OLDaily

Pedagogy vs. Andragogy: What's the Difference?
Cindy Nebel, The Learning Scientists, 2022/03/18

This is an introductory-level post but offers a fairly comprehenmsive account of the distinction between 'pedagogy' and 'andragogy', summarizing from Malcolm Knowles's The Making of an Adult Educator. The latter term is typically used to refer to the teaching process in adult learning, and it's different because adults have different characteristics as learners: they have more life experience, are often more disciplined, and can be more self-directed. But also, "it seems as though pedagogy has shifted to look more and more like the andragogy that Knowles describes. The primary difference between child and adult learners? Their motivation to learn… sometimes."

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Tech Futurist at SXSW Predicts Gloomy Future
Pernille Tranberg, DataEthics, 2022/03/18

This is a blog summary of a talk by tech futurist Amy Webb (and in this genre we forgive spelling and grammar because it's hard to capture a talk on the fly like that). Some scenarios:

• "AI systems won't need our faces anymore to recognise us. It can recognise us by our unique heart beat, by our unique breathing patterns or our unique gait: silhouette, height, speed, and walking characteristics."
• "The next Internet, Web 3, will become more embodied and sensory, and data will make it all work."
• "Death is more optional, everything is genetically modified, we know how our food is made, we have regulation, and we are eating tons of healthy, synthetic meat."

Mostly this makes sense to me. The big question marks are the timing (the third prediction is set 15 years from now but my experience is that the future is a lot slower than we think) and whether we'll get the utopian or the dystopian versions of the tech. Or both.

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This Animal’s Behavior Is Mechanically Programmed
Jordana Cepelewicz, Quanta Magazine, 2022/03/18

This is the coolest thing I've read in a while. "In a trio of preprints totaling more than 100 pages (biophysicists Manu Prakash and Matthew Storm Bull) showed that the behavior of Trichoplax could be described entirely in the language of physics and dynamical systems...  the well-orchestrated grace, agility and efficiency with which the thousands to millions of cells in Trichoplax move... usually requires neurons and muscles - and Trichoplax has neither." I read this partially as vindication for some schools of embodied cognition and partially as vindication for the idea that we don't actually need cognition at all. Either way, it stirs the imagination.

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Google Magic
Ben Williamson, Ben Williamson, 2022/03/18

Google's latest upgrades to Classroom are "all about injecting more artificial intelligence into schools," writes Ben Williamson. In particular, they've launched what they call Practice Sets, a tool that allows teachers to transform instructional materials into interactive assignments that are autograded by the Google engine. According to the Google blog post, "the kids were calling it 'Google magic' because of the hints, pop-ups and instant feedback they received." Williamson does not appear to be a fan. "These marketing materials are presented in a highly persuasive way," he writes. "Google marketing is also highly technosolutionist. It proposes that datafied forms of surveillance and automation are ideally suited to solving the problems of schooling." And, he notes, the 'gee whiz' aspect of magic often serves to obscure the more important topics of "privacy policies and user agreements, that are reshaping teaching and learning in schools.

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The future is bright - the future is hybrid
Zac Woolfitt, Video Teaching, 2022/03/18

This article offers a tour of four "advanced hybrid learning spaces", featuring rooms at the University of Amsterdam, KU Leuven, Imperial College London, and Oulu University of Applied Sciences, Finland. They remind me a lot of the videoconferencing classrooms back in the 90s and 00s, but now they're supported with a range of digital conferencing tools and services. I'm honestly not a fan. I think in-person learning spaces will add more and more digital services, including conferencing and recording, but putting people into the seats either turns them into a studio audience or it privileges them, to the detriment of online participants. Still, it's a pretty good article with some nice examples of what's going on in the space.

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Cornerstone Acquires EdCast: Corporate Learning Market Disrupted
John Bersin, 2022/03/18

The lede of this story is the EdCast acquisition by Cornerstone, a $5 billion giant in the corporate learning field that grew through acquisitions of Saba, Lumesse, Halogen, and others. But the article is a good overview of the space as a whole. The corporate learning market is complex, to say the least, and is depicted here as divided into a series of layers, ranging from the access layer (the productivity software where employees access learning resources) through the learning experience layer to the learning management system, business rules, and finally to the data layer in the back end. But more: "the big priority in most companies is to build an integrated platform for skills" which "requires a skills taxonomy for learning, one that understands careers and mobility, and one that can be used for recruiting."

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