OLDaily

Testing Transcribing Audio
Ton Zijlstra, Interdependent Thoughts, 2021/09/24

Ton Zijlstra describes his experience testing otter.ai, an automated transcription tool to convert audio into text. He mentions a few other tools as well - Amberscript (a Dutch company) and Happyscribe (a French company), as well as MS Word. I would add to that list the transcription available in Google's audio recorder tool on the Pixel, which is what I normally use. This time, though, I tried otter.ai for myself, uploading and converting the audio from my talk last week. I had to do it in two installments, since I can only upload 40 minutes on the free tier. The quality overall was better than Google, but not by a lot. You can see the results here - the only change I made was to split the text into paragraphs - and compare with the actual audio and video here.

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Are Facebook and Google going to ruin newsletters?
David Tvrdon, The Fix, 2021/09/24

Both Facebook and Google are moving into email newsletters. Email is one of the last non-platform forums for communication, so people are understandably worried that the companies will 'help' email newsletters the way they 'helped' RSS. Facebook's Bulletin model is a basic clone of Substack, while Google is integrating its Museletter model into its cloud services, and especially Google Docs. It's nice to have publishing tools that make it a lot easier to produce email newsletters, but the fear is that the companies will eventually reduce them to a closed system.

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Approaches to teaching in higher education: the perspective of network analysis using the revised approaches to teaching inventory
Velibor Mladenovici, Marian D. Ilie, Laurențiu P. Maricuțoiu, Daniel E. Iancu, Higher Education, 2021/09/24

Some background is needed to appreciate this article. The "the Revised Approaches to Teaching Inventory (R-ATI)" is a set of questions used in surveys to help teachers self-report their own practices (eg., a question might be "I think an important reason for running teaching sessions in this subject is to give students a good set of notes"). More here. The questions are taken to measure two sets of factors: "conceptual change/student-focused" (CCSF) and "information transmission/teacher-focused" (ITTF) (which I would interpret as 'constructivist' and 'instructivist' approaches respectively). The responses were then subjected to a graphical analysis to "display partial correlations between any pair of R-ATI items, while controlling for the variance of all other items." Finally, an interpretation of the graph yielded the following conclusion: "academics’ conceptions about the subject matter could be the first variable responsible for how academics develop their teaching approach preferences," a relationship that is stable (at least in this Romanian context) across "academic disciplines, class size, academics’ gender, and teaching experience".

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Instructional changes instigated by university faculty during the COVID-19 pandemic: the effect of individual, course and institutional factors
Jihyun Lee, Insung Jung, International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 2021/09/24

This study uses the SAMR model to represent changes made by faculty related to individual, course, and institutional factors respectively (micro, macro, meso). These changes are further subdivided into categories (eg., 'innovation propensity', 'nudging strategies', 'course modification') and the influence of each calculated from the responses (see table). "The results indicate that educators made the most drastic changes in their teaching behaviors, followed by changes made to their use of technology. The change in their beliefs about online teaching was small but significant." So the pandemic "likely forced many educators to change their teaching behavior without making corresponding changes in their beliefs." Maybe. But I think it's also too early to assess the impact on their beliefs. Let's see what they think after they return to the more traditional model.

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Beyond Zoom, Teams and video lectures — what do university students really want from online learning?
Dilani Gedera, Ashwini Datt, Cheryl Brown, Dianne Forbes, Maggie Hartnett, Academic Matters, 2021/09/24

This article is based on a survey of New Zealand students who report that they would like institutions to do, among other things, the following (quoted / paraphrased):

• design more flexible and inclusive learning experiences
• develop student skills and competency online
• establish opportunities for students to give and receive feedback
• foster social learning and social presence online
• provide opportunities to participate in class or online workshops
• inform students about the full range of support available

All are reasonable suggestions, and would be even more helpful if extended beyond traditional student populations, and made available to the wider community. Read the full SOLE report here.

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Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
John Marenbon, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2021/09/24

Known more commonly as Boethius, this philosopher lived in the last days of the Roman empire under an Ostrogoth king. Though he is most widely known for his Consolation of Philosophy, written in a prison in Pavia, to my mind he is much more important for bringing the work of Aristotle, via his translations and commentary on Porphyry, to the Medieval world, and in particular, the concept of "Porphyry's tree" as the structure and categorization of things in the world. Think of it as a mind map for Medieval thought. As Wikipedia summarizes, "The Isagoge, or "Introduction" to Aristotle's "Categories", written by Porphyry in Greek and translated into Latin by Boethius, was the standard textbook on logic for at least a millennium after his death."

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