OLDaily

A gallery of interesting Jupyter Notebooks
GitHub, 2017/11/24

This, or something like this, defines at least in part where we're headed with digital learning resources (formerly known as learning objects). This web page provides links to several dozen 'notebooks' - these are files that can be run on an application called Jupyter Notebooks. You can also view them in your web browser. But running them in the notebook allows you to change and execute the code visible in cells throughout the page. So it's a web page you can reprogram on the fly. Jupyter Notebooks runs on Python, and is included as part of the Anaconda Python distribution, though there are other ways of getting it as well. You can also create Notebooks in other languages, including Perl and Ruby. The examples here show running code for everything from data analytics to neural networks.

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EdTechFrance: The New Face of French EdTech
Céline Authemayou, Nina Fink , EducPros.fr, 2017/11/24

According to this article, "The newly founded EdTechFrance is the latest illustration of industry organizations' desire to collectively bolster their visibility and legitimacy. On November 17, the group published a manifesto stating its intention to turn France's focus to EdTech." You can read the manifesto (in French) on their home page. I've translated it, and you can see the English version on my Google+ page. "The manifesto's 140 signatories include educational institutions, numerous startups, among which Domoscio, AppScho and Beneylu, and more established companies like Qwant and Unow."

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How To Teach Students to Cover Elections in Real Time
Jason Kokot, J-Source, 2017/11/24

Personally I think that every event should be covered in real time by students in the field. Of the hundreds of education conferences I've attended, I can count on one hand the number that have engaged students in this way. That doesn't mean every student should do this. But for those who are so inclined, reporting on an event is an unparalleled way of engaging with the event, particularly when you won't be speaking and your alternative is to be a member of the audience. The current post from J-Source involves student journalists, but there's no reason why students from all disciplines couldn't be included (the same could be said of professional media). 

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Developing a European Maturity Model for Blended Education
National Institute for Digital Learning, 2017/11/24

I've never been that interested in blended learning but I do want to flag the launch of this project, the new European-funded European Maturity Model for Blended Education (EMBED) Project. "The project adopts a multi-level conception of blended education, including micro-level teaching and learning processes, meso-level institutional innovation and enabling strategies, and macro-level governmental policy and support structures." The article gets interesting about half way through when it asks "what is unique about the EMBED Project?" The answer is that "it should challenge us to do things differently and serve as a catalyst for helping educators to reimagine the nature of teaching and learning in the digital-era."

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