OLDaily

We must do more now to prepare young people for the future of work
Dave McKay, Globe and Mail, 2017/12/19

This is an op-ed from Dave McKay, president and CEO of Royal Bank of Canada. We are entering a skills revolution, he writes, but Canadian students are not being prepared for the future. We need "people who work well with technology and work well with people – that can be the Canadian difference." He touts an RBC program called Future Launch - actually started last March using a system called Talentlink. Here's the content. The program also includes "a 'no résumé required' paid internship program, with selection based on skills, not work experience" in partnership with WE Schools, a UK-US-based charity (download the WE Schools kit).

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Workflow Strategy for Those Left Behind
Roger C. Schonfeld, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2017/12/19

This is a two part article (part one, part two) describing how the 'big two' (Elsevier and Digital Science) are in a race to create "an entirely new class of products, those that support research workflow for the sciences" and how this could "marginalize other publishers large and small." The case is well made. "With the SSRN and Digital Commons preprint services that Elsevier has been purchasing, there is ample potential for connections with article submission and review." But what should the other publishgers do? Here's where the article falters. It likens the situation to the challenge faced by Google from Apple when it launched its iPhone; Google's response was to build a phone of its own and to open-source (but not really open) the Android operating system. But the response to centralization is not more centralization, it's to offer a distributed alternative, and that's what Google did, allowing multiple providers to work together to respond to Apple.

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The next generation of research – it’s online and open to all
Daniela Duca, JISC, 2017/12/19

This article points us in the direction of some startups representative of the trend toward open research. The three are: Sparrho, whose "mission is to make science more discoverable, understandable and shareable"; Reveal Digital, who "are helping to bring collections of specialist content, such as Independent Voices, into the digital age"; and Konfer, "escribed by its founders as ‘Google meets LinkedIn’." 

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Is Wikipedia a Trustworthy Academic Resource? Scientists Think So
Meghan Bogardus Cortez, EdTech, 2017/12/19

Though I have some issues with how it is managed and how it is produced, I still consider Wikipedia to be a valuable resource and one that I am quite willing to reference in my articles. And that's the point of this article: Wikipedia is useful to me because I'm sceptical, because I'm careful to read articles in the context of my own wider knowledge, and because I cite them as background, not authority. Other reserachers seem to be doing the same. “Our research shows that scientists are using Wikipedia and it is influencing how they write about the science that they are doing... We need to change the conversation from one of abstinence to intelligent information consumption."

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Measuring And Driving Usage Of Teams For Education
Sam McNeill, Microsoft Education Blog, 2017/12/19

The headline refers to Microsoft Teams, and not to teams in general. There's a reference back to this article on how to measure activity in Teams. In this article Sam McNeill looks specifically at measuring the use of Teams in education. It focuses mostly on how to extract data from the application to reveal usage. There is repeated reference to the idea that "if you value it, measure it". But increasingly, the tool does the measuring. "The future of O365 Admin reporting is clearly heading towards personalised recommendations on how to maximise the tools to drive efficiency and smarter collaboration within your organisation." Here's the question, though: should we trust the recommendation from the tool to use the tool more? That's like Facebook admitting that using the site poses a mental health risk, but then recommending people use the site more.

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