OLDaily

Learning through the Open Creation of Knowledge
Allison Littlejohn, Little by Littlejohn, 2017/08/14

This is a quick read exploring the idea of students creating and organizing heir own learning. As Allison Littlejohn notes, "Some Massive Open Online Courses have been designed around every learner also acting as a teacher and bringing knowledge to the network." Students don't always follow present objectives. "Students who do not complete a MOOC or who drop out are often very satisfied with their learning." So, concludes Littlejohn, "we need new ways to support students in planning, achieving and reflecting on their (self-determined) measures of success." This is true, to a point. The bulk of the post creates a structure within which this support would take place. "The model focuses on how students plan, learn, study, create and reflect/ assess." And it suggests that there need to be models that go beyond learning behaviour, and include cognitive and affective aspects as well. My concern is that the more structure is put inbto place, the less autonomy they student has.

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Useful xAPI Queries eLearning Designers Should Know
Anthony Altieri, Learning Solutions, 2017/08/14

Good article with real code examples showing both how xAPI data is stored in a Learning Record System (LRS) and how queries can be executed on this data. "Queries are where xAPI really shines," writes Anthony Altieri. "By understanding how queries work and what their limitations are, you can begin to build much better, and more meaningful, statements." You can find the full code used in the examples on GitHub.

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If I Ran a Newspaper….
Jeff Jarvis, Medium, 2017/08/14

Universities and news media face the same challenges from digital media, and if the news media house is on fire - to use the analogy Jeff Jarvis uses in this detailed post - then universities occupy the house next door, to which the flames have spread. I don't agree with everything in this post, but Jarvis nicely identifies three key strategies both need to undertake in order to survive (quoted):

• find communities that are self-defined and somehow underserved and learn how to serve them better
• interests must be defined not in our terms — the content we happen to have, the way we assign and organize our newsroom — but instead in the terms of the interested.
• we need to start with people’s needs and serve them in the context of their use, 

I'm less sanguine about the commercial model Jarvis proposes, but this is key: "The success of commerce in media depends on trust and credibility with your users... the best way is by making an open transaction and compact with users, delivering obvious value in return for data."

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