OLDaily

The seeds of commercialization start at the beginning of innovation
Feridun Hamdullahpur, University Affairs, 2018/08/01

In this article University of Waterloo president Feridun Hamdullahpur argues that in order to support the commercialization of university research, "we need to bring everyone to the same table through a formalized program... to move insights and inventions more effectively into our economy and society through the mobilization of talent, research and startups on and off campus." I get that commercialization pays the bills, but my problem with this is that if 'everyone is at the same table' at the start of the process, the only output will be commercialization. I'm not a fan of having companies peering over my shoulder pushing my work into a direction that will be more profitable for them, especially when this comes at the expense of the greater good, as it so often does.

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What Are Narrative Podcasts? Why Use Them in eLearning?
Jeff D'Anza, Learning Solutions, 2018/08/01

Narrative podcasts have their predecessors on radio newsmagazine shows and I've heard a bunch of them on CBC shows such as The Doc Project, Out in the Open, Now or Never, and Podcast Playlist. "They tend to lean more heavily on production effects, such as the use of music and sound effects, as well as narrative storytelling techniques such as multiple characters, scene setting, backstory, hooks, framing devices, and cliffhangers." I hate them because they're really hard to do well and so often not done well. They fall so easily into tropes - the present-tense narration, the mood music, and the magnification of personal issues and domestic drama. The thing, too, with narrative podcasts is that they're not for remembering things (despite what the 'research' in this article says). They can be very powerful - but for things like framing, developing attitudes, setting norms, and challenging assumptions.

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Mixed Reality: A Revolutionary Breakthrough in Teaching and Learning
Sue Workman, EDUCAUSE Review, 2018/08/01

This article focuses mostly on the anatomy lab at Case Western Reserve University which is focused on providing virtual reality simulations rather than cadavers. It's also a bit of an advertisement for Microsoft's HoloLens. The virtual experience is arguably better than the real: " when students learn about human anatomy using a cadaver, they do not get the experience of looking at the living colors or textures, or seeing how organs function, or learning how blood actually flows." It's easy to over-hype the new technology, and we shouldn't, but this is again one more instance in which new learning technology goes a long way to replace the lecture and the textbook.

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Apple’s Longtime Education VP Shares Frustrations With Slow Pace of Change
Jeffrey R. Young, EdSurge, 2018/08/01

For someone who says we have to "rewire education" John Couch says a lot of things that sound like the same old thing. Apple’s former vice-president of education is plugging his new book Rewiring Education: How Technology Can Unlock Every Student's Potential. "I think there are parts," he says. "There's the iTunesU portion which allows you to distribute curriculum all over the world. There's a new application called Classroom, which allows a teacher to monitor the classroom. There's iBooks. If I were still calling the shots today, it would be about, “How do I take those individual functionalities and [put] them all together in a dynamic learning environment that's well integrated.” It's sort of the holy grail."

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I get by with a little help from my friends: The ecological model and support for women scholars experiencing online harassment
Shandell Houlden, Jaigris Hodson, Chandell Gosse, George Veletsianos, First Monday, 2018/08/01

According to this article, "women scholars rely on three levels of support: the first level includes personal and social support...; the second includes organizational... technological... and sectoral...  support; and, the third includes larger cultural and social attitudes and discourses." The key point here is that typically all three types of support are required, especially in an environment of of online abuse and harassment toward women scholars.

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Domain Camp
Alan Levine, Domains of Our Own, Ontario Extend, 2018/08/01

This is a set of four weeks of content (and a catch-up week) on the idea of creating a domain of one's own. It's an introductory course (though even the experienced will learn a thing or two) but more to the point it covers content completely skipped over in this era of living in online silos like Facebook and Twitter. It's based around cPanel, which is widely used by internet hosting services, and looks at things like landing pages, setting up your own email address, and other applications. It's a course that should be widely taught at the high school level or earlier.

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