OLDaily

Person in environment: Focusing on the ecological aspects of online and distance learning
George Veletsianos, et al., 2022/06/02

I had to check to make sure this wasn't Jon Dron's paper on a similar topic, but this paper (7 page PDF) has none of the depth or complexity of that one. It offers a thought experiment featuring a person learning about decentralized finance and asks "what are some of the systemic implications instructional designers and researchers should consider for online and distance education environments?" The thought experiment features the student taking a progression of courses, eventually landing it what can only be described as something like a traditional university class, only hybrid. Does anyone really learn about an emerging topic like decentralized finance that way? I'd feel sorry for them.

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A Culture of Thinking for Teachers
Cameron Paterson, It's About Learning, 2022/06/02

I am certainly supportive of an environment that supports thinking and reflection, and not merely rote learning. So there's probably something of value here. Still, it bothers me the way this article is written in the tone of a revival meeting, and I don't think you need to tithe or go on a fellowship to Harvard's Project Zero in order to foster "a new story of learning where thinking is valued, visible, and actively promoted as part of the ongoing, day-to-day experience of all group members." Maybe it's just the way this is presented, where there's this idea of having to 'believe in' something for it to work. But it's just science. You just start using it, and it works. You show people how to use it, and it works. It's not a belief system; you don't need to build a culture around it. Via Aaron Davis.

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AI dubbing service could dramatically cut content localisation costs and turnaround
Ahmed Elkady, Videonet, 2022/06/02

We're only a few years away from really good automated translation services. In some cases it's already here; as related in this article, Cinedigm used Papercup's AI dubbing service to dub all 31 seasons of Bob Ross's The Joy of Painting. The future for this technology isn't the $2.5B market "that correlates to roughly 50,000 hours of content dubbed through traditional human dubbing" but rather the "$10B market of suppressed existing demand". That said, if automated translation doesn't dramatically reduce the costs of dubbing, there's not much point developing it. So these numbers should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt.

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Hybrid-enabling Spaces at the Taylor Institute
D'Arcy Norman, 2022/06/02

Because our research group has spent the last 20 years working as a distributed group I've had a lot of experience with hybrid meetings. For the most part, I hate them. If you attend 'in person' the displays are typically too small to actually view remote participants (this is especially the case if the remote participants also attend 'in person' but in a different room in a different city). Remote participation, however structured, is limited, and a special effort needs to be made to ensure the host participants even recognize that they're in the meeting. This post covers auto-tracking cameras (we used those too, they help a bit) and the Neat Board "to slice the video feed from the high quality wide-angle lens and create individual participants in Zoom for every person in the room", which is an interesting option - but for the people in the room the remote participants still don't really exist, and that's the real challenge of hybrid meetings.

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A requiem for CARPA: how Ottawa is rethinking innovation policy
Matthew Halliday, University Affairs, 2022/06/02

We've discussed the proposal for a 'Canadian DARPA' in the past and as this article reports it is absent from the latest federal budget. However, "In its place was a pledge to create a Canadian innovation and investment agency. Rather than funding pie-in-the-sky research, it will focus on more down-to-earth work: fostering and commercializing innovations already generated within Canada's research community, as well as bridging the research and business communities in general." This is quite similar to the approach taken during the Harper years and I fear the result will be the same: transferring public money to private enterprise while producing no tangible outcome. See also these two posts from previous years on this topic.

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