OLDaily

Presentation
Opportunities for Education in the Metaverse
Stephen Downes, May 13, 2022, Smart Education Summit: Reinventing education in the Metaverse era, Online, via Teams, to Rabat, Morocco

This short presentation introduces major elements of the metaverse, outlines some applications for education, discusses how it may be combined with other technologies for advanced applications, and outlines some issues and concerns.

[Link] [Slides] [Audio] [Video]

The semantics of diversity in higher education: differences between the Global North and Global South
Pedro Pineda, Shweta Mishra, Higher Education, 2022/05/13

The point couldn't be plainer. "Diversity discourses are dominant, but only in the USA and Canada, UK and Ireland and Europe, not being present in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America... We did not find any evidence that the semantics of diversity has become global or universal." The same I believe is true of many of the other ethical principles being promoted as core to, say, open pedagogy. "Only countries in the Global North adopt the vocabulary of diversity, and there are strong regional differences in its conceptualisation as well as the topics covered." I'm not saying that we in the west are wrong when we talk about diversity and all the rest of it - indeed, these are principles to which I am quite attached - but we should advance the global discourse with an appropriate degree of humility and a recognition that our problems are not everybody's problems.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Libraries and “Web3” – Vapourware or should you care?
Scott Leslie, Google Slides, 2022/05/13

This is one of the more comprehensive presentations of web3 in a learning context I've seen recently. The medium is Google slides, but the content is dense enough to be useful. There are overviews of tome of the major terms - blockchain, DAO, NFTs - leading to an overview of the fediverse. Scott Leslie then explores how libraries have started to work with web3 before looking at some of the issues and concerns. "The idea is that they can provide the best of both worlds - local instances, serving local communities with locally appropriate policies, and yet scalable via federation."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

14 Equity Considerations for Ed Tech
Reed Dickson, Campus Technology, 2022/05/13

This article is mostly a taxonomy of types of equity in educational technology organized along the lines of an enticing 'TAXI' mnenomic - Tech, Accessibility, Experience and Identity. The upshot is that author Reed Dickson is concerned about things like direct instruction and the 'banking' method short-cutting equity considerations. 

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Connectivism and its discontents
2022/05/13

I was initially enthused at the thought of reading a heady criticism of connectivism, but this completely anonymous web leaves me wanting just because it's so short. Still, the critique is on point. It asks "How does the connectivist cMOOC e-Learning 3.0 demonstrate the theory in which it is grounded?" It starts out OK. "It feels more familiar and authentic that the typical video-quiz-discussion structure of the standard MOOC." But the low rate of participation tells. "Looking at the surface analysis above, #el30 seems small, dislocated and disconnected, affectless and cold. Because it lacks living material warmth, a certain touch and affect which renders these interactions 'emotional, affiliative and meaning-rich'." All fair enough, I suppose. Having had more people would have helped a lot, I think. And also a better way to support direct interaction. But yeah, "the actual practice feels trickier to grasp."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Why Improving Student Learning is So Hard
David Wiley, improving learning, 2022/05/13

David Wiley offers convincing reasons to explain why it's so hard to improve learning, but I find myself frustrated by both the lack of precision and the paucity of imagination. To begin with the former: how are we measuring 'improve learning' or the 'difficulty' of it? While this may seem a pedantic question, it's Wiley who offers a formula ("the difficulty of making meaningful improvements in student learning is roughly equivalent to the difficulty of helping students change the way they study multiplied times the difficulty of helping faculty change the way they teach") with no data to support it nor even the units in which that data would be expressed. And this reflects the paucity of imagination. If we knew what counts as improvement, we could think beyond such tried and true solutions as "assigning students interactive courseware" or "helping students engage in more effective learning activities", as though there were no other variables we could consider or manipulate.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]