OLDaily

The Blogsphere is Hot….with Edtech Angst
Jim Groom, bavatuesdays, 2022/07/11

Jim Groom writes, "I really appreciate Alan's lingering a bit longer on the news cycle of folks turning their back on their roots for what can only be understood as profit. And that's just a few posts, there are many, and something strange happened this week at work, folks at Reclaim Hosting are linking to these posts and talking about them." I haven't committed my own post to the genre, I've mostly been documenting them here, but I appreciate this blogging renaissance and wish it would continue into the fall and winter as we grapple with in real time the issues of the day. So much better than limiting discussion to Twitter snark.

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A trailing edge technologies share-a-thon
Brian Lamb, 2022/07/11

"I'd like to express the value of an open platform that we support here at TRU via the most convincing form of argument I can think of, which is sharing some work it allows our community to do," writes Brian Lamb. What follows is a tour-de-force article filled with examples and illustrations of some of the best work in ed tech there is. It's hard to imagine someone being sceptical about the present and future of the field after looking through this list. But the approach is important. "What I hope comes across is that an open platform is a powerful toolkit that only gets more potent with each additional use," writes Lamb. " I also know that this approach is not exactly fashionable in learning tech these days... but this exercise reminds me that when given the choice many people will see value in a platform that doesn't exist to extract value from them."

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Some thoughts on ‘home’ pages for individuals within communities (and social networks)
Doug Belshaw, Open Thinkering, 2022/07/11

Designing online communities can be tricky. One thing most developers want to do is develop some sense of belonging. This could perhaps be done using notifications that let you know what's going on (or what you're missing) but this leads to information overload (or what Belshaw calls notification literacy). The main problem (it appears from this discussion) is that the notifications pull us from whatever context we were in (Chris Aldrich says says "people may frequently ask themselves 'where was I?'") so perhaps, says Belshaw, some sort of visual metaphor social media home page might be better than a notifications feed. Me, I don't want a social media home page (let alone a firehose of notifications) at all. I'd rather have my own personal home page, using my own social media filters and algorithms and filters. (p.s. this article wins the prize for most boring article illustration).

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Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL): Preparedness and experiences of South African students
Ashika Naicker, Evonne Singh, Tonnie van Genugten, Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 2022/07/11

Using Internet-based tools and innovative online pedagogies, Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) "fosters meaningful exchanges between academics and students with peers in geographically distant locations and from different linguacultural backgrounds," according to this article. As Nellie Deutsch comments, it's not a new idea (I've seen variations for decades) but "it doesn't seem to matter what you do unless you label it these days." In any case, exposing students to international experience is a good idea, and "using COIL to boost exchange is a sustainable, cost-effective online pedagogy targeting all students rather than a select minority."

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A shattered consensus: the end of college for everyone
Bryan Alexander, 2022/07/11

The consensus Bryan Alexander is talking about is this: "the more people go to college, the better". I will say that if it is shattered, as he suggests, then this shattering is mostly a U.S.-based phenomenon. And this ties in with two factors. One is political: the rapidly decreasing trust on the right wing of colleges and elites generally. The other is financial: people would be far more supportive of the idea of a college education for all is it were more affordable. As it is, in the U.S. especially the cost of college cleaves society neatly into a have and have-not faction, and this latter faction was been weaponized by the right wing. It is arguable - and I would argue - that the U.S. college system as it currently exists bears a large proportion of the responsibility for the sorry state of U.S. politics. It would help, I think, were commentators in the U.S. not only willing to talk about what happens in other countries, but were very clear that what they describe is the exception, not the rule, worldwide. Sadly, neither is common.

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Meta launches Sphere, an AI knowledge tool based on open web content, used initially to verify citations on Wikipedia
Ingrid Lunden, TechCrunch, 2022/07/11

I have to say, I'm uncomfortable with the idea of the people behind Facebook creating an AI application to check citations on Wikipedia - especially when they won't use the same tool on their own product. Sure, it might be (as this story suggests) an effort to get behind some good intentions and garner good publicity. But if you accept the idea that Facebook can correct Wikipedia, it feels a bit like letting the camel's nose into the tent: pretty soon you're in a situation where Wikipedia is not considered trustworthy unless it has been vetted by Facebook, which is exactly the opposite of where we want to be.

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Why Perl is still relevant in 2022
Girish Venkatachalam, The Overflow, 2022/07/11

Though I mess around in Javascript quite a bit, for me Perl is still my primary programming language. Yes, I know, it make my skills nearly obsolete (though if I really had to I could adapt to another language; none of it is really foreign to me) but I find Perl is ideally suited to what I want to do. I like the way it cleanly separates the processing and the presentation in HTML. It's object oriented when it's convenient, but it doesn't have to be, and it's very good with things like string search and manipulation. It doesn't have to be fast, just versatile.

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