OLDaily

The Academy Mobilizes – Unizin Tackles Learning Analytics
Judy Luther, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2019/07/01

Part of the problem with advocacy journalism (and this surely is an example) is that the authors tend to jump straight into advocacy and justification before even telling us what they're talking about. This article is about Unizin, a 27-institution consortium that manages student data and learning resources. It is about "tipping the table in favor of the academy" in a world where an increasing number of private organizations are providing services such as MOOCs, analytics, and online program management. The article describes Unizin's content management platform and agreements it has made with companies such as Kaltura and TurnItIn.

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Building Good Sustainable Communities through the Learning City EcCoWell Approach
Peter Kearns, Denise Reghenzani-Kearns, CR&DALL, University of Glasgow, 2019/07/01

This is a mediocre article (26 page PDF) based on a good idea. Basically, it takes the idea of Taipei's 2012 Learning City declaration (臺北市學習型城市宣言, original, translated), rebrands it as 'EcCoWell' - ecology & economy, community & culture, well-being & lifelong learning, and implements it in Cork. You can see some examples from Taipei in this post-conference article by Denise Reghenzani-Kearns. Each community builds around its local expertise and creates community initiatives, reclaims old properties, and basically use learning to increase well-being and sustainability. This would have been a much stronger paper had the authors focused more on the concept and less on themselves.

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Critical Reflection and Community Education Values
Rob Bray, Graham MacLellan, Concept, 2019/07/01

This article (11 page PDF) reports on efforts to implement critical reflection in community education initiatives. Critical reflection is, write the authors, "by its nature, difficult to implement within organisational cultures  dominated by a narrow managerialism." Critical reflection is depicted here as a subset of reflective practice, one that goes beyond discovering what we already know and understand, and challenges the foundations of that knowledge by examining "how power influences educational processes" and by recognizing and uncovering "hegemonic assumptions." I think it could go a lot further, but these are the topical issues of the day. In this project, discussion groups (known as 'reflective circles') looked at examples of best practices in the light of the Community Learning and Development (CLD) Standard Council for Scotland. Image: Madeleine Brooks.

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Untangling the IndieWeb
David Yates, dy, 2019/07/01

This is what I would take to be a first effort to explain the IndieWeb in a way that is accessible to people who are not programmers (something it has sorely lacked to date). " IndieWeb is about using the World Wide Web itself as a social network, through a set of open standards for communication and identification of content and people. These things can be used instead of modern social networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc…) or in a way that incorporates these networks as a complementary channel. The movement has three main pillars, expressed as sequential levels: identity, publishing and federation." Via Ton Tijlstra.

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Summary of Global Guidelines: Ethics in Learning Analytics
Allie Alayan, AACE Review, 2019/07/01

This is a summary of the ICDE's report on learning analytics publiched last March (previously covered here). There's no reflection or criticism; it's just a list of six or so points from each of the report's ten chapters. It's still useful though as a quick way to comprehend the document.

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