OLDaily

Vaccinating People Against Fake News
Elizabeth Svoboda, OpenMind, 2022/09/01

The idea here is that by having young learners play games in which they learn how media can be manipulated they are able to consume media more critically in the future. "These games rest on a single, overarching premise: You can inoculate people against fake news by exposing them to small amounts of such content - much as low doses of live virus can vaccinate people against a disease." Though I suspect that anti-vaxxers would be opposed to this sort of treatment as well.

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Why online learning must remain part of the education toolkit
Andreina Parisi-Amon, Times Higher Education, 2022/09/01

Now that our institutions are rebounding back to 'the way things were' after the pandemic, we're seeing the first glimpses of people saying "no, no, I don't want to go back" in the media (though tbh the piece feels like a paid placement). This article (with a wonderfully puzzling illustration of online learning in which almost everything is completely analog) is an indicator of that. "We have a generation of young people who have grown up on personal devices that allow them to customise anything important to them: playlists, blogs, chats. They successfully communicate with friends, family and partners, expressing their passions and interests via remote devices. For the most part, they understand how to use those devices effectively for their needs. Why can't it be the same with learning?"

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Web3: The Promise of a Blockchain-Based Internet of Value
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, 2022/09/01

I've been getting email suggesting I be more critical of blockchain and web3 technologies, though I would observe, with Irving Wladawsky-Berger, that "in their early years, major new technologies are generally accompanied by a mixture of excitement, speculation and confusion, as people sort out what the technology might be about and how it's likely to evolve. Something important is going on out there, but it takes time and marketplace experience to sort things out." Still - and here is where I think most criticism comes in - I have zero interest in what is called here an 'internet of value'. While it may be true that "contracts, transactions, and the records of them are among the defining structures in our economic, legal, and political systems," I don't think they should be, and there are many more important things in the world. But this isn't a problem with the technology, it's a problem with a world view that see things exclusively in terms of money, laws and power. Image: Tapscott, on Altoros.

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Top 100 Tools for Learning 2022
Jane Hart, 2022/09/01

Jane Hart has published her list of top educational tools for 2022, and usefully, divides it into three sections: tools that support personal learning (PPL), tools for workplace learning (WPL), and tools for education. The top of the list is virtually unchanged from last year (as is the make-up of the top 100 list as a whole). YouTube, PowerPoint, Google search, Microsoft Teams and Zoom lead the way. "It has become clear that whilst 2021 was the year of experimentation – with an explosion of tools being used as people tried out new things, 2022 has been the year of consolidation – with people reverting to their trusty old favourites."

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On the Relationship Between Adopting OER and Improving Student Outcomes
David Wiley, improving learning, 2022/09/01

To be honest, I think David Wiley is pursuing a straw man when he argues that open educational resources (OER) have no impact on improving student learning. Indeed, it feel like he is arguing mostly against his own past work. It has never been the purpose to OER to improve student learning; the objective is to improve access to learning for people who have none. That's why (as Wiley himself admits) studying the effectiveness of OER in existing university classes is like "the equivalent of measuring the effect of a pain relieving drug on a sample of people who are mostly not in pain." But to people without access, Wiley argues, OER is only a small part of the mix - after all, he says, only 27 percent of students surveyed indicate that they don't but the textbook. Sure. But nearly 100 percent of those without access to the university class don't buy the textbook. And it's true - these people can access the "billions of resources which are freely available on the public internet with the same result vis-à-vis the access hypothesis" and are not technically OER. But that has always been (part of) my point (contra Wiley) about there being no need to be a license purist to achieve the benefits of open access. But mainly, Wiley here says nothing, and seems to care nothing, about the outcomes of those people not fortunate enough to make it into a university class. That's why he has failed, after all these years, to see the actual benefit of OER.

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Socioeconomic roots of academic faculty
Allison C. Morgan, Nicholas LaBerge, Daniel B. Larremore, Mirta Galesic, Jennie E. Brand, Aaron Clauset, Nature Human Behavior, 2022/09/01

The authors write, "we show that faculty are up to 25 times more likely to have a parent with a Ph.D. Moreover, this rate nearly doubles at prestigious universities and is stable across the past 50 years." Not surprisingly, "Our results suggest that the professoriate is, and has remained, accessible disproportionately to the socioeconomically privileged, which is likely to deeply shape their scholarship and their reproduction." It most also shapes their indifference to open educational resources, their disinclination to support broader access to learning, and ongoing resistance to diversity, equity and inclusion. It also, to my mind, makes a mash of the suggestion that faculty are left-learning. If they are, it is only in comparison with their socio-economic peers, and not society at large. Via Bryan Alexander.

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Development of a sociometric web application to study the relationship among secondary school learners
Chutima Suraseth, Prakob Koraneekij, Heliyon, 2022/09/01

Most discussions of learning analytics look at things like content recommendation or prediction of learning outcomes, but this paper (14 page PDF) describes the creating and testing of a sociometric web application that performs a network analysis to identify how and why students associate with each other. Imagine being able to look at a screen and being able to see at a glance who the popular stidents are, who the outcast students are, and how they are different.

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The Landscape of MOOC Platforms Worldwide
Maria Perifanou, Anastasios A. Economides, International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 2022/09/01

Instead of focusing on the well-publicized MOOC platforms (Coursera, EdX, etc), "this study (30 page PDF) used 21 metrics to explore 35 MOOC platforms from across the world." It doesn't offer a lot of depth and insight, but it does aggregate a number of statistics related to each, including things like visitor engagement, technical characteristics, partnerships and courses. It's significant that many of the fields remain as question marks. Interestingly, "almost no platforms had adequate speed. Even so, most platforms provided mobile-friendly pages. Some platforms presented few accessibility and contrast errors while others had many accessibility issues."

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