OLDaily

Presentation
Trends in the Future of Learning
Stephen Downes, Dec 15, 2017, Learning Futures Workshop, Gatineau, Quebec

Work in the future will require higher levels of analysis, access to experts, and greater autonomy. How can the College@ESDC equipped itself for what’s coming? What form(s) is learning, and especially operational training, likely to take in 10-15 years?

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New post
Moodle News, 2017/12/15

Short article in Moodle News pointing to some interesting resources about a forthcoming MoodleNet: "Users and enthusiasts can follow the developments on a dedicated blog at blog.moodle.net, maintained by Doug Belshaw. There is also a (very preliminary) white paper available here." Some interesting bits: "Project MoodleNet should be a robust, decentralised, federated system that does not have on a single point of failure." Also, "Project MoodleNet should put the user in control of all of her data. All data held about a user should be compliant with the terms of the GDPR and be removable from the system." The unnamed Moodle News author is sceptical; "the image Moodle built already looks to be lagging behind."

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Key themes in mobile learning: Prospects for learner-generated learning through AR and VR
Claudio Aguayo, Thomas Cochrane, Vickel Narayan, Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 2017/12/15

"Mobile learning still requires the theories, methodologies, and practices of its own as a field," write the authors. "We also see a need for mobile learning to be conceptualised around ever-changing learning affordances and educational settings, rather than focusing on static structures such as content-delivery approaches, while embedding it within the scholarship of technology enhanced learning." All of which makes sense to me. The context is a literature review in a New Zealand project "targeting the origins, developments, and current state of the art in mobile learning across disciplines and educational sectors." The best quote from the report is from "Parsons (2014), who also recounts the key themes in mobile learning research over the past 20 years, concludes that '[T]he message from the timeline for current researchers is to cast their eye beyond current technology and practice and imagine the potential opportunities for the mobile learning that are not yet even possible or practical.'" Image: Paradiso.

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Mobile augmented communication for remote collaboration in a physical work context
Jana Pejoska- Laajola, Sanna Reponen, Marjo Virnes, Teemu Leinonen, Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 2017/12/15

This report documents "field studies in actual work contexts to map how participants solve physical tasks with remote help powered by augmented video calls, and examined how the drawing feature was used in these contexts... augmented video calls enhance remote collaboration by allowing workers to point at task objects and locations, thus potentially improving informal workplace learning." It's interesting to see how far back work in this field goes - some of the early references date from the 1990s. The research involved the development and testing of the open source SoAR (Social Augmented Reality) Android app "that enhances video calls for the purposes of asking questions and providing guidance in context-dependent work situations." SoAR was created for the construction sector in Finland and incorporated a vision-sharing feature "that enabled augmented interactions on top of the live video stream and allowed participants to communicate by drawing on the video call."

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The Fake News Culprit No One Wants to Identify: You
danah boyd, Wired, 2017/12/15

I waver back and forth on the topic of institutions. On the one hand, I find that they are capable of significant harm, as they concentrate power and authority and and easily usurped to work for an elite. Exhibit A: the university system. But by the same token, institutions create the fabric of society, without whiuch we exist only in a dog-eat-dog world of feudal authority. Whatever your views, institutions are being challenged in 2017. We have Umair Haque, formerly of Harvard Business Review, writing that American institutions are broken and near collapse. And here in Wired danah boyd asks, "what would it take to restructure the configuration of finance, political governance, and corporate activity for something that's a public good?" She argues, "the networks have become too fragmented and too polarized. Technology doesn’t help; it simply magnifies the poles... (we) were wrong to say that people would actively connect to those who were different than them because they could through technology."

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Fake news and Facebook: Campaign kicks off to help Canadians separate fact from fiction
Clare Hennig, CBC News, 2017/12/15

This is an example of the deployment of education outside the usual channels. The public service message has been around for as long as there are ways to send messages (1950s radio dramas are full of them). Does the PSA actually work? There's a case to be made. Canada's Participaction program has a longstanding history of promoting fitness. We all remember the sounds from the Hinterland Who's Who program. And over the years the government has produced 86 Heritage Minutes to inform Canadians of our hgistiory and culture. We might just say that these are forms of advertising or propaganda, but any form opf education not explicitly designed to serve opnly the students' interests can be argued to be the same. But more to the point, there are many cases where the interests of society and the interests of the individual align; the four examples cited above are all instances of this (which is why they were successful), and so is the case in the present article, the eight PSAs being released to help people defend themselves against fake news.

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