OLDaily

The Return of Peter Nicholson
Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates, 2018/10/10

Inside public service circles this argument on innovation is pretty familiar territory. Canada enjoys economic growth because we're a resource-based economy, but this is slowing, innovation is lagging, and as a reult productivity is dropping. So, as Alex Usher summarizes, "What is needed now are demand-side strategies: procurement policies that promote innovation, more export facilitation, competition policy, intellectual property policy and smarter regulation... The problem is not the supply of innovative ideas: it is the demand for them." Here's the problem. We've been trying to stimulate this demand for years (especially during the Harper years, but still in the Trudeau years) but mostly it amounts to pouring money down a sink. Companies take the money and just keep doing what they were doing. We're not large enough to create markets; we can only create products and market them, but corporate spending on R&D in Canada is low and getting lower (see diagram). And that is why productivity is dropping.

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Connected learning
Steve Wheeler, Learning with 'e's, 2018/10/10

It's nice to see people recognize the importance of connected reading, but this post recasts it as some sort of constructivism and feels like it should have been written in the 2000s. I don't want to be critical, because Steve Wheeler is normally on target, but as preparation for a talk in 2019 this outline is solely lacking. The first sentence of the last paragraph has by itself been the subject of a wealth of study over the last decade: "Learners with digital technology can discover for themselves, and drive their own learning, but it will be less structured than formal educational processes." Connected learning isn't constructivism. It's blogging and commenting, social networking, MOOCs, communities of practice, and so much more.

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Blockchain Technology Overview
Peter Mell, Nik Roby, Karen Scarfone, Dylan Yaga, National Institute of Standards and Technology, 2018/10/10

This is a good crisp summary that doesn't shy away from technical detail but steps through the major elements of blockchain technology with clarity and precision. The sections on blockchain components (section 3) and consensus models (section 4) are particularly strong. It even comes with a fun blockchain use case flowchart. 68 page PDF.

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Walmart planning 'net-connected trolley'
BBC News, 2018/10/10

Not e-learning directly, but this story about a shopping cart that spies on you points to the sort of world we're creating. "The patent, submitted in February, would see trolleys fitted with sensors which in turn send data over the internet to Walmart's servers." Walmart says it wouldn't collect any personally identifiable information, but why would we believe that?

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Flipping the Learning
Read Write Collect, 2018/10/10

Some of the best posts are those providing clear step-by-step instructions on how to do things, in this case, how to flip the classroom. The post describes how to start a blog, how to embed third party content or insert a URL, podcasting, making a class blog, creating a YouTube channel, adding media and plugins, and resource tables. There's also an extensive list of resources. Sure, many will find this basic - but many will not, and this is for them.

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Why open admission systems don’t always lead to greater equity in higher education
Marie-Helene Doumet, Education & Skills Today, 2018/10/10

People writing about open access to learning need to review their knowledge of necessary and sufficient conditions. It is misleading and trite to say "x by itself won't solve the problem of equity". This is true for pretty much any value of x because solving the problem of equity requires that a number of factors be present.PProviding one, but not the other, doesn't improve. Providing only the other doesn't improve access. What is interesting and useful is to show whether or not some factor is necessary, not that it's not sufficient. Sadly, this article doesn't do that.

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