OLDaily

It’s official - higher education students want staff to be better with digital, not to use more of it
JISC, 2017/09/12

One of the problems with of surveys telling us "what students want" is that they're surveys of students. And the population of 'students' is a highly selected population characterized by greater than average family social stanting and wealth, greater success in traditional academic systems, and greater orientation toward predefined academic goals. This produces exactly the sort of traits that would favour technology "most often used for accessing information and for the production of work in a digital format, and is valued for its convenience." Not, say, to 'learn', 'experience new things', or 'go beyond the curriculum'. Get outside the traditional student body and the demands on technology most likely change, which could be why games and productivity tools seem to emphasize such different features.Here's the full report (40 page PDF).

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Rewilding EdTech
Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, 2017/09/12

Yes, this is what I want. "Rewilding might be an idea we could take to ed tech. Much of the early enthusiasm around ed tech was that it was, as Brian Lamb used to characterise it, fast, cheap and out of control." Tony Hirst has a great idea in the comments: "Hmmm… so why not just install and then something like Binderhub?" Great idea. I'll do that. But I have a paper to write today, a poster that's due tomorrow afternoon, a work plan to do, a longish report to write, some funding applications to review... And even if I had the time to just play, there's so much stuff to play with that I can't do everything, or even close to everything (even as I type this I'm listening to Principles of Globally Distributed Systems (earlier I listened to live coverage of the Apple conference while writing a paper) because there's just no way to do things one at a time any more). Not that this is a bad thing (my days are never dull) but it makes it harder to just run wild. 

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3 Crucial Elements of Being a Change Agent
George Couros, The Principal of Change, 2017/09/12

I have no particular desire to be a "change agent" but I know a lot of people in education technology value the concept. George Couros lists three essential principles to successful change agency:

• Show and model change in yourself.
• Relationships are the foundation... no one wants to feel they need to be “fixed”.
• Start the journey from where people are, not where you want them to go.

These principles are reasonable, but they come from the perspective of pushing somebody in the direction you want them to go. Hence the agency in 'agent'. I prefer a model where the agent helps people get where they want to go.

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Nobody’s Version of Dumb
Sherri Spelic, edifiedlistener, 2017/09/12

Prompted by a recently-posted article on Twitter-based echo chambers, George Siemens tweeted that his own experience is similar, and commented "Sadly, bright and intelligent people are reduced to RTing pithy statements rather than thinking. Twitter makes smart people dumb." Not RTing, but instead responding in a blog post, was Sherri Spelic, who rejoinded, "When George Siemens claims that his network is fairly homogeneous, that is something that he can fix if it’s a priority. But to drag us all down into a space that he in a later tweet describes as “closed, intolerant, narrow minded, and short sighted” is decidedly unfair and unnecessary." Audrey Watters, in her own post, rebutted, "I think there are massive problems with Twitter. It is, by design, a platform for harassment." And she points out, "A great deal of what happens on Twitter is wildly unsafe because of vicious, vicious disagreement."

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What is cmi5?
Experience API, 2017/09/12

Think of cmi5 as a set of "extra rules" for xAPI. It is a "specification intended to take advantage of the Experience API as a communications protocol and data model while providing definition for necessary components for system interoperability such as packaging, launch, credential handshake, and consistent information model," thus defining "interoperable runtime communication between Learning Management Systems (LMS) and Assignable Units (AU)." The specification itself is located on GitHub. Best practices and JSON samples can be found on the website.

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Compilers are the New Frameworks
Tom Dale, 2017/09/12

Tom Dale argues that "what we call web frameworks are transforming from runtime libraries into optimizing compilers." The practical effect of this is that we will not be able to learn from viewing the source how the web page was created, because the source will vary from place to place, person to person, depending on how the page was optimized for delivery. "Between WebAssembly, SharedArrayBuffer and Atomics, and maybe even threads in JavaScript, the building blocks for the next generation of web applications are falling into place." So how will people learn how to write web pages, then? Chris Coyier suggests " today's world of GitHub, StackOverflow, and the proliferation of learning resources more than make up for learning via our own website spelunking." The key, as always, is openness.

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How to Teach Pivotability, Not Stability
Alex Ellison, The Synapse, 2017/09/12

This is just a short post to highlight an article where the author hasn't throught the concept through. She wants to use the word "pivot", because it's the new buzzword among startups (and in the business press generally). It means, basically, to do something different when what you're doing now is failing. For example, when Coursera could make enough money as a MOOC provider, it decided to 'pivot' to corporate learning. Anyhow, as the title suggests, the author wants to "prepare future pivoters." So we need to "teach broad, theoretical knowledge to stimulate the thinking, scrutinizing and critiquing muscles along with technical knowledge to give context and show real-world applications." OK. All reasonable. But let's think about this a moment. Does she really mean 'pivotability'? No. She means balance.

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