OLDaily

Welcome to Online Learning Daily, your best source for news and commentary about learning technology, new media, and related topics. We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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‘NO’: Grad Students Analyze, Hack, and Remove Under-Desk Surveillance Devices Designed to Track Them
Edward Ongweso Jr, Vice, 2022/12/05

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Here's the story in a nutshell: "In October, the university quietly introduced heat sensors under desk without notifying students or seeking their consent. Students removed the devices, hacked them, and were able to force the university to stop its surveillance." This is cited as evidence that "surveillance has been creeping unabated across schools, universities, and much of daily life over the past few years." The article as a whole is a pretty good description of the incident at Northeastern University, an obscenity offered by Cory Doctrow (does that make him cool?), and an assertion that "infrastructure to act collectively—unions, strike funds, communication infrastructure—makes all the difference."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Dynamic Evolution Analysis of Social Network in cMOOC based on RSiena Mode
Yaqian Xu, Junlei Du, Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, 2022/12/05

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This article (19 page PDF) studies "the first connectivist massive open and online course (cMOOC) in China", 'Internet plus Education: Dialogue between Theory and Practice'. Using a type of network analysis, the authors draw three conclusions: similar people find it easier to interact with each other; people are more inclined to reply to a facilitator; and reciprocity has a significant effect on social networks. These conclusions (which I've paraphrased for brevity) are probably familiar to others who have taught online. As others have observed (including myself), "facilitators, as an important learning partner, need to help beginners make diversely wayfinding through demonstration and connectivism emphasized learning support distributed in the community can establish incentive mechanism to promote peer support and role models, which is key to dealing with this challenge in mass group learning."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

How to think about truth
Jeremy Wyatt, Joseph Ulatowski, Psyche, 2022/12/05

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This is a nice and reasonably sophisticated discussion of the concept of truth - a concept that lies at the core of our mission as educators. Most of us began life with a naive definition of truth - "True beliefs pick out facts that exist independently of our beliefs about them." Or some such thing. Objective truth. But is that what truth really is? Or what it should be? In this article,  Jeremy Wyatt & Joseph Ulatowski argue that "your culture and the languages you speak may significantly affect the way that you think about truth." So might your thoughts about truth - what you learn, what you experience, what you think. To my mind, truth is an a property we assign to a sentence (or a proposition), and is defined relative to the system or model in which it is defined. If you think there's one and only one system or language that describes the world, then truth is objective - but when have we ever seen that?

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Six Impossible Things
Kevlin Henney, InfoQ, 2022/12/05

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I won't list the things; yu'll have to read the article. The teaser says, "Kevlin Henney takes a look at six specific impossible things that shape the limits of what people can develop, from integer representation to the minefield of task estimation and prioritization." Now, technically, these things are impossible. On the other hand, they're also things we act as though are possible (he doesn't quite say it that way, but you'll see what I mean). These really do define limits, though, and push at what we can't actually do, and by extension, the (few) things technology can't actually do.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

The online meeting chat is dead: long live the online meeting chat! — University Affairs
Bonnie Stewart, University Affairs, 2022/12/05

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Nice discussion of online chat as an accompaniment to video meetings. "Online, I heard from probably 90 per cent of my students voluntarily in the chat. No matter how welcoming I try to make my in-person classrooms, verbal contributions have never come close to that number." My experience is that conditions need to be just right for this to happen; I often use a backchannel when I speak and only sometimes does an actual conversation break out. What's interesting, though, is this: "now that we are back to in person learning, I'm missing that online community-building feature," writes Stewart. Getting 'back to normal' isn't everything it was made out to be.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]