OLDaily

Feature Article
What's The Value of OLDaily?
Sephen Downes, 2019/02/11

I wrote on Mastodon a few days ago, "I'm not sure anyone has any status in online learning any more. I'm wondering, maybe it's not even a discipline any more. There's learning analytics and open pedagogy and experience design, etc., but I'm not sure there's a cohesive community looking at what we used to call ed tech or e-learning."

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Roadmap to becoming a Solid Developer in 2019
Solid, GitHub, 2019/02/11

Solid, you may recall, is the project by Tim Berners-Lee and company to create a distributed social web. This page makes it clear just how difficult and complex that task is. It's a 'roadmap' to becoming a Solid developer - that is, it identifies and links to the different things you need to know. The 'basics' include identity, DOM manipulation, APIs and more, not to mention graph data and RDF. You'll also need package managers like Yarn or (Node.js) NPM. Then you can move on to React, a Javascript framework for dynamic web interfaces. After that, you can begin to learn Solid itself.

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Tinkering with the system won’t help reinvent the purpose of education
Jenny Mackness, Jenny Connected, 2019/02/11

I listened to the same episode of Brian Alexander's Future Tech Forum (all episode recordings here) and had the same reaction Jenny Mackness did. "The event was advertised as ‘reinventing education’, but for me the discussion was more about how and what changes could be made to the existing education system (in this case the American education system)... the future of education is not the same thing as the future of colleges." Mackness cites Iain McGilchrist, Ken Robinson and Étienne de La Boétie to make her point and extend it beyond a mere criticism of Alexander's interview.

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Help define digital literacy
W. Ian O'Byrne, 2019/02/11

Last week Ian O'Byrne wrote of work he is doing with  the International Literacy Association (ILA) and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) to define digital literacy. He was asked "why this work wasn’t being conducted in the open" and this post is the result. There's some annotation work being done with hypothes.is and he's using FlipGrid to solicit video-recorded opinions (this site is mostly empty, though). I'll be interested to see the outcome, though from what I've seen each organization has its own approach to defining digital literacy.

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Visual Studio Code Can Do That?
Burke Holland, Smashing Magazine, Medium, 2019/02/11

Visual Studio Code is my new favourite text editor, and has been responsible for a bit increase in my learning curve over the last month. It combines three core functions - file management (including version management with GitHub), text editing (with formatting that supports everything, even Perl), and command line terminals (so I can usefully write and test scripts in the same environment, and then publish in Docker or whatever). And as this article shows, there's a whole lot more for power users. Including (just announced this week) something called Live Share, which will allow multiple developers to work on the same project at the same time. It's all open source, written in Node, and compiled for the desktop using Electron. And made by Microsoft.

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Edraak Launches its School Learning for K-12 Children in the Arab World
IBL News, 2019/02/11

Three bits of interest in this short article. First, EdRaak was built on Open edX. Second, the project, which begins with math materials for grades 7 and 9, was sponsored by Google and included support from Google employees. Third, "given the growing need to support remedial education due to conflict and unrest that have disrupted formal education in the region, the platform adopts a competency-based approach to learning."

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HP’s Ink Subscription Has DRM That Disables Your Printer Cartridges
Josh Hendrickson, How-To Geek, 2019/02/11

It turns out that the idea of putting digital rights management (DRM) into your printer ink is as bad as it sounds. "Here’s the kicker: if you cancel, your ink stops working. You read that right; as soon as your billing cycle ends the printer will not accept the ink anymore." You're also sending a whole lot of data to HP - page count, page type, and more. That's because there are limits on the number of pages you can print as well. "It’s easy to get trapped into overages... It’s a strange proposition that every time I go to print, I now feel the need first to check if I have enough pages left in my plan."

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CSS Specificity — An overview
Vaibhav Khulbe, Medium, 2019/02/11

This post explores the weeds of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), the language that creates the design for web pages. CSS 'specificify' rules to the method web browsers use to select which CSS declaration to apply to a particular part of a web page. For example, if you said the default text style for your whole page is 'Arial' and the default text style for this paragraph is 'Times New Roman', your browser needs to make a choice (and will choose the latter, according to CSS specificity). There's also a link to a lovely diagram, CSS Specificity with fish.

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Dawn or dusk of the 5th age of research in educational technology? A literature review on (e-)leadership for technology-enhanced learning in higher education (2013-2017)
Deborah Arnold, Albert Sangrà, International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 2019/02/11

The first four 'ages' ae defined by Winn (2002) (21 page PDF) as the studies of instructional design, message design, simulation/interaction design, and (the new) learning environment design. The 'fifth age' is proposed by Jameson (2013) (27 page PDF) and is the focus on "more critical, selective, strategic e‐leadership approaches to the adoption and use of educational technology." This paper is an update of that 'fifth age' and is "an exploratory review of the literature for the period 2103-2017." The result is a pretty good paper on work in educational technology management. The individual paper summaries are well worth a read, as are the findings (the last two paragraphs before 'Recommendations'), one of which points to "the application of tools and methods from the business world," which I would say characterizes this paper as a whole.

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Laws of UX
Jon Yablonski, 2019/02/11

This is a set of 19 key tenets of User Experience (UX). They're nicely summarized and illustrated, and each one has a 'More' button linking to an extended description and links to more resources. Each also has a nice downloadable poster suitable for framing. The site as a whole is itself a nice example of good design.

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