OLDaily

Future Forward: The Next Twenty Years of Higher Education
Van Davis, Blackboard Blog, 2017/08/29

This post announces and summarizes a new publication (44 page PDF) of the same name. It's a bit of a misnomer, as it is in essence a set of thirteen interviews with academics on the future of education. It's interesting reading, but if I had to characterize the interviewees with a single word, it would be "executives" rather than "futurists", and their view, collectively, is steadfastly rooted in the present. Without irony, Van Davis writes, "erhaps Mike Abbiatti... summed it up best when he opined, 'If we can, in some way, move higher education into an organization that has a true conversation across the continuum of the organization...'" Cue the heralds.

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Obtaining Permission to Blog With Students
Kathleen Morris, The Edublogger, 2017/08/29

I may sound like a bit of a crank when I say this, but I think it's ridiculous that you should have to seek permission in order to blog with your students. We (most of us) don't live in dictatorships! Yet nonetheless, Kathleen Morris writes, "Your first step before introducing blogging into your classroom will be obtaining permission from your school, and parents or guardians." She also describes how you should talk about ho you will use blogging, why you want to blog, and what guidelines and privacy settings you will have in place. I understand the caution but I don't think it's warranted, and it sends students exactly the wrong message.And speaking of students, I find it interesting that they are the one group of people Morris did not say we need to obtain permission from.

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Hypercard Archeostackology
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2017/08/29

"Can I say," asks Alan Levine, "that like Ward Cunningham, experiments in Hypercard led me to the web?" Probably. Levine doc uments his early experiments with Hypercard, some of which were interesting and other of which were, in his words, a mess. "The bigger projects worked well because they had solid content, pedagogy and instructional design behind them. And a lot of the work in Hypercard seemed to take me on a path to the web." Good read, and it's useful to remember that a lot of the concepts were around before there was a world wide web.

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International Standard Name Identifier (ISO 27729)
International Standard Name Identifier, 2017/08/29

While publishers are pushing standards like ORCID, this is the ISO standard for names. "ISNI is the ISO certified global standard number for identifying the millions of contributors to creative works and those active in their distribution, including researchers, inventors, writers, artists, visual creators, performers, producers, publishers, aggregators, and more." It's a distributed system. "The ISNI database is built from many databases worldwide, and based on linking through matching algorithms. ISNIs are assigned when there is a high level of confidence in matching new names to existing names in the database." My ISNI is 0000 0003 8266 307X. See also Wikidata's page. Am I freaked out about this? No - I am deighted to have my own identity.

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All the routine jobs
Kate Bowles, Music for Deckchairs, 2017/08/29

This is a lovely post that looks at the (unattributed) nature of routine work. It's a bit like the art derived from Google book scanners, showing how the work of the invisible is essential to the product(s) we see today. And what happens when robots replace them, as Toby Walsh suggests they will? Will we end up with "fidget spinners of higher education," asks Kate Bowles? "It’s not just the overblown claims made about their transformative potential by the vendors who are excited to sell them to us, but because of all the ways they normalise a particular body type, and in doing this prepare to humiliate any student who doesn’t fit the mould, literally." Lovely.

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