OLDaily

Tradeoff solved: Jupyter Notebook OR version control. Jupytext brings you the best of both worlds
u/kite_and_code, Reddit, 2019/04/30

This is a reference ready-made for my talk tomorrow. It describes a convergence of Jupyter Notebooks and version control. "Jupytext saves two (synced) versions of your notebook. A .ipynb file and a .py file. (Other formats are possible as well.) You check the .py file into your git repo and track your changes but you work in the Jupyter notebook and make your changes there." Follow the link to Jupytext - there's a ton of documentation on the GitHub site. That is all.

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Exploring High School Students' Educational Use of YouTube
Salih Bardakcı, International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 2019/04/30

Facilitating conditions (FC) are defined as “the degree to which an individual believes that an organizational and technical infrastructure exists to support use of the system”. According to this study, the results showed that facilitating conditions were not a significant predictor of actual usage of YouTube in learning. This provides a contrast with theories suggesting people need all kinds of instructional support to use the internet. "These participants are categorized as digital natives that could easily navigate on a digital world without any assistance from others." More properly-formatted articles form the most recent IRRODL are available here.

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Perspectives on the open access discovery landscape
Sarah Fahmy, JISC, 2019/04/30

Good discussion of issues related to discovery in open access resources (mostly focused on journal articles). "Today, two key tools are available to achieve the above: Unpaywall and OA Button. These focus solely on OA discovery...  Kopernio was designed to help readers with institutional subscriptions." OA indices "include 1findr, Dimensions, Google Scholar and the Jisc/Open University managed CORE." But there's still no good service that will simply find the open access resource you want to read. "No tool is able to guarantee that 100% of the content is shared legitimately." Image: Open Access Blog.

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Voodoo categorisation and dynamic ontologies in the world of OER
Doug Belshaw, MoodleNet, 2019/04/30

In the early days of search engines Yahoo was one of the leaders. At the time (in the mid-90s) it sought to organize the internet by category. This approach became more and more useless, and was eventually supplanted by Google, which simply analyzed page contents. Why the history lesson? It has yet to be learned in the field of education, as Doug Belshaw makes clear in this article. Instead, providers of OER listings persist in the use of what he and Clay Shirly call 'zombie categories'. The problem is "The ontologies we use to understand the world are coloured by our language, politics, and assumptions."  Categories are nice if you want to just browse. But they do not serve as the fundamental organization of contents.

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Wikipedia’s Refusal to Profile a Black Female Scientist Shows Its Diversity Problem
Claire L. Jarvis, Slate, 2019/04/30

This article reports on the debate around the deletion of a notable black woman scientist on Wikipedia (that she is notable isn't really debatable - she was part of the team that purified the sample of berkelium-249 from which a new element, tennessine, was created). With Wikipedia the issue of representation is magnified because (unlike in the early days) your contribution will me monitored, and often deleted, by Wikipedia 'editors' operating under a set of principles that may need revision - Claire Jarvis writes, "Fixing the representation problem will require radical changes to Wikipedia’s rules and user base.Wikipedia could start by allowing more flexibility in its citation and sourcing criteria for notable figures from underrepresented groups. At the very least, it could protect those pages from anonymous flags... It could also remove user anonymity to help stem the impersonal nastiness seen in page debates and deletion wars."

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Creating Team and Individual WordPress Blogs From Your VLE Via An LTI WordPress Plugin
Tony Hirst, OUseful Info, 2019/04/30

This is a tool that does what it says on the package - "If a VLE user with the student role clicks on a student blog tool link they are taken to the WordPress multisite install and a blog is created for them. The student is added to the blog..." - or, for a course blog - " The first VLE user to click on a course blog tool link will be taken to the WordPress multisite install and a blog will be created for the course. The user will also be made a member of the blog. Any subsequent users that click on the link are added to the blog as a member." What's really cool is that it is done with LTI, so it can be combined with any LMS. Via (writes Hirst) a series of Twitter posts, of which this is the first, from @ammienoot.

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