OLDaily

Into the metaverse: What does it hold for the future of L&D?
Calvin Coffee, Chief Learning Officer, 2022/05/25

So here's the claim for the metaverse and learning: "When you put a headset on for 20 to 25 minutes and learn by doing, you're getting the same learning outcome as watching that PowerPoint lecture for three hours in that video from 1994." It's a ridiculous claim, of course. First, because the learning outcome from the PowerPoint lecture is a very low bar. Second, because the result of putting on the headset can range between zero learning all the way through to inspirational. And third, because the metaverse, properly so-called, isn't really about VR technology, it's about the persistence of objects in virtual environments (see this diagram to keep the meanings clear). So let's back up, take a deep breath, and think about what we're talking about here.

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Emergency Remote Teaching and me: An autoethnography by a digital learning specialist during Covid-19
Sophia Mavridi, Studies in Technology Enhanced Learning, 2022/05/25

I haven't been able to see it, but Inside Higher Ed reports on a letter calling for the retraction of an article entitled African Studies Keyword: Autoethnography. The argument is that the essay "is trying to inaugurate what it sees as a new genre of scholarly writing in African studies via encouraging white Euro-American scholars to focus extensively on themselves while ostensibly writing about African cultures, societies or histories." I am in no position to comment on any of this, but what I can do is point to this example of autoethnography, which I thought contained a good description of the writing process in an education technology domain. I also share a link to this autoethnographic study by Osholene Oshobugie to describe, in part, "how the understanding and development of my African Indigenous Knowledge, ontology, and unlearning of western educational epistemology impacted my growth as an educator." This thesis also contains a good account of the autoethnographic methodology, again in an educational context.

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Why UK journalism's class problem matters, and what can be done about it
Andrew Kersley, PressGazette, 2022/05/25

This article presents the change in the demographics of journalists as a puzzle. "They must be entering from somewhere," says Spilsbury. "But we don't fully understand where the engine for that is coming from." But we find the answer in the next paragraph. "Some 98% of new entrants to journalism have an undergraduate degree and 36% have a masters... Oxford and Cambridge function essentially as feeder schools for large tranches of the British media in London." So you can see the issue. This article came out within a few minutes of another article on WonkHE addressing a similar sort of issue, where universities are coordinating with schools. For example, "One third of the students at Aston University Engineering Academy who progress to university choose Aston University." But this sort of arrangement very much steers students toward - or away from - specific professions, without giving them much of a chance to move from the class they were born into.

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How corporate takeovers are fundamentally changing podcasting
John Sullivan, Nieman Lab, 2022/05/25

Podcasting was a nice thing we all had, an open media way to share audio content. But we're not allowed to have nice things in 2022. "One of the recent shifts in podcasting has been the introduction of paywalls and exclusive content. It has since become a standard feature of the medium," writes John Sullivan. "As companies like Spotify, Amazon, NPR, SiriusXM and iHeartMedia aggressively monetize and market exclusive podcast content on their platforms, they've positioned themselves as the new gatekeepers." This includes things like proprietary syndication formats, ad tech, and integration into live radio and music services. But... they may have purchased all the RSS-based podcast clients, but they can't eliminate RSS and people can keep creating new clients. So real podcasting will continue. "But grassroots podcasting will find itself competing with the professionalized, platform-dominated version of the medium that's hit-driven and slickly produced, with cross-media tie-ins and big budgets." (p.s. my Ed Radio podcast has run uninterrupted since, I don't know, 2003 or so. Here's the RSS. Here's the page. Here's the archived OG Ed Radio).

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About the Class Technologies Acquisition of Blackboard Collaborate
Phil Hill, 2022/05/25

Back in pre-history there was a really good live conferencing platform called Elluminate. We used it to offer live sessions in some of our MOOCs from 2008 and on. It was acquired by Blackboard, renamed Collaborate, and vanished from the public view (so did our pioneering Elluminate recordings, which were in a proprietary format, and lost forever). Until the pandemic we lurched along with bad tech like Adobe Connect and Google Hangouts. Then came Zoom and we had a good way to do live sessions again. Former Blackboard CEO Michael Chasen even launched a Zoom-based addon called Class. And now he's acquiring Collaborate, which I assume will allow him to free Class from being wholly dependent on Zoom. Phil Hill, in his analysis, suggests "that does go against Blackboard's strategy of providing a common data service based on shared platforms from the company." But I don't see why it would - it seems likely Class would share data with Blackboard (and, indeed, other partner LMSs), and (if well executed) could collect data form any number of videoconferencing platforms - Zoom, Collaborate, Teams, Jitsi, whatever.

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