OLDaily

he Cultivation of Critical Thinking Ability in Academic Reading Based on Questionnaires and Interviews
Jian Li, Yan Ren, International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning, 2020/12/03

A pair of researchers in China find that "about half of the students can objectively analyze and reason about the literature when they read the literature in terms of the cognitive skills (analysis, reasoning and evaluation), and one third of them can hardly classify the literature and compare the literature on the same topic" (I wonder what the results of the same survey would be in other countries; I would imagine it's similar). They argue that "students should not be superstitious about authority. Even papers published in authoritative journals or papers by well-known scholars may have deficiencies." This is good advice for everyone.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

4 Practical Ways Google Docs Can Help You in Your Online Teaching
Educational Technology and Mobile Learning, 2020/12/03

The four practical ways are: co-editing documents, sharing instantaneous feedback, suggesting edits, and sharing and collaborating on a document with more than 100 people. All these are different ways of saying essentially the same thing, which is specifically that more than one person can work on a Google Doc at the same time (a.k.a. 'collaborative editing'). I think collaborative editing is a fantastic teaching tool, and wish the author had spent more time thinking about specific teaching practices rather than just restating the same thing over and over. Other collaborative editing tools include Nextcloud, which has a built-in collaborative document editor, and CryptPad, a privacy-by-design collaborative document editor.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

How Microsoft crushed Slack
Casey Newton, Platformer, 2020/12/03

Here's the analysis of the Slack sale to Salesforce in one paragraph: "The idea that workers would someday choose all their own tools was always a fantasy, he told me, in part because most workers don’t event want to think about their tools. In such a world, the winning app will almost always be one with a giant, er, salesforce behind it. Microsoft had one. Slack didn’t. Enter Salesforce." I don't think that's the whole story. I think that having a whole enterprise suite helped Microsoft a lot (it will also help as Microsoft pushes back against Zoom).

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Bursting Their Bubble
Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed, 2020/12/03

I've long described a 'triad model' where people from different institutions cluster together in a local community, taking their courses online but enjoying the in-person experience with other people. I never quite expected it to roll out like this, though: " The U Experience, as it’s actually called, is slated to open to 150 students at a Pottsboro, Tex., lakeside resort next month. The concept? Students enrolled in different colleges and universities who would otherwise be studying remotely on their own will live, eat and take their online classes in a maskless, COVID-19-free bubble. " Cost? $10K per semester. More if you want more than one meal a day.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]