OLDaily

The middle school boys thought their teacher was a ‘creep.’ So they tracked how he treated the girls.
Amanda Milkovits, Boston Globe, 2022/09/13

This item has made the rounds on social media over the last few days. It describes how a group of middle school boys notices a problem with how a teacher was behaving and used their internet and data skills to document incidents and eventually saw the teacher suspended after a girl's parents threatened to file a restraining order against him. It would have been an even better story had anyone listened to the boys' complains, but that's not what happened. Still, it's a good case study in how data and media literacy is evolving over time.

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Cameras On or Off? It Depends! What We’ve Learned from Students about Teaching and Learning on Zoom
Torrey Trust, Faculty Focus, 2022/09/13

This post reports on a small study of students' use of Zoom cameras. What we should learn is that there are many reasons why they might turn the camera off or on - to each a sandwich, to yawn, to answer a question, whatever - 31 reasons in all. It also offers some advice (though of course a study of 70 students does not provide anything like enough evidence to infer best practices) with suggestions on how to retain student engagement and camera use strategies.

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How do good conversations work? Philosophy has something to say
Stephanie Ross, Psyche, 2022/09/13

This is a good set of reflections that anyone saying 'markets are conversations' or 'learning is a conversation' should read. Though the best advice concerns things like speech acts and power dynamics, the most useful bit may be right at the start where some common conceptions about language and communication are refuted: first, the idea that "successful conversations (are) those that moved the relevant cluster of ideas from one conversant's head to another," and second, that "words (are) straightforwardly labels for things in the world." Conversation is much more complex than a mere exchange of information; it is an interactive performance between two or more participants that combines (at the very least) meaning, context, relationships and power.

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Identity protection is key to metaverse innovation
MIT Technology Review, 2022/09/13

This article reads like an advertorial, which would explain why it isn't behind Technology Review's usual paywall. The report it cites is behind a spamwall, though you can read a summary blog post. The main point is that "organizations like the Open Metaverse Interoperability (OMI) Group (are) working to help companies achieve 'meta-traversal' capabilities," that is, moving from one 'store' to another with a single identity, as though you were in a mall. This, though, makes authentication a weak point, with the danger of impersonation and theft of credentials. These articles do nothing more than highlight the issue. True identity portability - which is required for everything from digital credentials to electronic health records to e-democracy - will require much more robust security than we have today, not only for authentication, but also secure and persistent digital artifacts. This isn't just a metaverse problem; it's an internet problem, and a wider social problem.

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The Course Hero/Lumen Deal
Michael Feldstein, eLiterate, 2022/09/13

Michael Feldstein offers his take on the transfer of OER courses from Lumen Learning to Course Hero. I'm not sure he adds a lot to what we know, but he does round it up into one neat package. What is notable is the fact that the announcement took many people by surprise, and that the two companies involved didn't realize there would be such a widespread public reaction. Feldstein's take, though, is that "the academic community needs to get far more sophisticated in their thinking about how sustainability works when OER gets used as infrastructure in a for-profit EdTech world." And he asks, "how do we cultivate companies whose business interests benefit from promoting affordable, quality education?" Well, maybe we shouldn't. Lumen Learning, in saying something like "the private sector is the best way to host OERs," created the problem. Why is it up to the academic community to solve it? Maybe we should be thinking of teaching and learning resources primarily as public infrastructure, developed in order to support teachers and students, and not as some tool designed to "cultivate companies".

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The business case for edtech startups engaging education research
George Veletsianos, 2022/09/13

The argument is essentially that it's a win-win. "You (i.e. startups) can save money and time," writes George Veletsianos. "By identifying potential pain points and what education research has to say about your value proposition early on, you'd be able to develop minimum viable products that are at the very least reflective of what we know about teaching and learning." This is a fairly standard approach to creating a business case, and Veletsianos doesn't go into more detail, but my concern would be that research often misidentifies pain points, it is often silent about the value proposition of genuinely new technology, and it is conflicted in its assertions about what we know about teaching and learning. As well, there is the danger to educators that such collaborations transform educational research into market research, which is a very different thing.

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