OLDaily

School Shootings: No More Thoughts and Prayers
Ronnie Burt, The Edublogger, 2018/02/16

I endorse this message: "Please, no more thoughts and prayers. It is time for action on how we can stop a 19-year-old, who had been suspended from school for bringing a gun, from walking into a store and purchasing a military-style assault weapon. We must work to elect those to office that will make this happen. For decades we’ve done nothing while our kids are dying. We are ready for real change and real action."

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Anger at Google image search 'peace deal'
BBC News, 2018/02/16

The essence of the deal Google struck with Getty Images is that it has removed the 'view image' button from its image search application. Now I personally don't know why you would search for images unless you wanted to view them. But more to the point, it seems wrong to me that one company with a few million commercial images would dictate the terms of access to an entire web full of billions of all sorts of images (including my openly licensed images that I want people to be able to view). "This is a terrible idea... you find an image on Google Images only for the image to be nowhere in sight," said one user on Twitter. "Talk about destroying your own successful service."  Google also removed the "search by image" button, which ironically is the best way for people to discover whether their images have been used by someone else. More: Ars Technica, Boing Boing, ZD Net. Update: there's a Chrome extension to put the 'view' button back. I checked and there's also a Firefox extension that does the same.

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Universities and the “democracy of the gullible”
Jean Winand, UNESCO Courier, 2018/02/16

This is a good article and a weak article at the same time. It's a good article in the sense that it raises a significant issue and discusses it clearly and precisely. But it's a weak article in that it overstates the problem (it's simply not true that "no one thinks of criticizing the technical elite") and offers an overly broad resolution, taking a classic 'defense of the humanities' position. I don't, for example, debate the need for "research on Kant [Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), German philosopher] medieval philosophy or phenomenology." But I would certainly debate the manner in which it is currently conducted. Philosophy and the humanities have such an important role to play in the day-top-day lives of people, and yet their practitioners retrench behind academic walls, subscription barriers, and programs available only to the elite of society. No wonder governments question their continued funding. More from the current issue of Courier, which is dedicated to the question of why education is still searching for utopia.

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Automerge
GitHub, 2018/02/16

This is a "JSON-like data structure that can be modified concurrently by different users, and merged again automatically." So how might that be useful? Here's one case: imagine a cMOOC has been developed and released, with all its contents defined in a JSON file (so it can be harvested automatically by personal learning environments). As people use the course, they begin to alter its structure and add resources. This data structure would make that possible. Would it work? No idea.

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IMS Global Learning Consortium Announces Caliper Analytics v1.1
Press Release, IMS Global, 2018/02/16

The Caliper specification "was initially released in 2015, to enable the collection of valuable learning and tool usage data from digital resources, which can be used for predictive analytics." This is an update. It provides "guided language for describing, collecting, and exchanging learning data across learning technologies, and promotes better data interoperability through a shared vocabulary for describing learning interactions."

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