OLDaily

Presentation
Applications, Algorithms and Data: Open Educational Resources and the Next Generation of Virtual Learning
Stephen Downes, Nov 30, 2017, Education Ouverte: Ressources Educatives Libres et Ingenierie de Formation, Hammamet, Tunisia

The next generation of OERs will take a step beyond traditional media and classroom support and begin to take advantage of the unique properties of virtual learning. Using examples such as virtual containers and actionable data books, I sketch the future for the next generation of OERs as a distributed and interactive network of applications, algorithms and data.

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The Surgeon Who Wants to Connect You to the Internet with a Brain Implant
Adam Piore, MIT Technology Review, 2017/11/30

According to this article, "Eric Leuthardt believes that in the near future we will allow doctors to insert electrodes into our brains so we can communicate directly with computers and each other." He is based in the U.S., so the surgeon probably doesn't want to do it unless you pay him a lot of money. But the idea, whether supported by public health care or not, has intriguing possibilities. "What you really want is to be able to listen to the brain and talk to the brain in a way that the brain cannot distinguish from the way it communicates internally, and we can’t do that right now,” Schalk says. “We really don’t know how to do it at this point. But it’s also obvious to me that it is going to happen." Some great photos with this article.

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Digital Debt, Personal Online Sustainability, and an Archive of One’s Own
Jim Groom, bavatuesdays, 2017/11/30

The number one reason to blog: "I’m really lucky I start blogging 12 years ago, because I could not imagine the fresh hell of having all of these memories strewn across third party social media services without the overarching organizing archive of my work that is the bava—it’s a mess, but its my mess."

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Three Slack Bots to Try
Prof. Hacker, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2017/11/30

This was a fun read. I likes especially Anamak bot: "Occasionally, a student will have a question that, for whatever reason, they don’t want to ask. Not because they fear they’ll get in trouble, but sometimes because they feel embarrassed. Simply, AnamakBot allows users to ask anonymous questions of other users. Yep, that’s it." Related: The Church of the Subgenius Finally Plays it Straight. "For some of us, Slack is not actually sitting around watching TV with a beer in hand. For some of us, Slack is doing the work, but the work we wanted to do."

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Why You Left Social Media: A Guesswork
Sofia Samatar, Catapult, 2017/11/30

"Sometimes at night I’ll spend an hour or more on social media, not posting, just looking, drifting through people’s feeds. I attach myself momentarily to certain personalities. They’re so clever, funny, observant, wise. I just want to be near them. Someone else." 

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Special Report on the Role of Open Educational Resources in Supporting the Sustainable Development Goal 4: Quality Education Challenges and Opportunities
Rory McGreal, International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 2017/11/30

Rory McGreal hghlights the role of OERs and MOOCs in supporting the sustainable development goal and outlines Canada's contribution to the field. "Canadian OER supporters must continue to increase awareness of OER among learners, teachers, administrators, and most importantly, among provincial education officials who are in a position to support open policies," he writes.

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Striving Toward Openness: But What Do We Really Mean?
Vivien Rolfe, International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 2017/11/30

We may be working toward openness, but "evidence shows that these ambitions are far from mainstream, and levels of awareness in institutions is often disappointingly low," writes Vivien Rolfe. To get at the reasons why, she strives to "explore the voices often unheard, those of the teachers and professional service staff with whom we are engaging." The formalization of openness as being related to open resoures may serve to lessen the emphasis on open practice. But this is the level that speaks to practitioners. "Those interviewed who were university lectures spoke of openness and how it had enhanced their teaching practice. For them, this related to the widening of pedagogic choice and providing flexibility in lectures and laboratory classes, and not being confined within the digital platforms offered by the institution."

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On Transformations
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2017/11/30

In a recent Twitter micropost Alan Leven commented that the 'broken' internet has allowed him to meet with, and have experiences with, people around the world, including during his current trip to Australia. He has always been a leading proponent of the benefits of sharing online, and his is certainly a model worth eulating. In this post he shares the text of a recent talk to  the International Specialised Skills Institute Fellowship Awards Ceremony. In the background, instead of slides, he showed a rotating set of 383 photos from the 60,000 he has posted online over the years (he also shares the bash script he used to extract them). 

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Draft: Introduction to the IEEE LTSC Technical Advisory Group on xAPI's Forthcoming Technical Report
Shelly Blake-Pock, LinkedIn, 2017/11/30

I'm helping with this, though not nearly as much as I should (NRC withdrew support for work in e-learning effective today so the work I do on things like this is pro bono). This is "an early draft of the introduction to the Technical Report on xAPI being written by the IEEE LTSC Technical Advisory Group on xAPI.," which is being led by Yet Analytics' Shelly Blake-Pock. "As an open source project, xAPI has been very successful in bringing together a wide community of developers, researchers, and business users across industry, academia, and government."

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Mastering the Learning Pyramid
John Hegel, Edge Perspectives, 2017/11/30

John Hagel is a business writer, so we shouldn't expect his analysis of learning to be deep, and it isn't. But he does capture an important concept: that as you drill down through the levels of learning effectiveness, beyond skills, knowlege and capabilities, you get non-cognitive factors such as passion. "I've written about here, here and here," he writes. "This form of passion has three components – (1) a long-term commitment to achieving an increasing impact in a particular domain, (2) a questing disposition that seeks out and is excited by new challenges and (3) a connecting disposition that actively seeks to connect with others who might be helpful in addressing these new challenges."

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One of the net's most important freedom canaries
Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing, 2017/11/30

I don't normally abbreviate headlines from the posts I'm covering, but this is a three-liner which states, in full: "One of the net's most important freedom canaries died the day the W3C greenlit web-wide DRM; what can we learn from the fight?" What we can learn, according to Cory Doctorow, is that separating the side effects of DRM from DRM is a powerful argument against DRM. "We proposed a membership rule that would allow members to use DRM law to sue anyone who infringed their copyrights -- but took away their rights to sue people who were breaking DRM for some other reason, like adapting works for people with disabilities, or investigating critical security flaws, or creating legal, innovative new businesses... This was devastating.  We made those companies address our concerns, and swept away the piracy smokescreen."

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A positive moment of uncertainty for universities?
Jonathan Grant, Wonkhe, 2017/11/30

The point of departure for this article is the John Ralston Saul's idea that there is “interregnum” an “in-between time” following the collapse of globalism in which there is “short positive moment of uncertainty …[where] it becomes possible to emerge into a less ideological and more humanitarian era." This moent comes at a time when universities, like most other institutions, are being challenged. "Perhaps the 'positive moment of uncertainty' for universities is a chance to re-think their public purpose, creating parity of esteem between education, research and service," writes Jonathan Grant. It would be a step in the right direction. Even in the government, the idea of 'service' has taken a back seat to making money and supporting companies. I'd like to see at least some institution trying to give back to the society that supports it.

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