OLDaily

How to teach yourself computer science: A developer’s 100-hour journey
Matthieu Cneude, TheNextWeb, 2020/10/05

What I like about this article is not that it's a how-to but rather one person's account of how they spent 100 hours (probably the equivalent of one university course or so) studying computer science. Each section is described in terms of 'what he learning', 'what he can apply in real life', and 'what problems he encountered'. Probably the most important - and most difficult - part of the work was the mathematics. I sometimes forget how important my own background in math and logic has been in my work on software and development through my career.

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Facebook targets teachers urging them to ‘request help” for any school supplies
Samantha Booth, Schools Week, 2020/10/05

This is another case of Facebook doing something inappropriate and then later apologizing. As part of a "a one-week pilot campaign in the US, UK and Canada" teachers using Facebook found a notice asking them to 'request help' at the top of their news feeds. It said, "Create a post requesting help with books, school supplies and other materials you need so people know how they can help.” While obviously school budgets are such that teachers are often raising their own funds, these tend to be (and should be)  managed by local school boards, and not multinational social networking sites.

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Strategies for Fostering a Productive Distance Learning Experience
Erin Gohl, Kristen Thorson, Getting Smart, 2020/10/05

This article will read like review for a lot of people, but it's still a good overview of what the authors say are "best practices that educators know are integral to productive learning and growth." In particular, the strategies recommended are (paraphrased):

• communicating expectations, including setting schedules for learners
• developing a classroom community and building relationships
• showing visuals, including models of completed work
• including hands-on resources
• scheduling breaks, and asking students to stretch, dance, or stand
• checking in with students and offering focused support

These together offer "engaging, productive and meaningful distance learning," say the authors. I think they are useful as guidelines, but should not be followed word for word.

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Developer Roadmaps
Kamran Ahmed, Roadmap.sh, 2020/10/05

This is a really useful set of roadmaps describing what you need to learn if you are pursuing different career paths in web development - Frontend (ie., the side that runs on the browser), Backend (ie., the side that runs on the web server), and DevOps. It should be noted that this is only a high-level view; for each item in the diagram there is a constellation of frameworks, templates, and helper applications (you can get a sense of this by looking at the React roadmap on the website). But it's interesting to see just how far this discipline has grown since the days of cobbling together some HTML in a text editor and getting it to display in a web browser. I found this resource via the GitHub site but it's the same in both places.

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Escaping the Ego Machine: Rethinking Systems Architecture for Educational Technology
Mark William Johnson, Improvisation Blog, 2020/10/05

This post suggests that social media feels like an "Ego machine" where "my thoughts, my documents, my desires feed a market of other individuals' thoughts, documents, desires." This, says the author, is because of the network architecture. "The 'ego machine' model can be represented as a set of interconnected nodes - individuals .... But social relationships in real life feel more like a cellular model, shown on the right. Cells are not individuals, they are 'dialogues' or 'codes of communication'... They are active processes with a boundary that separates an 'environment' which is negotiated and separated from a set of 'internal operations.'" I might disagree with some details of this analysis, but I think the overall picture is right, though I would add that we need our own personal environments along with the socially negotiated environments.

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The extremely weird story of a remote-learning company that’s making parents livid
Jared Newman, Fast Company, 2020/10/05

The story here isn't so much the technology company in question (though I must say its design choices are deeply disturbing) and the deeper issues regarding online content for young students. It's "about schools that failed to fully vet and understand the remote-learning platforms they were deploying as they raced to bring school online," writes Jared Newman. "Faced with extraordinarily difficult circumstances, some schools inevitably made some bad calls." Having content vetted by the wider community would address this issue. But this doesn't work with closed proprietary content.

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Instructional Design for a New Generation
Tom Kuhlmann, The Rapid eLearning Blog, 2020/10/05

Tom Kuhlmann writes, " Instead of just being traditional course creators, we should become both curator and connector. Curating resources helps sort through the noise and package what’s most important to meeting objectives. Connecting is all about facilitating a learning community and connecting experts with novices. It allows the content to live and breathe. The community has a knack for sorting value." Short article, nice pictures, and a theme that should sound very familiar to OLDaily readers.

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