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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Quantum Computing Community Education
René Schulte, Valorem Reply, 2022/12/19

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This is an interview with "a special expert guest - 17-year-old quantum researcher, Anisha Musti." She's also "the founder of an organization called Q-munity...  dedicated to teaching young people about Quantum Computing." Want more? "You can go on the website www.qmunity.tech and you can take a course. They're all free because obviously, we think that the freer it is, the easier it is for anyone to access." Musti adds, "One of the other projects that I'm super passionate about is, I built an app Moana that targets the child mortality crisis in Nigeria." To be fair, she got a boost, studying at a nice school and winning an award, but it's the sort of boost every child should get, and evidence of what they can do on their own with that sort of help.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Theoretical Development of Connectivism through Innovative Application in China
Li Chen, Yaqian Xu, Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, 2022/12/19

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If you are interested in connectivism you definitely want to read this study of six connectivist MOOCs (cMOOC) offered over three years at Beijing Normal University. What I appreciate most is that the article offers an empirical analysis of a cMOOC program on its own terms, for example, looking at what network properties can tell us, or looking at the roles of participants and facilitators in a cMOOC. Three of the results give me food for thought: first, "there was the phenomenon of class differentiation, or 'the rich getting richer' in connectivist social networks"; second, "pipes and content were equally important to connectivist learning with the goal of knowledge innovation"; and third, "facilitators played the roles of controlling, regulating, maintaining, and enhancing connections, and influenced and shaped the development of networks."

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Empathy in Education: A Critical Review
Ziqian Zhou, International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 2022/12/19

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This is an interesting paper (14 page PDF) but it really needed at least some editorial oversight. For example: in the abstract, we are promised four salient themes, but the text delivers us five (knowing a student's mental states, feeling or experiencing a student's mental states, a trait or character of the tutor, a display of care or concern, and the relation between empathy and compassion). The writing is occasionally quite loose, for example, "empathy is roundly praised mainly for being an effective vehicle for promoting student learning" and "educators, especially those in tertiary settings, can still reap the goods of empathy without being fully assaulted by its attendant costs." By 'loose', as you can see, what I mean is the use of words in a vague or awkward context so that we sort of get what the author is saying, but not precisely. But all that aside, this is quite a good treatment of the subject, looking at the benefits of an empathy-based approach to teaching, the risks of such an approach, and how to mitigate those risks. Image: Edutopia.

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Footsteps of Adaptive Online Learning: Tracing the Relationships Between Online Self - Regulation, Cognitive Style, Online Interaction and Gender
Sezan Sezgin, Asian Journal of Distance Education, 2022/12/19

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I would imagine learning style sceptics would disapprove of this article. Cognitive Style (CS)  "is defined as a mental way that individuals employ to organize and arrange information. It refers to how individuals generally approach the problems they come across and how they handle the processing  of  information about that problem," writes Sezan Sezgin, adding that CS persists in the individual over time. The suggestion is that "Cognitive style may influence learning in relation to different variables in online learning," and specifically, online self-regulation (OSR), which is "one of the predictors of learning achievement which depends on the autonomy of online learners." The study finds that people with one specific CS, field-independence, "have higher levels of persistence, and it has a very large effect size." Lots to talk about here.

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Investigating the dimensions of students’ privacy concern in the collection, use, and sharing of data for learning analytics - ScienceDirect
Maina Korir, Sharon Slade, Wayne Holmes, Yingfei Héliot, Bart Rienties, Computers in Human Behavior Reports, 2022/12/19

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This is an interesting study (34 page PDF). Though it has numerous flaws (for example, only 4 of the 50 participation students showed up for the follow-up interviews) the approach has merit: the authors set up a course of activities and discussion around two 'vignettes', one where student data is used and shared by Amazon, another where the data is used and shared by the university. Not surprisingly, given the demographics, the students felt more confident in the university's use and sharing of the data (the authors report that this conclusion is surprising, a good lesson in not trusting your intuitions on empirical questions).

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