ, 2022/03/14

This is a useful article even if you have no intention of installing and using Ballerina, which is a programming language designed to make it easy for developers to build server application programming interfaces (API). It's useful because it covers the full scope of API development and deployment, and thus provides an overview of all the moving parts in a typical service oriented website (which includes everything from an online store to an LMS). From an implementation perspective, the reason you'd use a product like Ballerina is to allow it to handle a lot of the API overhead, including authentication, logging, tracing and security.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Why You Should Try Firefox on Android
Joe Fedewa, 2022/03/14

I use Firefox pretty much exclusively, and there's one simple reason: no ads. With the UBlock Origin plugin, I've been able to eliminate ads just about everywhere (except on YouTube, and since I use it extensively, I do pay for the YouTube Premium ad-free experience). I hate advertising with a passion and have done everything I can to prevent those insidious messages from influencing me. Anyhow, Firefox works just fine on Android and I tend to use it, instead of an app, to browse most services. If you're using Chrome, Edge or (choke) Safari, you're not getting the web experience you should be getting.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain by Annie Murphy Paul (A Guide for Educators)
Jackie Gerstein, User Generated Education, 2022/03/14

Jackie Gerstein summarizes a book and paper by Annie Murphy Paul and includes an embed in the post so you can read it for yourself. I think people will find both the discussion and the paper interesting. The idea is that there is a host 'extra-neural' resources that help us in our thinking - "the feelings and movements of our bodies, the physical spaces in which we learn and work, and the minds of those around us." We've seen this theme echo though the literature in forms such as 'embodied cognition' and even the 'outboard brain'. What Annie Murphy Paul seems to be doing here is not so much to 'extend' the mind as to use things like bodily awareness and context-sensitivity to enhance our receptivity to the environment and sharpen our perceptual awareness. Nothing wrong with that. It's just not the 'extended mind' as is usually conceived, where cognition actually takes place external to (what we think of as) the mind.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Educational Data Mining for Student Performance Prediction: A Systematic Literature Review (2015-2021)
Muhammad Haziq Bin Roslan, Chwen Jen Chen, 2022/03/14

I think that student performance prediction is one of the least interesting applications of learning analytics, but a lot of people are very interested in it. This paper (33 page PDF - 12 of text, the rest references) follows the very typical pattern of a systematic literature review (keyword search in commercial database, selection of relevant articles, filtering for quantitative studies). The study found more algorithms (89) being used than there were papers in the study (58). The authors also found "Another most used aspect to predict student performance is student demographics. Age, ethnicity, gender, housing, family history, and family socioeconomic level are among the student demographics." This is consistent with 25 years worth of studies I've reported here in OLDaily, and many more years before that. But if nobody's going to do anything about these disadvantages, what's the point of reporting on them?

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Open Education Week 2022 Lightning Talks: Recordings and Slides
2022/03/14

We had a nice bit of informative fun last week as I moderated the Creative Commons Lightning Talks, a series of seven seven-minute talks on OER in learning. "The lighting talks covered everything from leveraging tax legislation for open education funding, to theories and practices around OER, fireside stories of open sharing, and even a Texas Sing-a-long!"

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Influence of Learning Engagement on Learning Effect under a Virtual Reality (VR) Environment
Youyang Xin, International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning, 2022/03/14

This is a study of 82 students at the School of Architectural Engineering in an ordinary provincial university in Henan province, China. You would expect that there is an influence on learning outcomes, and that's what this paper (12 page PDF) unsurprisingly finds. "In the test immediately conducted after the experiment, the two groups show evident differences in learning performance, and the learning performance in the experimental group is higher than that in the control group. In the second test implemented one week later, the learning performance in the experimental group is also markedly higher than that in the control group." As usual, we should generalize to entire populations on the basis of this one small study.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]