Blurts

Social media services try to be helpful which is in the opinion of some manipulative. The services create your feed based on an algorithm that attempts to deliver what is assumed will be most likely to attract your attention. There is sometimes an alternative that allows you to see what those you follow have posted in reverse chronological order. The difference is that with the latter option you see everything without priorities being established for you. Twitter used to allow the user to select which approach the user wanted, but this has changed and the default is now to allow Twitter to control the order that tweets appear.

There is still an option, but you need to understand that you no longer control the default. It is easy enough to see the reverse chronological feed by just selecting the tab that appears at the top of the Twitter display.

I was reading this post from Jonathan Wylie describing note taking apps for the iPad and encountered an app that was new to me. The app was CollaNote and I now recommend it to anyone exploring note taking apps. The app is quite powerful and surprisingly FREE. I don’t usually trust free apps as tools I want to spend time learning because I worry they may disappear. In this case as in the case of other apps that allow handwriting and drawing, it is more my manual dexterity that is the issue. The keyboard entry works fine so if you are not committed to another product, I would give CollaNote a try.

The University of North Dakota is starting an esports BA. It looks to me like the program is mostly a combination of existing courses with a few new specialized courses. I worked at UND for many years before my retirement and I have mixed feelings. I understand the logic and the business of esports, but it seems the institution has limited resources and I would have rather the focused more on a struggling program in Instructional Design. I think a better long-term case can be made for IDT.

My biases aside, I do not esports is being offered as a club activity in many high schools and understand that argument for a different kind of high school club.

Previous esports post

This research summary from Hechinger is likely to get a lot of attention and a lot of different interpretations. The review of multiple studies asked the question what was the value of educators reviewing data from standardized tests evaluating student academic performance. Did student performance improve as a consequence? The composite answer from the studies investigating this question was no. This same conclusion was even evident in controlled studies that compared the results from experimental studies with a treatment and control group (exposure to data on student performance was assigned).

Here is my prediction. Some will argue this outcome shows that standardized testing has no benefit and should be abandoned. The researchers offer a different interpretation concluding that while educators did learn more about the struggles of their students they made no changes in how these students were being taught. Why adjustments are not made was not investigated and would now seem to be the next target for researchers. Does the classroom environment lack flexibility? Are teachers lacking strategies that could be used as alternatives to existing approaches?

I recommend your attention to the first 45 minutes or so of this This Week in Tech podcast. The episode begins with comments on several major “music” sites paying for exclusive rights to popular podcasts and then focuses on these same services purchasing RSS sites. RSS feeds allow the collection of new content from several media types, but an RSS feed is necessary for the distribution of podcasts. The core concern was that users would have to go through fewer and fewer services to access content.

The conversation then moved on to the entire consolidation process moving audiences toward accessing fewer and fewer points of access for information and entertainment. Obviously the popularity of Facebook as replaced how many offered their content and to a lesser extent the same is true of Twitter. Along with this consolidation come the algorithms that exercise poorly understood control over the content that is actually consumed.

If you are not an RSS user, I recommend Feedly. Google’s termination of the Google Reader did a lot of harm in limiting the use of RSS but there are still some good readers out there.