Ed tech must reads: column #22

First published in Campus Morning Mail 15th Feb 2022

Second Life vs the Metaverse from Drew Harry

The hype continues to grow around the Metaverse, the coming virtual work/play space that Gartner claims 25% of people will spend at least an hour a week in (by 2026). Many of us however are having déjà vu of similar claims from the time of Second Life. This Twitter thread from Drew Hill firstly steps us through how little has changed but then, interestingly, explores some ways that we could learn from subsequent technologies to make more meaningful use of the virtual world this time around.

Pearson buys Credly from Reuters

Credly is one of the most notable digital badge/micro-credentialling platforms still in existence and with this purchase, Pearson continues, in their unique way, to look for opportunities to carve out a niche in the online learning space. Their focus here seems to be primarily tied to the corporate learning and development side rather than VET or Higher Ed, which kind of makes sense given the size of the too-hard basket that this approach to education has mostly sat in for more than a decade.

AI replicates your voice after listening to a 5 second clip from Ramos AI (Tiktok)

Some people still raise their eyebrows when I tell them that TikTok isn’t just full of dancing teenagers and cooked conspiracy theorists. I found this brief video demonstrating recent work from Google where a speaker provided a five second voice clip that AI was then able to use to generate many unrelated sentences in the same voice. If you are interested in the more scholarly side of this research, it was also presented at the 32nd Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.

Sound and vision: introducing leadership from the International Consortium of Academic Language and Learning Developers

This blog post addresses a question commonly heard from people in my world – As a learning developer, how do you influence University policy and practice? Authors Carina Buckley and Kate Coulson share their experiences working in UK universities, modelling good practice and getting a seat at the table.

Wikitrivia from Tom J Watson

This simple online game asks players to drag random tiles generated from Wikipedia entries to the correct relative spot on a timeline. Put three in the wrong spot and your turn is over. This game offers a nicely balanced mixed of educated guessing and learning more about entirely random subjects. (My highest streak is 18 if you are up to the challenge)