OLDaily

How to Become a Coach or Consultant After You Retire
Dorie Clark, Harvard Business Review, 2017/05/12

😃This article speaks to me. I'm looking at what I'm going to do next, and am already beginning to transition into my post-NRC life. What will that look like? Well, as this article suggests, I'm beginning to figure that out ahead of time - I'm thinking about what I like to do, taking a skills inventory, looking at what separates me from the thousands of other people out there trying the same thing. I'm also recruiting potential clients and, if the opportunity comes along, splitting my time between NRC and consultancy (where 'consultancy' is construed fairly broadly at the moment).

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Some thoughts on Keybase, online security, and verification of identity
Open Educational Thinkering, 2017/05/12

"Identity is the most important factor in any conversation or transaction. ," says Doug Belshaw. Not that it needs to be ties to real-world identity, but you need to be able to establish some sort of credential. Keybase, described by Belshaw, is one such option. "Cross-platform apps for desktop and mobile devices have been added, mearning not only can you verify your identity across the web, but you can chat and share files securely, " he writes." My Keybase ID is https://keybase.io/downes - you'll notice it lists only Twitter and GitHub as confirmed identities (as opposed to the five listed by Belshaw). I used to also list my website, but my security certificate expired and I don't want to spend money on a new one.

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Open Distribution of Virtual Containers as a Key Framework for Open Educational Resources and STEAM Subjects
Alberto Corbi, Daniel Burgos, Electronic Journal of E-Learning, 2017/05/12

This paper (11 page PDF) covers an important topic and is one of the first detailed descriptions I've seen (not that others don't exist). The idea, in a nutshell, is that future OER distribution will be greatly enhanced by the use of virtualized containers. I've mentioned this a few times recently, referring to providers such as Vagrant or Docker. An example of this sort of thing in action is the Moodle in a box distributions that have been developed over the last five years.  The current paper describes the provision of specific learning resources in their own boxes, these enabling a person to move easily from one environment to the next to the next.

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Spotlight On Adea 2017 Triennial and Its Key Takeaways On Education and Training in Africa
Stefano De Cupis, African Development Bank, AllAfrica, 2017/05/12

This article reads a lot like an overly-wordy press release than it does an article, but I wanted to include it because of the background on work going on and organizations involved in Africa. In particular we have the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA), whose annual conference is highlighted here (here's their blog (RSS is broken though)). As well, we have the African Development Bank (ADB), the African Education Fund (AEF) and the Continental Education Strategy for Africa 2016-2025 (CESA 16-25)(44 page PDF).

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An Algorithm Summarizes Lengthy Text Surprisingly Well
Will Knight, MIT Technology Review, 2017/05/12

The day I started work at NRC I was told of our efforts to summarize documents using artificial intelligence. NRC has moved on to other things but document summarization has remained the subject of sustained research elsewhere ever since. Even humans have difficulty summarizing documents (so my years of teaching critical thinking can attest) and so it's not surprising machines struggle as well. But progress is being made, and yes, I would trust a machine to summarize documents for me (especially if I don't have legions of humans to do the work for me).

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I So Want Try a Docker/Kitematic ContainerBook…
Tony Hirst, OUseful Info, 2017/05/12

We move one step closer to personal cloud-based environments. Here's Tony Hirst: "it seems as if VMWare’s Workspace ONE product, which is at the heart of the announcement, provides a secure online environment for launching managed, personally contextualised, virtualised services." But Hirst wants more. "What I keep thinking I’d like to have is a containerbook, rather than netbook. Think: Docker + Kitematic + Docker Compose + a browser."

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