OLDaily

UTC is Enough for Everyone, Right?
Zach Holman, During, 2018/06/21

Among many other things, the NRC is the keeper of time for Canada, which lends a little extra relevance to this article. Additionally, anyone designing educational technology has encountered the hurdles of managing time with software. And most people will find this article an entertaining (if occasionally colourful) read. Via CSS-Tricks.

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Edu-business as usual—market-making in higher education
Ben Williamson, Code Acts in Education, 2018/06/21

Good article on what Pearson is doing in education with a great cover photo. And I really like the analysis of what it is exactly that Pearson is doing in education. Beginning from the precept that " markets do not simply appear," Ben Williamson focuses on an argument that shows "how the formerly non-market space of higher education has been reframed and re-made as an ‘education services market’, and subsequently how these HE markets work." The offering of goods and services that higher education might purchase is only the first step of the process. It wants to reshape that market, and "it has established itself as a distinctive market provider which is ‘transforming higher education’." Ultimately, though, by reshaping the market, "Pearson is seeking to build and maintain the market for its products to ensure its long-term stability and profitability."

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Seven deadly sins of online course design
Matthew Lynch, The Edvocate, 2018/06/21

This is a light read and, as a listicle, doesn't really have a coherent point to make, but it was also a fun read and some of the 'sins' were well spotted. My favourites included: overwhelming discussions, bad narration, and buried leads. I would have prefered a focused article that stressed that learning should be clear and accessible to students. But this will do for now. And ways to atone for each, which is the strength of the article.

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GitHub Education Is Now Free For Classroom Use
Henry Kronk, eLearningInside News, 2018/06/21

Microsoft has made two major acquisitions in recent days and then turned right around and made them free for educators. One, featured in this post, is GitHub. The other was FlipGrid, a student video discussion platform, which it made free for education (and even offered refunds) shortly after. This reminds me of Apple's strategy decades ago, a strategy of supporting education that resulted in a generation of enthusiastic support.

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Scientists Seek Genetic Data to Personalize Education
Ben Williamson, DML Central, 2018/06/21

This strikes me as a really bad idea, but I present it here so readers can judge for themselves. That said, as the article notes, "It raises significant concerns about biological discrimination and rekindles long debates about eugenics and the genetic inheritance of intelligence." The idea is that "educational genomics seeks to unpack the genetic factors involved in individual differences in learning ability, behavior, motivation, and achievement." The problem, as I see it, is that none of these are genetically based, and further, "the new geneism" may well be just another attempt to import bias and prejudice into the system. However, "the concept of “precision education” has begun to circulate among scientists who engage with psychology, neuroscience and genomics to understand learning processes."

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Americans believe two-thirds of news on social media is misinformation
Taylor Blatchford, Poynter, 2018/06/21

This will be presented differently depending on where you get the news, which I guess is part of the point. Here's how API summarizes it: "Americans believe 39 percent of news in newspapers, on TV or on the radio is misinformation and 65 percent of news on social media is made up or can’t be verified as accurate." Personally, I think this is probably a fairly accurate assessment. Part of the reason why there is so much mistrust in institutions these days is that these institutions have become untrustworthy.  There's probably no way to legislate trustworthiness, so don't worry, I'm not promoting a Tanzanian solution. But institutions - the media, universities, publishers, governments - need to find ways to regain that trust. This in turn help the rest of us establish credibility on social media. "The full reports on bias and inaccuracy, and views of misinformation, are available on the Knight Foundation's website."

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Building a RSS Viewer With Vue
Raymond Camden, CSS-Tricks, 2018/06/21

I do like stuff like this. "In this article, I'm going to explain how I put it together and also what's wrong with it. I knew getting into this that I was going to make some compromises, so the plan is to follow up this version with a nicer one in a follow-up post." Part 1, Part 2.

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Has Consciousness Lost Its Mind?
Tom Bartlett, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2018/06/21

This review of the Science of Consciousness conference, held recently in Tucson, illustrates everything that is wrong with academia. The Chronicle of Higher Education seems offended that people outside the orthodoxy of what he styles as the "field of consciousness studies" would gather and discuss the topic in a serious way. I get that he thinks a lot of the content is nonsense. A lot of the content in most conferences is nonsense. But if it's approached earnestly and carefully, it sometimes turns out that this nonsense is valuable. And that's why people have conferences like this, and hatchet jobs by Chronicle reporters do far more harm to scholarship that people thinking hard about the idea of consciousness out there in the desert.

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Management alone can’t drive open culture change
Laura Hilliger, 2018/06/21

All this is true: "targeted learning around how a non-hierarchical governance model practically works in a global organisation is required. This, in and of itself, is a learning expedition that needs to be highly personal. We have to be retrained to fail forward and without fear. We have to learn to criticize constructively, even our bosses. We also have to rethink things like typical management activities, job security and career pathways. Above all, we have to feel safe inside our organizations and that requires trust." It's the kind of culture change we need in  our offices (and that, I think, I

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