July 19, 2013
Saylor Foundation launches open online K-12 courses
Cable Green,
Creative Commons,
July 19, 2013
Cable Green reports, "The Saylor Foundation recently launched a new K-12 program on Saylor.org, debuting courses for grades 6-12 in English language arts and mathematics. A team of experienced educators and staff are developing courses fully aligned to the US Common Core State Standards. Like Saylor’s college-level courses, the K-12 program incorporates open educational resources (OER), making the courses, as well as their contents, widely reusable by students, teachers, and parents nationwide." And open education marches on.
In 20 Years, We’re All Going To Realize This Apple Ad Is Nuts
Mark Wilson,
Co.Design,
July 19, 2013
"This is it. This is what matters. The experience of a product." They're showing this Apple ad in Canada as well and I'm glad someone has articulated juts what it is about it that bothers me so. "Why it’s begun to make my shoulders tense and stomach churn every time it comes on TV--is not that it’s lying about how we use technology, but Apple’s consecrating the behavior, and even going on to say that their products, not the lives they serve, are 'what matters.'" And 'the experience of a product' is so not what matters.
HR and Big Data; Jumping the Gun?
Michael Folkman,
Four Groups,
July 19, 2013
From a human resources (HR) perspective, big data has two potential applications, according to this article:
- to enable organisations accurately predict the performance of individuals and identify and nurture the behaviours that lead to success
- widen the recruitment net by trawling social networks, forums etc. looking for people with experience or abilities that are in demand
But Michael Folkman writes, "I’m not convinced that in its current form Big Data going to have the effect that many supporters are claiming." Why not? Because "a person’s performance is not just about that individual." For example, "individuals are rarely able to replicate the success they have in one organisation once they get headhunted into another." Team relationships, organizational culture, and similar factors play a crucial role in outcomes. But it will be hard, I think for governments, organizations and educational institutions to stop thinking of people as 'plug and play' and instead start thinking of them as people situated in specific environments.
You Are Not an Artisan
Venkatesh Rao,
ribbonfarm,
July 19, 2013
This is a long post and will take some time to schlep through, but the distinctions painstakingly made by the author are important and serve to draw our attention to the sort of work we should focus on in the future (this in turn should guide our decisions about education). "The easiest way to appreciate the emerging human condition to adopt a couple of new metaphors for machines: machines as children and humans as intestinal fauna..." We will have to take care of our machines as though they were percocious children; while most of the attention is focused on creative work, the real employment gains will be in the schlep work the giant machine-system cannot do for itself: data cleaning, image interpretation, human customer service as a differentiator from voice-prompt hell, various kinds of machine repair... From solar panel installers to driverless car debuggers, several schleppy professions are starting to emerge."
Immersing
Keith Lyons,
Clyde Street,
July 19, 2013
One of the challenges of email (and any web communication, for that matter) is representing it more intuitively. We communicate, for example, with people, not objects such as topics, messages and artifacts, yet our mail is organized around the latter rather than the former. In this post Keith Lyons points us to an MIT project called Immersions (as always I have to admire the way MIT manages public relations around its projects). Immersions is "a people-centric view of your email life... dive into the history of your email life... a tool for self-reflection at a time where the zeitgeist is one of self-promotion." I can't use it; it connects to GMail, which I mostly don't use. I note with interest though that Immersions manages to connect to GMail with OAuth, which means you never share your email password - something LinkedIn has yet to figure out.
Bring Your Own Policy: Why Accessibility Standards Need to Be Contextually Sensitive
Brian Kelly,
UK Web Focus,
July 19, 2013
I'm inclined to agree with the reasoning in this paper. Brian Kelly summarizes: "rather than having a universal standard for Web accessibility, Web accessibility practices and policies need to be sufficiently flexible to cater for the local context... web accessibility is not an intrinsic characteristic of a digital resource but is determined by complex political, social and other contextual factors, as well as technical aspects which are the focus of WAI standardisation activities. It can therefore be inappropriate to develop legislation or focus on metrics only associated with properties of the resource."
We’re missing jobs, not skills, Mr. Kenney
Jim Stanford,
Globe, Mail,
July 19, 2013
On taking office as Minister for Employment & Social Development, Jason Kenney tweeted, "I will work hard to end the paradox of too many people without jobs in an economy that has too many jobs without people." Today, my former student newspaper colleague Jim Stanford responded, "the labour market almost never runs out of workers. The usual problem is a general, persistent inadequacy of employer demand for labour... there are more than six unemployed Canadians for each job vacancy." Both are right; both are wrong. Yes, there is a skills shortage, but we're not seeing industry take action to address this; it's being left to government. Yes, there are more workers than jobs, but as key labour shortages are eliminated the overall pool of jobs increases; each skilled job filled creates several new less-skilled jobs.
Free Courses for a Big Problem
Paul Fain,
Inside Higher Ed,
July 19, 2013
From the Inside Higher ed newsletter: "Community colleges use open-source, MOOC-style content as study guides for remedial courses, and some are choosing homegrown content over courses from MOOC providers." Well they would have to, since the MOOC provider content is for the most part locked down and not reusable. That's why OERs and MOOCs are such a potent mix.
Blackboard MOOC Gains 15 More Colleges
Kelly Sheridan,
Information Week,
July 18, 2013
Lots of movement in the commercial MOOC arena. On the one hand, San Jose State and Udacity have decided to cool it for a while (more) (even more). Meanwhile, Blackboard has signed on more than a dozen partners. Taking all this in, Inside Higher Ed has started a campaign compplaining about no-boid MOOC contracts (I wonder why this wasn't a problem for them last week, or last year).
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