OLDaily

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

TB872: first reflections, heuristics, and systems literacy
Doug Belshaw, Open Thinkering, 2023/11/17

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Doug Belshaw has been blogging about his experience taking an MSc in Systems Thinking in Practice. I hope he keeps doing this; for me, reading the posts is like taking the MSc by proxy. The posts are clearly written, well illustrated, and topical. The trick here is to understand, as the module makes clear, "that all practice is situated, which means that we should be using 'I statements' a lot and relating what we're learning to our own practice." So the exercise for the rest of us is to read Belshaw's posts, but relate them to our own experiences. For me that's pretty easy, since I approach everything that way, but it works less well for someone who thinks of knowledge and learning as being only about some 'other' that exists independently of any experience of it. Anyhow, this is the first post, and he's already followed up with several more.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

A New, Broader, More Fundamental Case for Social Media Agent "Middleware"
Richard Reisman, Smartly Intertwingled, 2023/11/17

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This short post and slide presentation hits the mark in a number of ways, outlining a framework for building social media that addresses the issue of context collapse. According to Richard Reisman, what is required are three major elements (paraphrased): individual choice and agency over how we each use online media, creates speaker/listener context; a social mediation ecosystem that mediates context collectively; and reputation and trust to evaluate speaker/mediator context both individually and collectively. These, he argues, are best provided by a form of middleware (something, I might add, silo and proprietary social media systems make impossible).

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Science and Truth
David Papineau, 2023/11/17

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This is an interesting, engaging and accessible article first published in 1997 but only recently available online. David Papineau addresses how we choose between different scientific theories, a question of importance after the work of people like Feyerabend and Kuhn. Philosophers, historians and sociologists of science, he argues, simply give in to the sceptical answer; "the real explanation must therefore lie in political factors, either in the form of affinities of content between certain theories and the interests of certain sections of society, or in the form of the outcome of struggles for power between competing groups of scientists." But epistemology teaches us that even if certainty is unattainable, reliability is a reasonable standard, and what we actually learn, "when you become expert in any field of science, is which methods will be effective at answering that science's theoretical questions. In effect, you learn which kinds of possible answers need to be taken seriously as candidates to questions in your fields, and which kinds of answers can be discounted."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

A Flawed Way of Diagnosing Dyslexia Leaves Thousands of Kids without Help
Sarah Carr, Scientific American, 2023/11/17

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One wonders why the learning styles sceptics aren't so keen on addressing issues like this: "schools in the U.S. continue to use an iteration of the discrepancy model to test children for learning disabilities. Moreover, for a multitude of reasons, including biases in IQ tests, a disproportionate number of those diagnosed—and helped—have been white and middle- to upper-class." Maybe it's this: "Because human brains are organized in diverse ways, some people's reading circuits end up being inefficient. Dyslexia is the most common reading disability." Reprinted in Hechinger Report.

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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