OLDaily

Kirkpatrick and Open Badges: Can do better!
Serge Ravet, Learning Futures, 2018/10/05

This is a nice blending of Kirkpatrick levels of course assessment and open badges. It begins as a criticism of Kirkpatrick's use of badges ("I find it outstanding that after a mere 3-hour training, participants receive a badge specifying that they are able, among other things, to 'plan and deliver training programs with business value in mind.'"). Instead, Serge proposes " to define what I coined as K3 Badges—’K' for Kirkpatrick and ‘3’ for level 3." These are badges that would be certified not by the training institution or the learner, but by managers in the workplace (at K3, signifying that the learning is being applied on the job). This is a lovely idea, and extends the concept of badges in a potentially useful direction. Now all it needs is Bluetooth. I mean, Blockchain. Image: Clan Kirkpatrick badge.

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Top Hat Content Rescue Bookmarklet
Tom Woodward, Bionic Teaching, 2018/10/05

As Tom Woodward writes, "Top Hat has some useful features (and a very aggressive sales team) but it’s not a place that makes it easy to get your content out." This short item offers help. It's a "bookmarklet will select the Top Hat content into a format that lets you cut/paste it into an HTML editor. You can see some of the issues with typical awkward paths for trying to get content out in the video. It’ll also show you how to add a bookmarklet if you’re looking for that." It's ridiculous that this should be necessary.

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Research: Career Hot Streaks Can Happen at Any Age
Dashun Wang, Harvard Business Review, 2018/10/05

In my own mind I often compare my own career to that of a musician. Such a career is a mixture of hit songs, near misses, duds, and even periods where nothing seems to be happening at all. And it's very relative; I've never had a gold record, but I could, but it isn't up to me, and doesn't really reflect my work in any case. And this randomness isn't just me; it rules across the board. "We used a given work’s number of citations (as provided by the Web of Science), auction price, and IMDB rating, respectively, as measures of quality and impact. We find that across these diverse careers, the random impact rule holds firm." So what's the lesson? "As long as you keep putting work out into the world, one project after another, your hot streak could be just around the corner." Or not. But it doesn't matter. Do the work. Keep researching, keep digging, keep developing. What happens, happens.

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Education for All… Even a ‘Nazi’?
Greg Toppo, Inside Higher Ed, 2018/10/05

I do not like to get involved in U.S. politics because they are essentially the internal affairs of another country. However, Inside Higher Ed has published an article very sympathetic of Peter Cvjetanovic, one of the Charlottesville tiki torch marchers, and  Marc Johnson, the University of Nevada at Reno president who "had one clear, immediate thought: Cvjetanovic must graduate." The article depicts this case as one involving free speech (even though someone was actually killed at the far-right rally), but it is nothing of the sort. "Hate speech, after all, is protected just like other speech," says the article. No it isn't. It is a speech act, and specifically, a violent act, calculated to inflict harm on other people. Freedom and democracy are not about threats, intimidation and violence. Academic freedom doesn't grant the right to be racist and misogynist. People have a right to be protected from these people, even - especially! - on a university campus.

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An Ode To RSS, Moodle’s Most Pressing Interface
Cristian T. Duque, Moodle News, 2018/10/05

On the one hand, some people will say that the world of educational technology will resist decentralization. On the other hand, that same world can't kill it completely. A case in point is RSS, the ultimate decentralized technology, that lives on despite the efforts of even the might Google to kill it. RSS has been central to my own work for two decades, and the idea of a decentralized content and resource network is as robust today as it ever was. Maybe more so, give the now obvious failures of the social network platform model.

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Apple's New Proprietary Software Locks Kill Independent Repair on New MacBook Pros
Jason Koebler, Motherboard, 2018/10/05

As Doug Belshaw says on Mastodon, "Proprietary software is what proprietary vendors do." In this case, that the proprietary vendors do is write an application that presents people from repairing their MacBooks. " The new system will render the computer “inoperative” unless a proprietary Apple “system configuration” software is run after parts of the system are replaced." Yet another reason for me to stay far far away from Apple products.

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