OLDaily

Welcome to Online Learning Daily, your best source for news and commentary about learning technology, new media, and related topics.

On the Misappropriation of Spatial Metaphors in Online Learning
The Open/Technology in Education, Society, and Scholarship Association Journal, 2023/01/13

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Jon Dron argues "that the term 'environment' is a dangerously misleading metaphor for the online systems we build to support learning, that leads to poor pedagogical choices and weak digital solutions." He proposes instead "an alternative metaphor of infrastructure and services that can enable more flexible, learner-driven, and digitally native ways of designing systems (including the tools, pedagogies, and structures) to support learning." The key to the argument is the observation that there is no such thing as digital learning; from the point of view of the learner, learning happens in their own space (their own room, their own head) and the digital part is the set of services and supports that may be provided online. It's a good discussion, though I found it pretty long for the point it's making. Image: EDUCAUSE's Next Generation Digital Learning Environment.

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Edtech Has Grown More Common, More Global and More Sophisticated. What's Next?
Matthew Tower, EdSurge, 2023/01/13

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This article limits itself to three fairly specific predictions backed by corresponding hypotheses about the edtech industry. The focus on raising capital doesn't interest me but the depiction of the industry as increasingly complex and integrated. The three hypotheses are that edtech is becoming more analytical, results-focused, global. These are maybe not the most original predictions in the world, but the predictions create more room for the possibility of being wrong. Maybe we won't see a company break out by "measuring and consistently reproducing meaningful student outcomes." Maybe a new workforce management company won't raise $50 million in 2023. Though I confess - I would be more surprised if these predictions were to be wrong than were they to be right.

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Medium embraces Mastodon
Tony Stubblebine, Medium, 2023/01/13

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We saw Tumblr announce support for ActivityPub late last year and today we're reading that Medium will offer Mastodon integration for (some of) its authors. "Mastodon is an emerging force for good in social media," writes Tony Stubblebine, and "this ecosystem has existing community norms that are especially focused on avoiding the toxicity that have plagued other social media platforms." So they're quite understandably being cautious. Expect to see more of this. In this same week, WordPress has a new Mastodon autopost plug-in. And even more interesting, Cloudflare is developing Wildebeest, "an ActivityPub and Mastodon-compatible server whose goal is to allow anyone to operate their Fediverse server and identity on their domain without needing to keep infrastructure, with minimal setup and maintenance, and running in minutes." This is important because 'support' for Mastodon and ActivityPub has to be more than just dumping posts into the feed; it needs to include receiving replies and supporting conversation.

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Real Professional Learning in Schools
Miguel Guhlin, Around the Corner, 2023/01/13

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The context of this post is the lack of professional development for teachers, especially with respect to educational technology (edtech). It takes some interesting turns; this is the linchpin: "The truth is, teaching is an art. What we have in schools isn't that. It's a top-down effort to indoctrinate students without getting anyone in trouble, without letting anyone think too much about what's really happening." This to me raises the very interesting question (once again) of how we define 'what works' in teacher (or, in this case, PD). What if "teacher-proofing education with edtech is the goal" so the indoctrination can proceed without interruption? I would prefer to see students challenge and interrogate what they're being told, but in a content-focused results-oriented education, there's very little room for that. And no need for teachers to learn how to facilitate it.

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Image Stacks and iPhone Racks - Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine
Matthew Bryant (Creator), FindThatMeme.com Blog, 2023/01/13

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I love articles like this because they describe the thought process involved to solve a design and development problem. This particular example might be beyond the capacity of most students (or it might not!) but it serves as an excellent example of how the process works, beginning with a statement of need ("I could never find the niche memes I wanted to send folks when I needed them most") and coming up with an elegant, if off-beat, solution: using a network of old used iPhones (load balanced with nginx on a Raspberry Pi) to run Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on images or videos, storing the results in a database searchable with Elastisearch. Programming was done in the Swift language, where the author admits, "my familiarity with Swift was about on par with a golden retriever's understanding of finance." Via Chris Lott.

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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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