OLDaily

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

Upskilling and reskilling for talent transformation in the era of AI
Keith O'Brien, IBM Blog, 2024/05/13

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According to this article, " A 2024 Gallup poll found that nearly 25% of workers worry that their jobs can become obsolete because of AI, up from 15% in 2021." This would not be an issue except for the fact that we currently structure society such that, if you do not have a job, you are relegated to a life of pain and poverty. We should rethink this. Certainly, as the IBM blog suggests, lets think about reskilling. But articles like this that focus only on reskilling serve as a distraction from the larger issues. But let's also reimagine the social and corporate compact to ensure everybody earns a share of the increased productivity AI will generate. Because the changing workplace isn't the employee's problem. It's everybody's problem.

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Movement Charter/Content/One-page draft
Wikimedia, 2024/05/13

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I find it interesting to juxtapose two documents, a statement from the Stanford Social Innovation Review on what it means to govern for all, and this document from the Wikimedia Movement declaring "the values, rights, relationships, and mutual responsibilities of all participants in the shared mission of this movement." There are numerous points of contrast, starting from Wikimedia's embracing of "a factual, verifiable, open, and inclusive approach to knowledge," and SSIR's failure to address the topic at all. There's the difference between 'inclusion' (in Wikimedia) and 'equity' (in SSIR). At the same time, Wikimedia embraces a 'shared vision', while SSIR limits this to fairness and consistency under the law. And, taking a few steps back, the SSIR document seems to be about the relation between us (the governors) and them (the people) while Wikimedia "entrusts decisions to the most immediate or the lowest possible level of participation". I don't think you get democracy without education, or education without democracy, but what either of those two things amount to is still very much open to debate.

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What are educational podcasts?
Dom Conroy, Jo Fletcher-Saxon, BERA Blog, 2024/05/13

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This is a headline I would have considered current in around 2003 or so, but hey, educational podcasts were a good idea then and they're a good idea now. As true today as it was twenty years ago, "educational podcasts come in diverse forms, including podcasts produced by teaching practitioners for learners, by learners for teachers (for instance as summative assessment) by students for each other (for instance as peer-supportive resources) and by teachers for other teachers." What the article does point to is a resurgence of interest in podcasts (not coincidentally, I think, with the collapse of cable media, the fragmentation of streaming video services, and the toxification of social media). What it doesn't talk about is the use of an open access format (RSS) to distribute and collect free media. Image: EduTech Wiki.

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Say hello to PEE - your Personal Engagement Environment
Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, 2024/05/13

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Martin Weller reflects on "a way to think about post-Twitter life," bringing us the personal engagement environment, a nod back to the personal learning environment (PLE), where "you may have a main platform (eg blog), a work focused one eg LinkedIn, a personal one eg Instagram, a general one eg Threads, a course focused one eg podcasts, etc. For any one engagement activity you may post to all, one or some of these." Not quite though - a PLE was one place we could use to reach out to these other services, not merely a collection of platforms (the collection of platforms was the 'personal learning network', which is what people used in lieu of an actual functioning PLE (which never materialized).

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Bloomberg Media launches education platform with Emeritus
Sara Fischer, Axios, 2024/05/13

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The main takeaway from this oddly-written story is that "More media and tech companies are launching educational courses as they venture deeper into video." AI-written? You can read more about the specific Bloomberg-Emeritus project in the press release. Of course, online courses are more than just nice video presentations; you need to do something to justify the $2500 price tag. So they'll get a Bloomberg subscription too.

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‘Sharing’, Selfhood, and Community in an Age of Academic Twitter
Áine Mahon, Shane Bergin, JIME, 2024/05/13

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This article "follows Gert Biesta's recent call to query the 'common sense' understanding of educational research" as it relates to social media, reflecting on the "subtle demand that the contemporary academic present to the world as a coherent, consistent, and orderly self." Twitter, we are told, "discourages a fluid and complex self. It prioritizes stability over self-creation." But as Richard Rorty would say, we need people to see us as complex and sometimes changing individuals. From here the article diverges a bit, on the one hand considering the new toxic Twitter (you can leave only iof you have a well-established identity) and on the other considering what's lost by staying on Twitter (intimacy, vulnerability and acknowledgement). Either way, networking on social media involves presenting oneself as an abstraction lacking the nuance found in a physical space "which draws people together, which fosters dwelling, and which invites care and connectedness." Image: LSE Blog, Time to Rethink Academic Twitter.

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Decker
Internet Janitor, 2024/05/13

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If you're curious to know what the hypercard experience was like for Mac users back in the day, you might want to try Decker, "a multimedia platform for creating and sharing interactive documents, with sound, images, hypertext, and scripted behavior." I'm not a fan of the small sized and black-and-white aesthetic, but that's purely a matter of taste. Via Alan Levine. More fun tools from Internet Janitor.

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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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