OLDaily

Good online learning – group work
Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, 2022/04/01

Martin Weller argues that good online group work "is completely achievable, and will give all the same benefits you would gain from face to face group work, therefore it should be implemented for the same reasons." My own experience is that it is in many respects better. You don't get a lot of the posturing (and preening, and negging) that you get in real-world groupwork. People are more able to participate on their own terms, and it's harder to bully them into compliance. And when working online they have direct access to other resources, backchannels, tools, and all the other affordances of digital cooperation. Weller offers some cautionary notes - for example, that it can take longer to do some things online, it sometimes requires more planning, and 'retention' might be a bit lower.

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Ed Leaders: Your Path Out of COVID to a Radically Better Future Is Hiding in Plain Sight
Andy Calkin, Getting Smart, 2022/04/01

When I say that the role of the educator is to model and demonstrate, this is in part the sort of thing I have in mind: "To help students become capable, caring, self-directed learners and creative problem-solvers, these educators believe, their schools should deliberately model those same attributes for them—in their design of learning, for sure, but also in the ways the adults work together, address problems, design systems and procedures, and engage with the community." You can tell students things all you want (and we do an awful lot of that) but they will learn from what we do, not what we say.

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What Is Web3, and Could It Usher a New Economic System?
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, 2022/04/01

Imgur has a clever parody running today; I saw it here but it's probably gone now; view my capture here. It replaces the traditional 'up' and'down' voting arrows with cryptocurrency icons, the result being a 'value' created for each contribution. In a sense this parody represents the 'new economic system' contemplated here by Irving Wladawsky-Berger. The parody is funny because Imgur's rankings are really arbitrary and capricious, and converting them to currency would distort them beyond recognition (and take all the fun out of them). And that's the fear about web3 (and ed3, the online learning analogue). See also: Dion Hinchcliffe.

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Gamer types reimagined for student engagement
Simon Varwell, Sonny Maley, WonkHe, 2022/04/01

This article should be read for fun and not really taken seriously. It takes a typology developed in 1996 to describe online gamers to describe learners in 2022. I could certainly imagine it being applied to multi-player role-playing games, or even to contemporary games like No Man's Sky. But the categorizations themselves are weak: we have the achiever, the explorer, the socializar, and the killer. Even in 1996, though, we could have added categories like the builder, the storyteller or chronicler, the troll, and the newb. Does anything follow from these categorizations? Not really (you might use them as personas in game design, as a creative tool). But they're fun to think about.

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Using Courage, Compassion, and Connection to Combat Disconnection
Amy Winger, Faculty Focus, 2022/04/01

This article is written very passively and awkwardly. It is best represented with the following statement: "In using courage, compassion, and connection when communicating with students, it reduces perceived stress and enhances the student experience while also improving the teacher-student relationship." Oh! for a good editor. But I link to it because it raised a question in my mind: in the rush to move back to traditional in-person classes, how are we going to deal with the sudden loss of connection that students will feel? Is the physical presence of a teacher in a classroom going to be enough to replace the always-on instant connection students can experience when online? When a student experiences anxiety or depression in an in-person class, how are they able to reach out for help when they have no access to messaging?

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Hybrid classroom – the future way of teaching
Education Matters, 2022/04/01

You can read the article if you want to but if you're like me you'll be distracted by the photo and will start playing "how many things are wrong with this classroom ?" You can see from the branding on the wall that it's a ViewSonic hybrid classroom, so presumably it's their best effort, right? Yet look at how people have to be clumped into a tiny group in the centre to even see the view screen. You might notice (if you look carefully) a projection of the remote participants on the back wall. The room is colourful, which is nice, but visually distracting and yet boring at the same time. The desks are tiny and you couldn't really work on them. There are no plug-ins anyways. You might be thinking that with all wheels it would be easy to reorganize desks, and you could, but there's no way to have hybrid groups.

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