OLDaily

Publication of LRMI controlled vocabularies
Stuart Sutton, Learning Resource Metadata Initiative, Google Groups, 2018/04/04

I'm just reposting this verbatim, because it's chock-full o' links. "DCMI and its LRMI Task Group are pleased to announce the publication of a set of controlled vocabularies (enumerations) for use with existing schema.org learning resource properties. The vocabularies have been described using the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) and serialized in RDF Turtle.

1. Alignment Type for use with schema.org/alignmentType 
2. Educational Audience Role for use with schema.org/audience 
3. Educational Use for use with schema.org/educationalUse
4. Interactivity Type for use with schema.org/interactivityType

A fifth vocabulary identifying the learning resource type for use with schema.org/learningResourceType is still in development. These vocabulary additions can be found on the LRMI website at http://lrmi.dublincore.org/specifications/concept_schemes/."

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The CWiC Framework: Context around Courseware
Michael Feldstein, e-Literate, 2018/04/04

This post is mostly a video about the Courseware in Context (CWiC) framework, which you can read about here. The idea of CWiC is to "help you make better-informed adoption and implementation decisions with the goal of advancing the adoption of high-quality digital courseware in higher education." As Michael Feldstein says (and I concur) "We've seen repeated failures in the market to create selection tools for curricular materials or edtech products." The approach of CWiC is to place these selection decisions into context. There are, as Tanya Joosten's says "'a million' different contextual variables, from classroom implementation to support to individual student needs." Thus "CWiC is an attempt to take a traditional product selection tool model and enrich it enough to account for all these contextual variables."

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How babies learn – and why robots can’t compete
Alex Beard, The Guardian, 2018/04/04

This article blends to major streams of thought: the first, as suggested in the title, describing how children actually learn (hint: it's not the encoding of content knowledge; that's how robots learn, not people), and the second, relating this to failed attempts to 'school' children from lower socio-economic backgrounds by cramming them and force-feeding them. "Erika Christakis, early-childhood expert and author of The Importance of Being Little, charts the slow descent in preschool learning from a multidimensional, ideas-based approach to a two-dimensional naming-and-labeling curriculum." I would add the word "yet" at the end of the title. Robots are not yet adaptive and interactive, but they will be. And that's when they'll slowly begin to assist learning.

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Millennials destroyed the rules of written English – and created something better
Rachel Thompson, Mashable, 2018/04/04

I have written in the past (in Speaking in LOLcats) how internet users have created a new online language of their own using (for example) images. This article describes how English-speaking internet users (not just 'millennials' and not all 'millennials') have reshaped some of the conventions of written language as well, using punctuation, capitalization, and abbreviation in non-standard ways. This isn't new to the most recent generation of internet users :) and probably won't stop happening.

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Forged in wildfires: Lessons from California student-reporters
Anne Belden, Columbia Journalism Review, 2018/04/04

I'm not recommending that we send students into wildfires in order to improve their education. But the lessons learned by these student journalists will never be forgotten. “I was flipping between journalist mode and ‘that’s-my-home’ mode,” said one student journalist. “As it got closer to my house, the priorities started to shift. It was almost fluid.” The article offers some good advice on how to support student journalists (advice, really, that could apply to almost any sort of field work done by students). "Their skill sets advanced a year and, in three intense weeks, they transitioned from student-reporters to journalists."

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