OLDaily

Blogging an Unpublished Paper: South African & Egyptian Academic Developers’ Perceptions of AI in Education
Maha Bali, Reflecting Allowed, 2022/03/16

This is the first post in a series of posts (I won't link to all ten, but I love the photo of sparrows in the last part) which together comprise an unpublished paper. Me, I would have just published one long post, not ten parts. But each to their own. The article is focused on actual teacher experiences of "three applications of machine learning in higher education: plagiarism-detection systems such as Turnitin.com, automated grading, and teacher bots, and two others, speech recognition and automated translation," based on interviews with ten academic developers. It's interesting reading, but it's hard not to treat an interview with ten people as anything other than a (not always informed) opinion article. Hint: when blogging a multi-part article, it's really important to make sure each post has links to the 'previous' and 'next' page, and perhaps to an 'index', as I do here and here.

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Virtual Learning Done Right
Eric Sheninger, A Principal's Reflections, 2022/03/16

My first thought on reading the title was "Thank goodness someone has figured out how to do virtual learning right". But then I felt I should be more charitable, and view it as a set of instructions for getting started. But I also think it would be very hard to follow these instructions because they're just so generic. The second requirement, for example, is "the consistent use of an LMS such as Google Classroom, Schoology, or Canvas." Third is "Tier 1 instruction and engagement", which appears to be some blend of instructivist approaches along with the caution to "ensure that students are empowered to think and apply their thinking in meaningful ways." Then we get 'breakout rooms', which seem to have appeared out of nowhere. This is a classic example of a 'paint-by-numbers' blog post, where a bunch of topics are hastily assembled in some sort of order with no real regard for the overall message or cohesion at all, and is more likely to confuse than to enlighten.

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Cultivating Student Resilience to Resist Institutional Replication
Eileen Camfield, Taylor Fugere, James Barnes, Maria D. Ramirez Loyola, Hybrid Pedagogy, 2022/03/16

The purpose of this article is to develop "a multifaceted and synergistic portrait of transformational resilience, the capacity to 'bounce back' from adversity without compromising one's core identity and capitulating to pressures to assimilate to dominant academic norms." I don't think it succeeds in that aim, though it does make a useful distinction between 'transactional' and 'transformational' resilience. But it is far too rooted in the 'student' experience (and especially the U.S. student experience) to draw a portrait of resilience that is useful to the wider community, and this correspondingly weakens the discussion of student literacy.

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Welcome to the Metaverse, did you bring your NFTs?
Stefanie Panke, Leandro Rossi Sampaio, AACE Review, 2022/03/16

Short article on web3 and the metaverse from an AACE perspective. It starts with the obligatory reference to Neal Stephenson, mentions Non-fungible tokens (NFT), depicts web3 as 'Read-Write-Own', and raised the obligatory sceptical note from Jaron Lanier. AACE should do better.

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Perlego raises $50M to build out its vision of being the ‘Spotify for textbooks’
Ingrid Lunden, TechCrunch, 2022/03/16

Given how bad Spotify is (think Joe Rogan, paywalls, anti-RSS behaviour) it's not clear to me why anyone would want to be the 'Spotify of anything'. Also, given how limited textbooks are, it's hard to see why anyone would want to be the 'Anything of textbooks'. But here we have it. Perlego also has VC backing, which means a drive to create profits in the short term. On the other hand, "The London startup currently has 400,000 paying subscribers who get all-you-can-read access to some 850,000 titles — textbooks, fiction and other literature that students are assigned as coursework." And "It now has linked up with 6,000 institutions to fulfill class and course syllabi across 172 countries." I'm not sure what 'linked up' means in this context. It also appears to spam search results - or as it puts it: "Perlego claims that in 2021, it intercepted 2.1 million searches online for 'free' pirated textbooks."

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Defining the process to literature searching in systematic reviews: a literature review of guidance and supporting studies
Chris Cooper, Andrew Booth, Jo Varley-Campbell, Nicky Britten, Ruth Garside, BMC Medical Research Methodology, 2022/03/16

I'm fully into my Data Literacy Unmooc and went through a number of papers discussing literature reviews today. This paper was quite a good overview, I thought - it's a literature review of guides to doing literature reviews. I thought it would be useful to the many ed tech researchers doing literature reviews. A few other good finds: How to write a superb literature review, Nature; Advanced Literature Search Guide, Suffolk; Literature Searching Explained, Leeds.

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