OLDaily

Avantis Education launches Eduverse, a safe and secure ‘metaverse’ for K-12
edCircuit, 2022/06/29

This article in edCircuit is a reprint of a press release. "Avantis Education today announced the launch of Eduverse – a ground-breaking new online platform that gives students access to a K-12 metaverse." The only ground-breaking here should be the burial of the idea that this is in any sense the 'metaverse' - it's just a bunch of VR scenarios made available for private access by school classes. These are called 'expeditions' and are either 360-degree photos or 3D models, both well-known and we--established technology. Most of this is promotional; the real money is in Avantis' ClassVR headsets. None of this is new; beware people wrapping older tech in new 'metaverse' clothing.

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Hitting the wall and maybe working out how to get back up again
Anne-Marie Scott, 2022/06/29

Some good thoughts here about the relation between scale and edtech. "Access is a problem of scale at one level and I am committed to working on that but I increasingly hear reductive views of digital learning limited to students navigating personalised pathways through high-end content and teachers interpreting that learning through analytics. This seems devoid of any kind of good relations and community." She continues, "I remember a time when I got excited about generative and liberating uses of technology... I think this is still possible, and I think work around open practices, open pedagogies, ethics of care, and decolonisation point the way towards how to do it in today's dogpile of an internet." I agree.

But why is it this way? Ben Werdmuller points to the cause. "The need for high scale is a crater that has been dug in the fabric of civic life. For a startup to be venture fundable, it must demonstrate that it is scalable: in other words, it can plausibly grow to be a billion dollar company without linearly increasing the size of its team." This, he says, is the startupification of education. "Venture funding isn't the only way to fund a startup, but it's certainly the way that's caught the public's and the industry's imagination, and the result is that the notion of scalability has, too."

The difference between education based on conversations and relationships and education based on data and analytics is that in the former, but not the latter, each connection is unique. It occurs in a specific context, with specific people, with distinct backgrounds, perspectives, goals and values. It's not something that can be mass produced; it requires mass participation, but not of each person doing the same thing, but of each person doing different things. Datafication and analytics produce abstractions, reproducibility, and scale, but at the cost of sterility and meaninglessness. They produce action without responsibility, content without provenance, requirements without justification. The only meaningful metric is volume, and this subsumes all other measures of value and consideration.

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CRISPR in the Classroom Network
CRISPR in the Classroom Network, 2022/06/29

The New York Times came out with an article 'CRISPR in the Classroom', which is of course paywalled, but there's a tone of resources already available online that describe and help teachers and students do their own gene modification experiments. This seems to me to be a good starting point, including access to open educational resources (OER). There are also CRISPR materials for sale, for example, this kit from Lab-Aids, hands-on labs from MiniPCR, CRISPR-in-a-Box from Rockland, and resources from CRISPR Classroom. Chris Anderson writes, "Transcription, translation, and protein synthesis can all be taught with a gel electrophoresis kit, which you can also make by yourself relatively cheaply (Instructables is your friend!). The Exploratorium of San Francisco has a good activity with different food dyes that model how different genes move from the gel matrix."

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Research with people (quotes from UNESCO’s new social contract for education report)
George Veletsianos, 2022/06/29

George Veletsianos quotes at length from a report written last year by UNESCO's International Commission on the Futures of Education, Reimagining our futures together: a new social contract for education. His emphasis is on the dialogue that needs to happen in education and "the renewal of education as a common good and the co-construction of a new social contract for education" which will require "a renewal of the public mission of universities towards the generation of an open and accessible knowledge commons, and the education of new generations of researchers and professionals." Something like Octopus is a start - but this is just one part of the larger (and hopefully decentralized) ecosystem of knowledge, learning and research (I'm typing this as I watch the Octopus launch event - and it's the first thing that's really excited me for some time). But this isn't social contract so much as it is an architecture.

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