OLDaily

Feature Article
How It Could Work
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, 2021/05/11

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Top educational apps for children might not be as beneficial as promised
2021/05/11

I'm categorizing this item under "I'm shocked! Shocked!" But I will note in passing that this sort of complaint is not uncommon, and that there has been a constant line of criticism of ed tech that it does not deliver what its proponents promise. Nobody I know, for example, is saying "apps should replace human interaction and that they guarantee learning."  Now these criticisms, I might add, tend to cherry-pick examples. I never see them criticize what i and other serious developers project for learning technology. And that points to the source of the problem. It isn't ed tech - it's marketing and the rest of the hype that follows from commercialism. Don't blame ed tech for commercialism. It's nothing we created, and for many of us, nothing we desire.

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What skills shortage?
Harold Jarche, 2021/05/11

Discussion of the skills shortage has reached a new plateau recently and it causes Harold Jarche to look back a few years to think about what it means exactly to say that there's a skills shortage: “When employers say there’s a skills gap, what they’re often really saying is they can’t find workers willing to work for the pay they’re willing to pay,” according to Marina Gorbis. As Jarche writes, "to understand human performance improvement we need to focus on the system, not the individual worker. As W. Edwards Deming noted from his extensive experience, 94% of work performance issues are a result of the system... This looks like a major gaslighting operation, driven by corporations, educational institutions, and big consultancies. Blaming the victims (workers) of financial capitalism takes the spotlight away from the real causes of our problems and challenges." Or as another commentator said recently: "artificial intelligence isn't taking away your jobs. Management is taking away your jobs, and blaming it on AI."

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Remember the Days When People Commented on Blog Posts?
Helen Blunden, Activate Learning, 2021/05/11

This is a post not only about the demise of comments on blogs and the damage that social media did to blog conversations in general but also about what's important in online writing and what metrics (if any) really matter. Hint: it's not likes and retweets. "Maybe we need to review our 'why' of using social media," writes Helen Blunden. "Is it to simply 'push' our articles, blog posts, thoughts and reflections. Or, can we have more meaningful responses and conversations in our blogs in exchange with our readers who took the time to respond to our posts?"

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Connectivism and emotions
Alaa AlDahdouh, 2021/05/11

I like this experiment in a new post format Alaa Aldahdouh calls  text-over presentation, "organized as if I were speaking to audience in the conference. You will see the slide first and will read my speech next." The post is based on his recent IRRODL article on the same subject, and provides a more accessible way to cover the content. "There were a consistent pattern emotions experienced among almost all learning activities... Internet searching and online communication accounted for most of the emotional arousal." So "The role of teacher is to keep one’s eyes open for frequent failure by students and to intervene before the negative-activating emotion develops to negative-deactivating emotion."

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Implications of the Intertwined Effects of Curriculum InclusiveMOOCs
Aakarsh Shrivastava, Nitasha Hasteer, K.M. Soni, International Journal of Information and Education Technology, 2021/05/11

This article (5 page PDF) describes the integration of a MOOC within an existing curriculum in a process the authors describe as a Curriculum Inclusive MOOC (ciMOOC). We aren't told very much about what a ciMOOC is, exactly (though we are told several times that it is "a framework implemented by a private Indian University to provide flexibility to both University and its students"). It seems to me that this is an example of what used to be called a "wrapped MOOC". And this points to a weakness in standard processes of literature review - if you didn't know the term "wrapped MOOC" (and why would you?) you wouldn't be able to find the previous work done on the subject. 

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