OLDaily

The OERu Blog Feed Finder
OERu Technology, 2018/10/23

I want to keep this handy for our course. "If a learner has a blog, they generally know its web address. If provided clear instructions, they can fairly reliably go to it, and copy and paste the URL into a text field. So I decided to use this as a starting point for creating our "Blog Feed Finder" - a simple tool that helps us side step the issue of requiring a learner to find their blog feed URL - by finding it for them." As the site notes, "you can try it yourself right now without even needing to log in." That's the way it should be.

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With what do you want to light the torch? Say things in full, bedlamite!
Wordshore, Metafilter, 2018/10/23

This year marks, more or less, the 40th anniversary of the Multi-User Dungeon, or MUD. This post on Metafilter focuses on the first MUD, ultimately called MUD2, licensed to CompuServe, and later killed by that company. MUDs really began to proliferate with the LPMud, created by Lars Pensjö, which, first, was extensible, and second, spawned numerous free and public domain versions of the code (many of which predate the 'official' invention of free software at Stanford in 1989). I started internet programming on the LPMud in 1987 (accessing the internet through Athabasca University's servers), taking advantage of the Object Oriented LPC parser he built with the system to make it extensible.

People forget the origins of these early licenses. Here's George Reese (aka Descartes of Borg), writing in 1994: "Since all  drivers except DGD were derived from LPMud 3.0, they all require a copyright at least as strict as that one, which basically states that you can use the server as you like, so long as you do not make a profit off of its use." More, to the people who take this free code, change it (by adding a comma or notice), and commercialize it he writes: "you used the original author's software. You did not have to use it, and they did not have to let you use it. Playing legal games based on legal technicalities (real or imagined) is slimey and unethical." Pretty much my views too.

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Meet the modern learner: Engaging the Overwhelmed, Distracted, and Impatient Employee
Todd Tauber, Wendy Wang-Audia, Bersin by Deloitte, 2018/10/23

This is a scraped blog post (may or may not be framed) containing a framed version of a Bersin by Deloitte PDF-based report uploaded and shared through Slideshare. I can think of easier ways to offer this content (but I follow e-learning, conocimiento en red for the content, not the convenience). Anyway, the gist of the report is that there is a "noticeable lack of participation, engagement, and satisfaction exists in corporate training offerings these days [because] they still are not fully embracing the fact that much employee learning does not actually happen in formal training courses or via learning management systems."

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The Road to Sharing is Not Paved With Licenses
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2018/10/23

"Share for gratitude," writes Alan Levine, "not for rules and license terms." I agree (and I have my own stories about home someone just uses some of my content for a project or whatever). What the whole copyright and licensing debate has done is to move the ethos of the crass commercial from the corporate sphere into the personal sphere. The same ethics that govern corporations (which is to say, none, which is why everything must be spelled out in a license or contract) is now to be applied to people. Anything goes, unless there's a legal liability attached. I have no interest in that world, in its indifference to what is right and good, and in its valuation of nothing more than wealth and power. (p.s. now that gRSShopper uses WebMentions, when I post something like this it sends a message back to the author - not because it's required, but because it's nice).

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Meaningful Learning Begins and Ends with the Opportunities We Create
Eric Sheninger, A Principal's Reflections, 2018/10/23

It's a bit ironic to read this headline and then read in the text that "When it comes to learning the emphasis has to be on what the kids do, not the adult." But the sense of it is reasonable enough. Education - especially at younger ages - revolves around the creation of learning experiences rather than the transmission of content. But in this article so much of this sentiment is placed in a teacher-centric and information-centric context. Like this: "Knowledge must be organized around key concepts and not learned in isolation as this promotes understanding." Well, no, it's not the concepts that ground knowledge, it's the experience. And this: "Learners must receive feedback from more knowledgeable others as well as peers." No, the idea is that feedback should some from a diversity of sources, not specifically "more knowledgeable others" (ie., teachers). And the diagram, where the final output is "stories" (credit here). No.

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Has L&D been hijacked by ‘identity’ politics?
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, 2018/10/23

I'm sympathetic with this sentiment from Donald Clark, having seen my share: " Gone are the days when HR and L&D were at the forefront of personal development. Much ‘training’ is now targeted at protecting the organisation from their own employees. A tsunami of compliance and identity training has overwhelmed L&D." I also agree that "I have values and have no interest in HR telling me what my values should be." But we shouldn't confuse between bad training and bad ideas. People should learn about things like leadership, values, identity, diversity, and bias. But being lectured to about these doesn't help anybody - it just creates the sort of pushback we see in Clark's post. And - as always - if our managers, governments and corporations want us to learn about these, then they need to live those princples they want to teach, so we can see them in action. To teach, after all, is to model and demonstrate.

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Introduction to Open Education: Towards a Human Rights Theory
TJ Bliss, Patrick Blessinger, International Journal of Open Educational Resources, 2018/10/23

This is an overview of openness in education and in educational resources in particular and takes a human-rights perspective on the subject. It's a fairly long article, but relatively introductory. Its almost entirely US-based history dates the beginning of open content from 1998, which is a (large) number of years too late (again, my 1995 openly-licensed Fallacies guide was following examples already widelky found the field even by then). Moving foward, the article describes " a home for all OER-related research in the first academic, peer-reviewed journal, the International Journal of Open Educational Resources. Not only was it a first for OER, but Layne also offered authors the opportunity to 'Blockchain' their research–which was also another first in the world of scholarly publications." This claim is also questionable; projects like Pluto have been putting them into the blockchhain for a while now; search for them with scinapse.io. Similar projects include ARTiFACTS, DEIP and Scienceroots. Also worth a look is this 2017 European Commission report on blockchain in education, which also discusses academic publishing.

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