OLDaily

Seeking Answers: Can a Narrative Tie a Course Together?
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2019/05/02

The DS106 corses offered by Jim Groom along with Alan Levine have always had narrative threads running through them - think of the 'Summer of Oblivion', for example. In this post Alan Levine is moved to ponder whether this would work for courses not directly tied to the idea of digital storytelling. " The challenge is to now see what it would take to find a narrative thread in other kinds of courses. And without it being a significant overhead...The theme need not be one of mystery or darkness either, it just ought to be something that makes assignments and activities focus on something other than completing them."

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Chernobyl comes back to life in Ukrainian computer game
Margaryta Chornokondratenko, Reuters, 2019/05/02

This is another reference I would have added to my talk yesterday, but I ran out of time in the morning. It's a computer game, sure, but the players are not playing in a virtual environment. It's real. " The game’s real-scale model occupies a 180 square meter (1,938 sq. ft) basement of a residential building in the Ukraine city of Brovary, just 150 km (93 miles) from the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and 30 km east of Kiev.... 'It’s a really neat concept ...,' Shaun Prescott wrote in a review of the game published by PC Gamer magazine in January. 'Controlling the tanks is kinda cumbersome, but they are tanks, after all.'"

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Creating informal online meetings
Alastair Creelman, The corridor of uncertainty, 2019/05/02

"A few weeks ago," writes Alastair Creelman, "I wrote a post about the missing link in online conferences; the opportunity to network and discuss during mingle parties, coffee breaks and sightseeing tours." In this post, he recounts an "experimental webinar to show a variety of tools and methods for creating such informal meeting spaces." They tried  a virtual office solution called Remo. and similar solutions such as Sococo and Walkabout." The technology is already in place and is developing rapidly and the only thing missing is the willingness of educators to start experimenting with new forms of online meetings," he writes. The article includes a 45 minute video of the webinar.

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The Vision for a more Decentralized Web
Tautvilas Mečinskas, Decentralize Today, 2019/05/02

This is related to my talk yesterday. It offers a three-step approach to decentralization: liberate content publishing (" we have built a prototype of a decentralized publishing platform https://dpage.io/ "), empower decentralized identity ("The Blockstack platform has invented their own domain name system that is based on blockchain"), and liberate content sharng (" In Decentus, you can see all posts that were posted by the user (domain). Here is an example.").

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But Really, Don't We ALL Need a Tattle Phone?
Eyebrows McGee, Metafilter, 2019/05/02

I can't imagine a tattle phone being useful in society generally (the risks, I would think, outweigh the benefits) but this article about a tattle phone in a preschool makes for interesting listening (be sure to read the transcript on This American Life). "It is everything-- and rules. They live by rules. They can sit down to play a game, and that whole playtime will be nothing but arguing about the rules. And then there's no playtime left, and they feel good about it."

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Revising Online Course Standards - OER Content Standard Question, Feedback Please?
Various authors, Open Education Platform, Google Groups, 2019/05/02

The push to redefine 'open' so that it means 'commercial', 'paid' or 'closed' continues apace. I like Dough Belshaw's pushback: " I'd like to echo a point David Kernohan made when I worked with him on the Jisc OER programme. He said: "OER is a supply-side term". Let's face it, there are very few educators specifically going out and looking for "Openly Licensed Resources". What they actually want are resources that they can access for free (or at a low cost) and that they can legally use. We've invented OER as a term to describe that, but it may actually be unhelpfully ambiguous." He also references a First Monday paper (with an unfortunate and tone-deaf title) on the varieties of 'open'. Image: SeedSavers.

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