OLDaily

Drafting #IndieWeb Principles for the Rest of Us
Greg McVerry, IntertextRevolution, 2018/06/01

The author of this post correctly points out that the original indieweb principles were too technical for most people. He thus drafts a second set of indieweb principles that are also too technical for most people. But this page gives us a nice set of starting principles (quoted):

• When you post something on the web, it should belong to you, not a corporation.
• Your articles and status messages can go to all services, not just one, allowing you to engage with everyone.
• You can post anything you want, in any format you want, with no one monitoring you.

The third principle has the potential to be problematic, but I read it this way: you are responsible for your own posts. Nobody's spying on you, but nobody has to listen to you either, and if you broadcast, you are responsible for the consequences. Here's my previous coverage of Indieweb.

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Cognitive Biases
John Manoogian III, Buser Benson, Visual Capitalist, 2018/06/01

This is just a placeholder to allow me to associate cognitive biases with critical literacies should I ever getting to writing more about the latter in the future. It's a list of 188 cognitive biases in a nifty graphical form. View the original list on Wikipedia.

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MOOC Expert Fiona Hollands Makes A Suggestion and a Prediction
Henry Kronk, eLearningInside News, 2018/06/01

The suggestion is to change the name MOOC because "they might be small, they might not be open, and they might be wholly different from the MOOCs first offered by Stanford professors in 2011, not to mention the earlier iterations in 2008." One prediction is actually a directive:colleges saving money using MOOCs should "invest in experiential learning for the students who don’t fare well in online learning experiences." The second prediction is a prediction: "Over the next seven years, (MOOCs) will be recognized by employers and gain credibility generally."

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Let's Stop Talking About The '30 Million Word Gap'
Anya Kamenetz, NPR, 2018/06/01

A number of years ago the government ran a series of ads saying, basically, "talk to your baby". But it isn't the number of words that's important, noe indeed is it clear that there was ever a 'gap' in the number of words some babies hear. If there is a gap, it's much smaller than was reported, and it isn't clear at all that it is correlated with income. But as the article notes, "the 'word gap' has become a kind of code word. We can say 'vocabulary.' We're not going to say 'poor' and we're not going to use 'race' but it's still a marker." That's not to say that talking to your children is unimportant. It is. " the sheer volume of conversation directed at children, not just spoken in their presence, is fundamental to language learning and later success in school.

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Social Finance pilot projects: Interim report
Kelsey Brennan, Brian Carriere, Sheila Currie, Shek-wai Hui, Boris Palameta, Sopcial Research and Demonstration Corporation, 2018/06/01

Social Impact Bonds (SIB) in education is a concept "whereby private investors pay up front for training and are repaid by the government if the training is successful in achieving pre-established outcomes." This report (92 page PDF) is an interim report on some SIB projects. In one, "led by Colleges and Institutes Canada, Essential Skills Social Finance (ESSF) offers ES training to low-skilled unemployed Canadians, through three College delivery partners. Private investors pay up front for the training, and are repaid up to 15% return on their investment." In another, "Skilling UP, led by Alberta Workforce Essential Skills Society (AWES)... employers receive up to 50% of their upfront investment in training for their workers, if targeted literacy gains are achieved." See also: Government of Canada, Social Finance; Non-profit Finance Fund, Activity Map of Pay-for-Success Projects (USA only); OECD, Social Impact Investing.

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Open-Access Best Sellers
Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed, 2018/06/01

I don't keep close track of how often my eBooks have been downloaded, but I do know it's in the tens of thousands. Maybe more; who knows? But this number, whatever it is, is a compelling argument for offering them for free, as compared to the press run of 300 copies the typical monograph might warrant. This article talks about how different publishers measure and report the usage of open access books and surveys a number of the larger OA presses.

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