OLDaily

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

The Power of Creating / Maintaining Your Own Links
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2024/10/07

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Totally agree. "All those 'posts' tossed into LinkedIn, The Platform I Will Only Call Twitter, the One I don't Use That has a face and a book in it, even my beloved Mastodon… those things indeed have a link to can point to, but they mostly just flow quickly down the stream, never to be readily found or used again." That's how OLDaily came into existence, and why.

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The Atlantic Did Me Dirty
Carrie M. Santo-Thomas, Substack, 2024/10/07

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A few days ago an article was published in the Atlantic titled The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books. The premise, of course, is that since students got so little practice in school, they arrive at (elite) universities unable to read books. No mention of how elite university students are selected, but I digress. Anyhow, this article is by one of the people interviewed for that Atlantic article. Carrie M. Santo-Thomas, who argues that "my experience is that young readers are eminently capable of critically engaging in long form content, but they're rightfully demanding a seat at the table where decisions about texts are being made." She also worries about the too-quick jump to scapegoating phones and other such things.

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Some Notes on Global Funding of Higher Education | HESA
Alex Usher, HESA, 2024/10/07

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I did read this whole post, so I suppose I may as well pass it along. It's basically a summary of trends in  public funding on higher education, and its core message - which is indisputable - is that trends vary around the world. The y-axis is an unlabeled set of values that likely stands for the percentage of increase or decrease (per year) for various countries. What I would like to have seen was a per capita analysis. If your funding increases 1% while your population increases 10%, that's not really a funding increase in any meaningful sense of the term.

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What’s the journalism we can make for people who don’t trust journalism?
Neel Dhanesha, Nieman Lab, 2024/10/07

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There's a reason why we don't want our learning content to be produced by Disney or AT&T: we would get content that reflects the priorities of Disney and AT&T (and likely, the sensibilities of large corporations in general). So why are we OK with these companies owning the news media? This is the issue that doesn't get raised in this discussion of what it would take to rebuild trust in news media. News and education are very similar in that they need to be designed first and foremost to serve the needs of their audience, and where the consequences are significant if they stray from that imperative. It concerns me that this panel of media experts doesn't seem to get that.

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Mobile phone bans in schools: Impact on achievement
Peter Kemp, Richard Brock, Amy O'Brien, BERA Blog, 2024/10/07

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I'm not sure how much we can take from one study, but here it is: "our examination of student outcomes and phone bans has revealed an inverse relationship: the more a country bans phones, the lower their PISA score." This is from February. A more recent analysis states that " A meta-analysis of 39 studies exploring the relationship between mobile phone use and educational outcomes for university students (Kates et al., 2018) concluded there appeared to be a consistent, but small, negative effect on educational achievement." An LSE Study found mixed results; "the evidence for banning mobile phones in schools is weak and inconclusive." Fordam, meanwhile, says there is a benefit to cellphone bans, but the studies they cite are from 2016 and 2018.

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Content Insider #877 – Not Us
Andy Marken, Google Docs, Content Insider, 2024/10/07

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Another excellent column from Any Marken. This one, subtitled 'Social Video is Profitable, Entertaining, Changing', takes a look at the reach of social media platforms, how they're being regulated (or in some cases, not regulated), and their strategy to extend their influence. "Social media video has become a big business worldwide with an estimated 45M professional (52 percent women, 48 percent male) and 162 amateur content creators."

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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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