Stephen Downes

Koos, who must have seen my presentation Against Digital Research Methodologies, referred me to this stream: #overlyhonestmethods. There's also an article in the Guardian, here from last January. "scientists from all four corners of the twitterverse have not just dismantled that pure-of-thought image but demolished it with repeated 140-character salvos all bearing the hashtag #overlyhonestmethods... It all started with a neuropharmacologist researcher and blogger called Leigh when she tweeted "incubation lasted three days because this is how long the undergrad forgot the experiment in the fridge." There's 'scientific method', which is pure and abstract and unreal, and then there is science which, like me, muddles along. More: coverage from I, Science, also, the browser of a scientist, also, Tumblr images.

I think educational institutions can learn a great deal from the strategy adopted by Canada's National Film Board in 2007 to digitize its collection and move into the field of new media. "At home and abroad, the organization is fusing Canada’s traditional strengths in documentary and communications technology with its newer reputation as a new-media leader to build a uniquely accessible cultural institution dedicated to storytelling and democratic dialogue." It's hard to overstate what is happening in Canadian public media. Take a measure of Chris Hadfield, add some sniffing bears from the NFB, and add a good dose of Radio 3 attitude, and you have a uniquely forward-looking landscape. Canadian educational institutions should be in the middle of this (and so should we at NRC), not standing on the sidelines.

According to this report, "a new peering arrangement being signed today between Microsoft and Janet, the UK’s research and education network." Essentially the agreement is to provide cloud access to Microsoft products; "any UK education institution can benefit from standard terms and conditions on Microsoft’s cloud-based productivity software suite Office 365." In the comments, we read also that janet "are already working on deals with Google and Dropbox – see https://www.ja.net/products-services/janet-cloud-services." In general, this seems like a good plan, especially if UK universities are able to save millions of pounds. But there is also good reason to be cautios when you see reports like this stating that "government is currently over-reliant on a small 'oligopoly' of large suppliers (and) benchmarking studies have demonstrated that government pays substantially more for IT when compared to commercial rates."

Enclosures:
- janet-cloud.pngw687h594

According to this University Affairs article, "the B.C. government said it will make available up to 20 free and open online textbooks for some of the most popular first- and second-year university and college courses... it has committed $1 million to fund the venture. BCcampus, the provincial agency overseeing the project, is rolling it out in phases. It recently released a list of the 40 most highly enrolled first- and second-year subject areas for which it is sourcing textbooks. It also identified 10 existing open textbooks, mainly first-year introductory texts. The agency issued a call for proposals to faculty members and teaching assistants to peer review the books and is making available an evaluation rubric to use for the reviews." The proposal received a good response from Tony Bates, who calls the idea "shrwed," especially as it implicates faculty in review and selection. It is estimated to save students $1000 per year. No response from publishers in the article.

This is a really useful post. It begins by deflating some misconceptions about TinCan replacing SCORM, and proceeds to offer a much wider description of ADL's overall plan. In a nutshell, writes Christian Glahn, e-learning today has become distributed, collaborative, networked, continuous (etc etc), and so, "this creates tensions with the centralised, single interfaced, individual learning, and course-centred concepts of SCORM." So by 2011 ADL decided to rewrite the specification. TinCan, or the Experience API, constitutes only the first part of this. The Training and Learning Architecture (or TLA) has, he writes, "four essential parts that are intended to extend the present capabilities of SCORM for maintaining interoperability in modern learning environments:" the Experience API and learning record stores (LRS), the content broker, learner profiles, and competence networks. See also tincanapi.co.uk and see also this response from Michael Roberts.

In my email just now, this announcement: "Today Lumen Learning and Instructure announced the availability, via the Canvas platform, of six open course frameworks that make it easier for instructors to teach effectively using open educational resources (OER). You can view the press release or browse the courses from the Lumen Learning website. The brainchild of open education pioneer David Wiley, open course frameworks are curated collections of OER that look and feel like online courses, with content and course segments mapped to learning objectives. These courses serve effectively as blueprints instructors can use to teach a course as-is, adapt or refine the course content to make it work better for their students." So... they're course packages, right? The materials are mostly licensed under CC-by, and there's an option to purchase print materials on Lulu.

Looking at the new xBox release (I saw an ad for it on the morning news) Dean Groom writes, "while games are scapegoated as causing all manner of social ills, they are the media-platform which is most able and likely to significantly change who own’s the content gateway. It will be game-networks which decide which social-network, which movie, which news-channel and music will be presented to the family." The new xBox is Microsoft's play to become the network that leverages access to that attention, and hence, can derive revenue from the advertising and promotion thereby enabled. "What is important is that as a game-media-network they want a direct line to consumers in the attention economy – and that is what it will deliver. It will leverage its games capital to achieve it."

This is brilliantly done, painting a dystopian picture of the teaching profession in the not-too-distant future. A lot of detail, a lot of understatement, this article strikes a perfect balance of realism and chilling.

“Taxes?”

“Who pays those things any more?”