OLDaily

Open Pedagogy and the Inclusion of Marginalized Students
Deirdre Maultsaid, KPU Teaching and Learning Commons, 2022/05/06

Deirdre Maultsaid argues that "Open Pedagogy is inclusive for all, especially marginalized and underrepresented students." I would have thought that this was generally understood, though I suppose it's something that bears repeating. "We must listen to the experiences of marginalized students," writes Maultsaid. "These students are often the most isolated, degraded and bullied. They can be physically and emotionally excluded from the full postsecondary experience." I agree, but would add that there are many ways to be marginalized beyond race, ability and gender. As a result, I think that open pedagogy doesn't mean specific technologies, but rather, as Maultsaid says, "one significant intent of Open Pedagogy is to encourage student agency. We can celebrate students as contributors to evolving repositories of OER and to evolving public knowledge."

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Virtual Reality Has Now Gone Mainstream For Corporate Training
Josh Bersin, Bersin, 2022/05/06

For the last year I've been involved peripherally in an VR-enabled training development product (for fire safety) so I've been exposed to some of the technology and methodology. I can well believe that it has gone mainstream in corporate training. It ticks all the boxes; it's flashy and high tech, people (mostly) enjoy using it, and it even sometimes produces real learning outcomes. It's also expensive and takes a long time to develop, so consultants like it too. This article features a company called STRIVR Labs for no particular reason (I always suspect the article in an advertorial in such cases), but it's just one of many companies involved in VR learning development and delivery.

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Google Announces AI-Generated Summaries for Google Docs
Anthony Alford, InfoQ, 2022/05/06

According to this article, Google has announced an AI-based document summarization feature in Google Docs. The summary field shows up above the contents in the navigation pane, and when an automated summary is available it generates a blue icon (alas, no blue icons for me). "The model is based on PEGASUS," writes Anthony Alford, "an NLP system for abstractive text summarization developed by the Brain Team. PEGASUS uses a pre-training scheme called Gap Sentence Prediction (GSP), which teaches the model to re-generate full sentences that have been masked from input text." It would be useful to have something like this wrtite abstracts for me (one of my least favourite authoring tasks).

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The World Bank delivers a blow to commercial practices in education
Ashina Mtsumi, Zsuzsanna Nyitray, World Education Blog, 2022/05/06

Normally I don't have many good things to say about the World Bank, but it's hard to find fault with them here, at least at first glance. The 'blow' being described is the World Bank's International Finance Corporation (IFC) divesting from New Globe Schools, better known as Bridge International Academies (BIA). BIA has already received funding of more than US$ 100 million. The divestment comes after a series of scandals and complaints, for example (as cited in this article), company's lack of compliance with the rule of law, violations of labour rights, child sexual abuse involving BIA staff and students, and inadequate health and safety measures. These remind me of the case of reesidential schools here in Canada. And as the article says, "Public education, managed and delivered publicly and in the public interest, is the most effective way to build just, inclusive, and sustainable societies, and to meet SDG 4 and human rights commitments."

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Visual literacy and fake news: Gaining a visual voice
Lesley Farmer, Studies in Technology Enhanced Learning, 2022/05/06

"Tracing the information cycle of fake news reveals steps where images can be faked in order to influence and impact consumers," writes Lesley Farmer. "Visual literacy can use the framework of a news media information cycle to empower people, especially marginalized populations, to become impactful civically engaged visual literacy consumers and producers." This article uses a number of good examples to demonstrate the visual literacy principles being described and their use in shaping (or distorting) perceptions.

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