OLDaily

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

Open to Learning
Andrew Jacobs, Lost and Desperate, 2024/03/27

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This post takes a look at the phenomenon of people moving from Twitter to LinkedIn. "I agree entirely with Michelle that it is about building relationships and sharing experiences,": writes Andrew Jacobs, "and it feels like there are a lot of people on LinkedIn who haven't worked that out yet." Instead, what we see is a "gold rush mentality on LinkedIn these days (with) some people are so desperate to stake their claim, they're pumping out content." But "it's not about blasting out sales pitches into a void, it's about cultivating genuine connections." So what is Jacobs doing? "Regular (daily) and short (less than 200 words) posts and articles." Maybe that works; I've seen some people (Donald Clark springs to mind) getting a lot of traction that way.

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A Narrative Approach to Foster the Construction of Recursive Thinking in High School Students
Bianca Nicchiotti, Angela Donatiello, Giuseppe Bianco, Education Sciences, 2024/03/27

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I personally cannot imagine using narrative and short stories to explain recursive thinking to high school students (or anyone, for that matter). Even in the study described here, the authors resorted to using an image (of a fractal) to illustrate what they mean. The best use of recursion in a story I can think of is Abbott and Costello's Who's on First? but of course students will struggle to see the practical aspect of it. My main use of recursion is to parse structured documents containing (say) lists of lists. Something like this: for a list, we call a function called parse_list() in which we cycle through each item, such that, if it's a string, we print it out, and if it's a list, we call the function parse_list() to process it. Do we make something like this simpler or more intuitive by turning it into a story? I don't think so, and the sense I get from this paper is that the students didn't find it so either.

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The Case for a Peer Review Market
David Thunder, Daily Nous - news for & about the philosophy profession, 2024/03/27

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Nobody would deny this: "The academic peer review system as it currently stands is frustrating and dysfunctional for many of those who participate in it." In fact, I have stopped reviewing papers completely (despite the presumptuous and sometimes insistent emails I get from journals practically demanding I do a peer review for them). But the peer review problem is not going to be solved by creating a market for peer reviewers. I personally think that over time people will publish in open access repositories (aka preprint repositories like ArXiv) and 'journals' will be created by one or a group of people collating and listing the best of those papers they find, much as I do in OLDaily. In this way, people can see the 'review' process as it happens from day to day, and there's no mystery about any bias or sloppiness in the system - it's there for all to see. So, over time, instead of a paper being 'published in Nature' we'll find it's 'listed in Nature', which will be just as good, and much more transparent.

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How can Donald Trump’s loss-making Truth Social be worth $9bn?
Alex Hern, The Guardian, 2024/03/27

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There's a short but important lesson to be learned here, and this is about the nature of 'valuation'. We often read of tech companies being 'valued' at x number of billions of dollars. But this isn't a real number. As the Guardian explains, the valuation is just is just a product of multiplying the value of a recently purchased individual share with the number of shares outstanding. So if there are 100 shares and someone buys a share for $20 the valuation is $2000. Now, as author Alex Hern suggests, "Typically, that value, known as the market capitalisation, is kept in check by reference to the 'fundamentals' of the company.... But sometimes … it isn't." And that's the case with Truth Social, which is somehow 'valued' at $8 billion, based on income of $3.3m from advertising and posting a loss of $49m. Nobody is ever going to actually pay $8 billion for the company, and no responsible lender would ever offer a loan based on that collateral.  

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Guyana Launches National Training Initiative with Coursera to Empower Every Guyanese Citizen and Public Sector Employee with In-Demand Skills - Coursera Blog
Maria Fernanda Carvajal, Coursera Blog, 2024/03/27

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Obviously there's a cost in the background (there's always a cost in the background) but this sort of approach is exactly what MOOCs were supposed to enable: a program that "offers every Guyanese citizen and public sector employee free education and skill training on Coursera." (Are there public service employees that aren't citizens? It seems like an odd wording.) Anyhow, we can talk about whether this is the best way to provide free public higher education for everyone, and how it could be improved, but it has to start somewhere (such a contrast to nations that complain they have a shortage of skilled professionals and then charge tens of thousands of tuition to those capable learning the skills).

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Do Students Generate Better Self-Feedback by Comparing their Work Against Assessment Criteria or Exemplars?
Maxine v Swingler, David Nicol, Lorna Morrow, EdArXiv, 2024/03/27

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So, this is an interesting question. According to the authors, "students produced more high-level process comments when comparing against exemplars while they produced more task-related feedback comments when comparing against assessment criteria." And for what it's worth, "students' final grade performance was also better after exemplar comparisons." Which, I guess, gives us a definition of 'better'. The sample of 113 psychology students is neither random nor representative, so we should not draw any generalizations from this study, but it would be interesting to see whether the findings can be replicated more broadly. 30 page PDF.

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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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