OLDaily

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

Presentation
Introduction to Open Online Learning
Stephen Downes, Feb 28, 2024, Microlearning, Online via Zoom

---

The idea of open online learning has been taken up by numerous colleges and universities, opening up new opportunities to many people previously unable to access higher education courses and materials. This presentation talks about the history of open online learning, the motivations for its development, open learning tools and resources available today, and the future of open online learning.

[Link] [Slides] [Audio]

Educational Gag Orders, etc. in the US
Jusin Weinberg, Daily Nous, 2024/02/28

---

"What are state legislatures across the United States doing to limit academic freedom and otherwise interfere in education? You can see a state-by-state breakdown of existing and pending legislation on a sortable table here. The table was created by the PEN America Foundation." Image: NEA.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

AI, Content and Context
David Truss, Daily-Ink by David Truss, 2024/02/28

---

I don't think of this as a statement of fact but rather as a research project: "AI is very good at content but not context. And having 5 people who share a context and create a context, together… then the content can happen using AI. AI without that context, it doesn't know what to do, so it doesn't have any purpose."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

TB872: Overview of different traditions in social learning systems
Doug Belshaw, Open Thinkering, 2024/02/28

---

A table summarising the approach of different thinkers and traditions, including situations as learning systems, appreciative systems, willingness to learn, communities of practice, ubuntu and Pratītyasamutpāda (I don't know why the western systems are assigned to specific authors and the others aren't; there's this deep desire in educational theory to attack people's names to things - not a fan).

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Sports Betting Raised $100 Million for Education in First Four Years
Annmarie Timmins, 2024/02/28

---

Sports betting (or any sort of betting really) is where people wager that their individual knowledge is better than the collective knowledge of the 'house'. Headlines like this are evidence that the house always wins (but with just enough uncertainty to keep enticing the individuals confident in their own knowledge). I in no way support it, because it depends on perpetuating a falsehood on those who, for one reason or another, aren't able to know better. There are better ways to fund education. Taxing billionaires, for example.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Disobedience, (dis)embodied knowledge management, and decolonization: higher education in The Gambia
A. T. Johnson, Marcellus F. Mbah, Higher Education, 2024/02/28

---

This article (18 page PDF) explores the complex history of the relationship between the university and Indigenous knowledge in The Gambia. "We tend to concentrate too much on the white man's knowledge. Students graduate [and] they will read all the theories, but yet these theories are not applicable in our domain." What I found interesting was the representation of Indigenous knowledge as tacit knowledge, developed and shared in non-formal ways, often through disobedience, both inside and outside the university. "Indigenous knowledge is tacit knowledge, the personally held knowledge of knowledge workers that required the informal knowledge management practices of faculty to perform organizational work (e.g., teaching) effectively."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Strategy paper: The European OER Ecosystem - Encore+ Project
giuliacalabresefpm, Encore+ Project - European Network for Catalysing Open Resources in Education, 2024/02/28

---

According to this short report (7 page PDF) "neither OER nor Open Educational Practices are widely used in all European countries." I've seen this observation made globally. The paper asserts that this is because of "the lack of distribution of strategies for integration into organizations like educational and corporate institutions" as well as "the ongoing discussion about the differing quality of OER and OER repositories." I personally don't think either is the case; I have always felt that people in the OER movement should have targeted students (and the wider population in general) rather than teachers and educational institutions. If we look at open learning resources broadly conceived, including things like YouTube videos and discussion list posts, and even open access research publications, the uptake of OER has been huge.

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.

There are many ways to read OLDaily; pick whatever works best for you:

• Read in your web browser on this web page, updated weekdays
• Receive a daily or weekly email newsletter by subscribing here
• Subscribe to the RSS feed using your favourite feed reader
• Follow @OLDaily@mastodon.social on Mastodon or elsewhere in the fediverse
• Follow @OLDaily on Twitter
• Integrate the open API using the JSON feed