OLDaily

The End
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, 2022/06/15

Audrey Watters announces that she's ceasing to write on Hack Education and is leaving the field of ed tech, this in the wake of One Good Company being acquired by Amplify. "It's time to move on to something else. I cannot, I will not be your Cassandra any more." Personally I'm more jaded by the news from Lumen Learning, because that's what startups do, they get acquired and provide an 'exit' for their founders. Over on her blog she writes, "Some folks will say yes, the technology is bad — if we just had better technology then everything'd be okay. Others will say that it's our educational practices that suck — if we just had better pedagogies, then everything technological would fall into place. Both camps still insist that the future is 'digital,' and as such, are trapped in a story that will never get them to 'better'."

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How technology is shaping learning in higher education
Claudio Brasca, et al., McKinsey, 2022/06/15

According to this report, "students and faculty are eager to continue using new classroom learning technologies adopted during the pandemic, but institutions could do more to support the shift." This shows we're moving into the second phase of post-pandemic adaptation - after the rush to return everything 'back to normal' we're beginning to recognize all the faults and limitations of 'normal'. "Technologies that enable connectivity and community building, such as social media–inspired discussion platforms and virtual study groups, saw the biggest uptick in use - 49 percent - followed by group work tools, which grew by 29 percent."

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Critical ID/LXD Differences?
Clark Quinn, Learnlets, 2022/06/15

What's the difference between instructional design (ID) and learning experience design (LXD)? It's the emotion, Clark Quinn says in this brief take. "It's the engagement part that separates the two," he writes. In LXD, "we need to manage emotions through out the experience. We want to do (things) like keep challenge balanced, anxiety low enough not to interfere, build confidence, etc." In other words, "what we're focusing on is making it a true 'experience', not just an instructional event. Ideally, we'd like (it) to be transformational."

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Guidelines for Mapping Education Data in Sub-Saharan Africa
Taskeen Adam, Irene Selwaness, EdTech Hub, 2022/06/15

This article introduces a guidance note (31 page PDF) on collecting and using educational data in sub-Saharan Africa, based on experiences in Kenya, Malawi, and Sierra Leone. The document considers key questions (for example, the objectives of data collection, the stakeholders involved, etc.), data collection challenges, distribution and presentation, and resource requirements. It also introduces key concepts such as communication strategies, open data, and community engagement. Good, crisp, clear document that can underline the case for data collection proposals to higher management.

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Firefox rolls out Total Cookie Protection by default to all users worldwide
dist://ed, 2022/06/15

I enjoy a mostly ad-free internet experience because I use Firefox and some plug-ins like Ublock Origin. Now I'll be surveilled less as well as Firefox  is blocking tracking cookies, "confining cookies to the site where they were created, thus preventing tracking companies from using these cookies to track your browsing from site to site." This is long overdue, and while Google has pondered how to do it while still tracking users, Firefox has simply done it.

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Fin (pour l’instant)
Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates, 2022/06/15

Alex Usher offers a three-fold case for pessimism about the future of universities in Canada. First, he says, "the outlook for more higher education public funding is almost non-existent." Second, he says, we don't have "coherent theories of growth where higher education and skill development translated into future growth and prosperity." And third, "there are unprecedented levels of exhaustion and ... layered on top of widespread (though not universal) governance practices that are perfectly designed to serve the universities of the 1970s" that make it difficult to come to agreement." I think we both agree that "educational institutions, both individually and collectively, are monumentally self-centred," and that they need to enage with the public, but I think we would differ on the nature of this engagement. I don't think it's simply about economics and prosperity. We need to be more aspirational than that.

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Course Hero took over Lumen Art course?
CCCOER Community, 2022/06/15

Lumen Learning was launched in specifically to create, host and promote open educational resources (OER). In recent weeks, though, the company has been using Course Hero to host their courses. According to the company, " Lumen has partnered with Course Hero to host the content of our community created course, that includes our all of our Art courses .From here on out, Course Hero will be hosting the courses you were linking to. You are welcome to continue linking to it." This is significant because Course Hero requires users to pay subscription fees to access online resources. The Lumen Learning content remains freely accessible, though. The question is: for how long?

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