OLDaily

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

Building Community Online: Moving toward Humanization Through Relationship-Focused Technology Use
Staci Ann Gilpin, Stephanie Rollag Yoon, Jana LoBello Miller, Online Learning, 2023/09/07

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Though this was an interesting paper (PDF link that currently points to a 22 page MS-Word Doc), the demographics of the participants ("20 undergraduates and 10 graduates at a small midwestern liberal arts college who were enrolled in two online teacher preparation courses") work against the sharing of a diverse set of perspectives and, potentially, the insights that might arise. Basically, the paper lays out a set of feminist pedagogical principles, applies them in the form of a teaching method based on relatively self-organized small group discussions, and reports the results from the perspective of Gee's (2011) Building Task Tools. Overall, the authors argue, "relational-type small group online discussions provide opportunities to expand accessibility and equity through community development and content learning while also impacting future teachers' identities." I think, though, that the results would have been very different with different sets of students. Some students (I count myself among them) would resist being placed into a small group for the duration of the course, and it's hard to see this method as promoting autonomy when it's a core requirement. With a less like-minded set of participants, there would be more than just one person criticized for "focused on ensuring they provided a detailed 'right' answer rather than having a discussion between classmates," or for that matter violating other norms of relationship-building small group settings. I wish the authors had been forced to grapple with these wider issues, but alas, the setting was too small for that.

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UNESCO AI Competency Framework for Teachers and School Students: A Work in Progress
UNESCO, 2023/09/07

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Here's a draft of proposed UNESCO AI competency definitions for teachers. The link takes us to a personally owned Microsoft Word document in a Sharepoint repository, so I can't be sue that this is an official UNESCO draft (though there's a very official-looking photo on LinkedIn). I've asked a more official posting somewhere (preferably on a UNESCO website)?. But anyhow, you can add your opinions in the form provided.

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Critiquing Sustainable Openness in Technology-Based Education from the Perspective of Cost-Effectiveness and Accessibility
Junhong Xiao, Open Praxis, 2023/09/07

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Junhong Xiao has played an important role in my own work over the years so I am always inclined to take what he says seriously. Thus I take his critique of sustainable openness of technology-based education as doubly challenging. His core argument is this: "what extent technology can deliver the goal of equitable education depends, in a sense, on how cost-effective technology-based education is." And, of course, I would not disagree with this. And I'm also supportive of the three principles he advocates at the end of the paper: first, that "we need to be cautious of naturalizing the 'mainstream' discourses concerning technology-based education", second, "all stakeholders... are entitled to have their say in what counts as accessible high-quality education", and third, "sustainable openness in technology-based education is also related to students' social and cultural factors."

But I'm less sanguine about how he gets to these conclusion. To be sure, his research is impeccable, consisting of a review of some 3,059 studies reporting on technology innovations in education. But being familiar with the studies published by people like David Wiley on student savings achieved through the use of OER, I question the finding that "none of the studies investigated the costs which students (and their families) had to bear when technology-based education was implemented." Has he read the wrong 3,059 studies? The true test of the technology is not found in the academic studies, but rather, in whether people actually use it. That's why (as we saw Tuesday) YouTube is reported as this year's top tool for education.

But the main issue, I think, is the confounding of the issue of technology in education with broader social, political and cultural issues. Inequality and access to technology are of course issues for open education - but would it make sense to stop building roads and rail because not everyone can afford a car or train ticket? Do we stop broadcasting television because not everybody can afford electricity? These are technologies, and in their own way, important educational technologies. And this leads to my third criticism: we can't make the mistake of classifying all technologies within a single category. Heavy expensive over-engineered technologies like XR are one thing. Light and widely useful technologies like the Gutenberg library are another. Image: Vare, et al.

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University Educators' Experience of Personal Learning Networks to Enhance Their Professional Knowledge
Kay Oddone, International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 2023/09/07

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I'm linking to this paper because I'm interested in the topic, but I have to admit that I'm struggling especially in this instance to see the difference between a research study with five subjects and an opinion paper with five unattributed authors. The knowledge of personal learning networks (PLN) in this group is not deep, with one account seemingly lifted from Harold Jarche's two-decades' old seek-sense-share framework that he has reprinted in LinkedIn every two or three days since then. The main conclusion is that "the university educators interviewed placed a greater emphasis upon connecting with people and platforms, and information and knowledge management." Make of it what you will.

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OXREF: Open XR for Education Framework
Ishan Sudeera Abeywardena, The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 2023/09/07

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This paper describes "major barriers to the wider adoption of extended reality (XR) in education, including the lack of (a) open content, tools, and skills; (b) sound pedagogy and instructional design; and (c) scalability and sustainability," and recommends the Open XR for Education Framework (OXREF) in response, "an empirical framework that proposes a holistic solution to XR object creation, implementation, and deployment." While I am supportive of the general idea (and especially the idea of an open artifact archive) I am not sure there is anything near enough to the demand on the part of educators that would make such a project widely applicable.

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Can Open Pedagogy Encourage Care? Student Perspectives
Deirdre Maultsaid, Michelle Harrison, The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 2023/09/07

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The answer offered in this paper is, unsurprisingly, yes. "We believe that open pedagogy (OP) is an actualization of the ethics of care," write the authors. They report on a study of student perceptions of care and observe that "according to students, OP, because of its relational, collaborative nature, highly values and embodies care. The processes of OP encourage students and teachers to be attentive, responsible, competent, and trust-building." Obviously we cannot generalize at all from this study ("participants were self-selected), 100% of the focus group students (N = 16) were from one or more underrepresented groups") but the conclusion is intuitively plausible. I do feel some discomfort, though, in the reduction of the ethics of care to specific framework consisting of "attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and trustworthiness." Image: Educause.

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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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