OLDaily

Take our playbook: NPR’s guide to building immersive storytelling projects
Wesley Lindamood, NPR, 2018/06/27

This is an outline of NPR's "editorial development process called Hypothesis-Driven Design." It's an approach to design that goes beyond layout and presentation to include aspects of experimentation, but which also "provides teams with a structure for developing an informed and shared opinion to test and learn from in quick and lightweight ways." From where I sit the model would offer students a useful model to follow in their own development projects, one that combines both creativity with evidence-based practices.

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Declaration of Rights and Principles to Transform Scholarly Communication
Richard A. Schneider, University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication, University of California, 2018/06/27

This is dates from April, 2018, and was recently (?) released (via Digital Koans). It is an all-encompassing statement of author and institutional rights that draws a clear line between current predatory practices and what ought to be the academic publishing regime in the future. I strongly support this declaration. It opposes copyright transfers, opposes waivers on open access clauses, and states (among many other things) that "licenses shall not restrict, and should instead expressly protect, the rights of authors, institutions, and the public to reuse excerpts of published work consistent with legal exceptions and limitations on copyright such as fair use." Yeah! No double payments. No hidden profits. And no NDA clauses - " shall be transparent and shall not contain terms that prevent the sharing of their contents."

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5 Critical Gaps in STEM Skills
Dian Schaffhauser, 2018/06/27

This is a different way of looking at the gap in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) skills. Sure, there's the knowledge component - or, at least, "basic mathematics, critical thinking, complex and creative problem-solving and the ability to adapt." But the gap manifests in some unexpected ways as well. Consider, for example, the "belief gap", that is, "the impression students have about which industries offer STEM jobs and whether or not they believe they belong in STEM." Or the "geography gap," "exposing the connections between 'poverty and place' and the 'lack of opportunity in certain neighborhoods and communities.'" This account is based on the State of STEM report (warning: they will require the information they need to spam you before they send you a copy, but this direct link to the 44 page PDF might work).

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The Coherence Theory of Truth
James O. Young, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2018/06/27

A naive theory of truth would be one where a sentence is true if and only if whatever it describes is actually true in the real world. This is the correspondence theory of truth. But what if you can never satisfy this? What if you can't know enough about the real world to establish correspondance? Is there no truth, then? Not necessarily - this is where the coherence theory of truth comes in. If we can have a set of consistent sentences describing the world as we know it, then that consistence itself might be enough to justify our claim that the sentences are true. The most important advocate for a coherence theory of truth today is probably Donald Davidson, and I think this newly revised article in the Stanford Encyclopedia doesn't do him justice. But it's a good brief description of a concept everybody interested in knowledge should know.

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Lessons Learned From a Consortium That Fizzled
Mark Lieberman, Inside Higher Ed, 2018/06/27

This article describes what happened when four liberal arts colleges decided to form a consortium to offer EdX MOOCs together. Don't worry, it's nothing bad. But it's interesting to see how each institution found its own path forward. Davidson focused on "free, short courses driven by timely topics in the news, such as voter fraud and "engaging in a time of polarization." Colgate developed two MOOCs and "now sees them as one element in the institution's landscape of course modes." Wellesley secured Mellon Foundation grant for blended learning and developed an on-campus initiative. And Hamilton developed four MOOCs "but eventually opted not to pursue the medium further."

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