My vision for an open textbook
Tony Bates, online learning and distance edcuation resources, February 20, 2014

Tony Bates is always interesting and therefore so is his vision for an open textbook ("a personal vision for what I want to do, he writes. "There are innumerable alternative visions one could quite legitimately have for an open textbook"). It will be "aimed mainly at faculty and instructors in colleges and universities" and "a model for open textbook publishing, incorporating many of the design principles of ‘good teaching’ – such as active and social learning, use of video and audio, crowd-sourcing, remixing and adaptation."

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An(other Attempt at an) Intro to Data Journalism…
Tony Hirst, OUseful.Info, February 20, 2014

I like this presentation a lot. Science, management and journalism are typically represented as taking an objective stance on objective data. But the data are rarely objective, and as this presentation makes clear, the stance can depend a lot on your point of view. Good science (and management, and journalism) means being able to take a variety of points of view (Hirst talks about 'sensemaking' and 'telling stories' but I think this is loose vocabulary for describing contextualization and perspective). Seen from one angle, a set of points may represent a straight line; from another angle, they may be a curve. The real strength (and meat of the presentation) comes when Hirst describes how we can ask questions and how we can interpret answers: looking for outliers, similarities and differences, trends, patterns and structure.

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