OLDaily

The Difference Between an Informational Resource and an Educational Resource
David Wiley, improving learning, 2021/12/10

I like the way David Wiley is willing to go right back to basic premises to work something out. Here, he suggests that the difference between an informational resource and an educational resources is that the latter includes practice with feedback. To me, that would make something a learning resource, perhaps. But for something to be an educational resource isn't to have any essential content or components, it is to be used by an educator in the process of instruction or coaching. To be sure, learning resources make better educational resources, but no small number of educators are quite happy with nothing more than information resources. Meanwhile, we'll defer for another day a discussion of what it means for a resource to include practice with feedback.

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Toward Abolishing Online Proctoring: Counter-Narratives, Deep Change, and Pedagogies of Educational Dignity
Charles Logan, The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, 2021/12/10

The main point in this polemic against digital proctoring is that "we need counter-narratives.... we also need stories that aren’t defined solely in opposition to... online proctoring CEOs." Fair enough. But Charles Logan also argues that "pedagogies of policing and punishment are the soil sustaining online proctoring," which he tries to blunt by saying online proctoring is invasive in ways in-person proctoring is not. "An in-person proctor is not an unflinching gaze trained to interpret students’ behavior through the singular lens of suspicion." Really? That seems to me to be exactly what it is. I don't agree with most of what he says, but contra Logan I maintain that online proctoring is and extension of education's existing beliefs and practices.

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New Brain Maps Can Predict Behaviors
Monique Brouillette, Quanta Magazine, 2021/12/10

The article reports on some researchers who "released the first wiring diagram of a piece of the human brain... about the size of a pinhead." Obviously, nobody is predicting behaviours from that. But as Jeff Lichtman says, “It is like discovering a new continent.” In other words, "To search the sample completely, he said, would be a task akin to driving every road in North America." Where predictions have been successful is with much smaller neural nets, like that of the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, which only has only 302 neurons. The study of connectomes show just how much influence experience has, even in simple brains. "Even though the worms were genetically identical, as much as 40% of the connections between nerve cells in their brains differed." This creates what's called the “n of 1” problem - no two individuals has the same neural network, even if they have the same neurons.

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View of A feminist data ethics of care for machine learning: The what, why, who and how
Joanne E. Gray, Alice Witt, First Monday, 2021/12/10

This article covers a lot of the same ground as the module on duty of care in my ongoing ethics course. I read it as an attempt to systematize the concept and make it more accessible to more technically-minded readers. This, for example, explains the reduction of the approach to two principles and five practices. The authors also emphasize the role of humans in the AI economy and argue against a rights-based approach, saying that this leaves out discussion of structural issues of representation.

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Reflections on “EDUCAUSE’s 2022 Top 10 IT Issues”
Daniel S. Christian, Learning Ecosystems, 2021/12/10

Daniel Christian reflects on the recent Educause report on the Top 10 IT issues for 2022. I found the list somewhat vague and repetitive, and Educause may appear to agree, as it divides the list into three categories: two issues, four definitions of student success, and four stabs at a (crisis-informed) business model. Christian is sceptical. "Being data-driven won’t save an institution," he writes. "Vision might. But being data-driven has its limits." Also, "The digital transformations being talked about within institutions of traditional higher education may be too little, too late."

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“This is important, tell me why it’s great” – A Fallacy
Ted Curran, Ted Curran.net, 2021/12/10

Here's the gist: "This fallacy takes for granted that this content is “important” without doing the hard work of letting learners experience for themselves what’s genuinely good or useful about it" and it "puts learners in the position of having to instantly come up with reasons why this new framework is the best idea ever." An example of this is a learning exercise where you introduce a new technology and then have participants come up with applications before ever having actually used it.

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ADL Initiative Partners with NATO to Advance PERLS Microlearning Platform
Advanced Distributed Learning, 2021/12/10

The focus of this article is the PERvasive Learning System (PERLS) being developed by the U.S. organization Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL). PERLS is "an open-source platform designed to optimize anytime/anywhere learning opportunities for mobile device users." NATO is calling it the NATO e-Learning Network Application (NENA). "PERLS and NeNA are both designed to use standards and specifications consistent with the ADL Initiative’s Total Learning Architecture (TLA), including the experience application programming interface (xAPI)."

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Designing Higher Ed Data Visualizations: Aim Deeper to Gain Knowledge and Understanding
Campus Technology, 2021/12/10

"To gain more insight from analytics," writes Matt Jackson, "consider whether your dashboards offer basic facts or dive into true understanding of patterns within your data." The key to this article, I think, is in the section on rote learning fersus transferability. Numerous instructivists (eg. Daniel Willingham) stress rote learning and deny the transferability of important skills like critical thinking. But in fact there's a lot of transferability throughout learning. "My students provided dozens of examples to illustrate this concept," writes Jackson. Now this articl;e is weak on how to implement this as a visualization, but the core idea is sound.

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That Is Not How Your Brain Works
Lisa Feldman Barrett, Nautilus, 2021/12/10

This is from a few months ago, but is still current, as the myths it sets aside continue to persist. What do we have? Via Mike Taylor. Here (quoted or paraphrased):

• Myth number one is that specific parts of the human brain have specific psychological jobs. No, not so. Most neurons have multiple jobs, not a single psychological purpose.
• Myth number two is that your brain reacts to events in the world. Brains, however, don’t work by stimulus and response. All your neurons are firing at various rates all the time. What are they doing? Busily making predictions.
• Mhe third myth is that there’s a clear dividing line between diseases of the body, such as cardiovascular disease, and diseases of the mind, such as depression. Hah! Not so. (The 'hah' was me).

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