OLDaily

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

Presentation
How to Make the Most of Online Learning
Stephen Downes, Mar 02, 2023,

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[Link] [Slides]

Bringing the Practice of Positionality into Teaching and Learning – BCcampus
Britt Dzioba, BCcampus, 2023/03/02

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Positionality statements are becoming more common in social sciences research. Such a statement is "meant to introduce the author and show the reader the personal lens through which the researcher approached their work." I'm not todally comfortable with the idea; I don't see myself as a 'lens' or any other objectification as an instrument or tool for someone else's research. But if you must know, beyond what you can deduce from my picture, I'm from a working class background, paid my own way though a non-elite university, earned my way through post-gradate work through a series of assistantships, see myself as a journalist, educator, computer programmer and philosopher, and have defined research in my own way as exploration and discovery, not building on some sort of 'accepted canon' but reflecting my perception of the world through words, ideas and photographs. I try to be useful, but it's not a requirement; mostly I try to be honest and open and sharing. I care most for the weak and the powerless - the sparrows among us.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Awesome Mastodon
GitHub, 2023/03/02

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This page describes itself as an "up-to-date and curated list of Mastodon-related stuff!." It begins with a large list of Mastodon cients for desktop and mobile, Windows, Linux and Apple. It then offers user lists and sever lists. Then it covers tools, and then some lists of tools. There are also extensions, bookmarklets, user styles and scripts, and guides. Following that is a section on federated services generally. Then there's a section on bots and code libraries.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Disciplined Making
Matthew Cheney, Finite Eyes, 2023/03/02

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This post was introduced to me by Robin DeRosa "asking a prospective student not, 'What do you want to major in?' but rather, 'What would you like to be able to make?'" I pauded to think for a bit, because I see myself more as an explorer than a creator, but I could see myself 'making discoveries'. We could expand even more if we used the far more flexible French verb faire instead of 'to make'. But I digress. Matthew Cheney's post is a reflection Nathan Heller's The End of the English Major. He astutely notes that "most reporters for influential media outlets like The New Yorker went to those famous and wealthy schools, and most such reporters seem incapable of understanding that their experience does not translate to that of the majority of college students or faculty." Indeed, I don't know why we listen to them. Anyhow, the article eventually gets to a point: "the best argument I can think of to encourage interdisciplinarity, disaggregation, and making is that doing so might be a good strategy to bring innovation back as a key value for both research and teaching universities." Related: Make Magazine, Constructionism.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

You Are Not a Parrot
Elizabeth Weil, Intelligencer, 2023/03/02

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I'm disappointed by this article, even though it is described as fierce. It profiles arguments from linguist Emily M. Bender against the idea that AI can do more than merely mirror human interactions. It begins with the 'Octopus' story, which is essence a version of the well-known Chinese Room argument. The idea is that we cannot know the 'meaning' of a sentence if we only know the 'form' of the sentence; all the mimicry in the world won't get at what's behind the words. The 'Parrot' example, also from Bender, makes the same point. The problem, to my mind, is that such arguments (and there are many in this article) beg the very question they purport to prove. If we take seriously the idea of human cognition as taking place in a neural net, as opposed to some magical place where meanings reside, then we have to take seriously the idea that human cognition is essentially stochastic, that is, a set of sensations and reactions based on the probability that a current set of perceptions is the same as some previously experienced set of perceptions. Complaining that today's computers can't quite catch up to humans doesn't change that point.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Memorable Feedback: Lessons from Cognitive Psychology in Encoding
Behany Brunsman, Rob McEntarffer, The Learning Scientists, 2023/03/02

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I don't agree at all with the theory presented in this article, but you'll see it a lot in discussions of technology design. "The purpose of this series of blog posts is to highlight three potentially useful connections between these research areas:  selective attention, encoding/deep processing (the topic of this post), and retrieval practice." According to this article, "Teachers have to make hundreds of instructional decisions that impact what kind of cognitive 'work' students do in their working memories. This deliberate attention to cognitive work in working memory is also relevant to feedback decisions."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

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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