OLDaily

Agile research
Michael Twidale, Preben Hansen, First Monday, 2019/01/03

"We already know what Big Design Up Front, waterfall style research looks like," write the authors. "Unlike in the setting of software development, there are many situations when BDUF waterfall style research is perfectly fine, indeed desirable or the best thing to do. But not always." I think a lot of research already operates within this paradigm, as illustrated by one of the risks mentioned by the authors: "agile research can be seen as perpetuating, even encouraging the concept of the ‘least publishable unit’ as an analogy to the minimal viable product." Image: Raphael Velt.

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A Whole New World (of Learning)
Josh Bersin, Chief Learning Officer, 2019/01/03

"While I hate to say it," says Josh Bersin, "the end of the LMS as we know it is coming." Instead, "What most companies are doing now is simply 'starving investment' in the LMS so they can spend their money on learning experience platforms, new content libraries, advanced VR and microlearning systems, and tools that help people share video and other types of information, collaborate and implement performance support. Products such as WalkMe, EnableNow (by SAP) and GuideMe (aka MyGuide), as well as tools such as Axonify and Qstream, can deliver training 'as needed' without an LMS, giving L&D leaders the option to shift their investments." (My parentheses and links; image: Axonify).

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Partnership Working to Connect Degrees and Certifications
Rhea Kelly, Campus Technology, 2019/01/03

Universities may eventually regret this arrangement. By pairing their programs with third-party certificates they risk losing their monopoly on credentials. Not that they haver a choice - they will probably lose it in any case. Anyhow, this very short article is about Workcred, a nonprofit organization focused on credentialing in the workforce, funded by the Lumina Foundation.

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Futures thinking with Bruce Sterling
Bryan Alexander, 2019/01/03

Summary and link to a talk by Bruce Sterling. There are two propositions: first, to be a futurist is to pick an audience "that agrees to value a certain aspect of futuring." Second, these audiences can be defined along the lines of Stewart Brand’s Pace layers. Clearly Sterling's talk was tailored to this audience, the Long Now Foundation. Me, I would classify change along another axis as well: duration. Culture, commerce and infrastrcuture change rapidly and the changes have a short duration. Governance, culture and (aspects of) nature change slowly, and the changes endure. But my own focus is on a layer not even present - we can call it, perhaps, 'scientific and technological discovery', where the changes may be very rapid but have great duration, because these discoveries don't go away - planets, algorithms, materials: once we find them, they don't disappear, and the changes they create are more or less permanent.

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