OLDaily

Untrackable Learning
Clint Lalonde, EdTech Factotum, 2019/09/04

I'll have more from Alt-C tomorrow, but for now I'd like to link to this short item about 'untrackable learning'. The basis is a tweet by Anne-Marie Scott: "Hearing about the "hidden learning environment" Students taking information from the VLE and sharing on social media and other platforms. No tracking, no data." Clint Lalonde comments, "these hidden spaces are out of reach of institutional data analytics, which is important to remember if you use data analytics to try and quantitatively measure what is happening in your asynchronous discussion forums."

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What Do You Do with 11,000 Blogs? Preserving, Archiving, and Maintaining UMW Blogs—A Case Study
Angie Kemp, Lee Skallerup Bessette, Kris Shaffer, Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, 2019/09/04

This is a bit of an inside look at some of the work that led to Domain of One's Own at the University of Mary Washington. With 11,000 blogs the university had a major support project on its hands, and then later (as most moved over to DoOO) a major archiving challenge. "The platform was a launch pad for Domain of One’s Own and put UMW on the map for innovative digital learning. At the time, there was no precedent, no best practices, no road map, no rules. Now, we hope the lessons shared in this essay help schools trying to maintain their own legacy, open, digital learning platforms." Realted: Terry Greene interviews Jim Groom on Getting Air.

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Rise of the platforms
Nature, 2019/09/04

What will publishing look like in the future? Maybe this: "In physics, platforms such as quantum, researchers.one and, perhaps most impressively, SciPost are experimenting with innovative approaches such as transparent peer review, user comments and even doing away with the concept of accepting or rejecting papers entirely." I think it's not just a change of business model, a change from thinking of research and discovery as narrative to thinking of them as (say) data points in a global accumulation of information.

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Developing a Small-Scale Graph Database: A Ten Step Learning Guide for Beginners
Fred Cheyunski, Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, 2019/09/04

This post introduces the readers to graph databases by having them create and work with a grapoh database of their own. The database used, Neo4j, is a widely used and popular application. The example is based around the concepts of books and reviewers and the logic of the graph is built step-by-step to show that the database does more than just store information about books, but also helps the user identify relations getween them. Thisd is a good introduction if you want to explore the concepts further, but in addition to reading, doing the hands-on activity is recommended.

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Distributed Identity Foundation Newsletter
2019/09/04

This is the first issue of the DIF monthly newsletter. Founded in 2017, the Distributed Identity Foundation  "represents a diverse, international collection of organizations and contributors working together to establish an open ecosystem of decentralized identity that is accessible to all." It includes a large number of organizations and companies that aren't Facebook or Google (who want identity all to themselves). There's also a (badly formatted) DIF blog as well as the usual social media accounts and a GitHub repository. You won't find a link to the newsletter subscription page anywhere (I tried) but you try your luck at this page I found by playing with URLs on MailChimp.

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