OLDaily

Staples Canada opens the Working and Learning Store concept in Oakville
Staples, Cision, 2019/10/08

It was just an off-hand comment by a panelist at the conference, but it led me to this, a fascinating new initiative from Staples. "Start-ups, small businesses and students can access the innovative and collaborative workspace, featuring beautiful lounge spaces, community kitchens, private and shared offices, and meeting rooms fully equipped with modern office furniture and state-of-the-art technology to meet the needs of the ever-growing start-up community." More coverage from late last year. Even more (which calls it 'incredible').

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Psychodata
Ben Williamson, Code Acts in Education, 2019/10/08

Ben Williamson's min point here is that "Social-emotional learning sounds like a progressive, child-centred agenda, but behind the scenes it’s primarily concerned with new forms of child measurement." Because there isn't sufficient knowledge of "what works" in these areas, the focus has been on collecting and analyzing data (this will probably be the case for any future discipline, I would say). Williamson offers 'six main points' in this article that focus on the size and value of the SEL market, policy moves, and "a wider political context where psychology and economics have become dominant forms of expertise in contemporary governance." Good article.

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Be Very Impressed By The Open LMS Of Open University of China — 国家开放大学’s Wei Xiong at MoodleMoot US 2019
Cristian T. Duque, LMS Pulse, 2019/10/08

Here are the numbers: "it’s still a largely hybrid learning institution, with face-to-face sessions taking place in more than 1,000 city and 3,000 county-level branches. 85,000-strong staff, with over 52,000 full-time. 75 majors offered by 6 faculties. 3.7 million registered students at the time of Xiong’s address." It's probably the largest implementation of Moodle. Some challenges: "Despite the efficiency gains, there are several second-level human challenges to address. Onboarding over a hundred thousand instructors and tutors is no small feat. In addition, the potentially thousands of IT and tech support need introduction to Moodle development." I wish this article were longer, but it's interesting.

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OA monographs: policy and practice for supporting researchers
Helen Clare, Jisc scholarly communications, 2019/10/08

There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth after the implementation of Plan S in Europe. The result has been several events and reports, which are mentioned and linked here. The bulk of the article focuses on two workshops: 'What can institutions do to inform authors about OA?', and 'Where do we want to be in 10 years?' Most interesting bit: "it might be wise to invest in infrastructure services rather than content, a potential role for funders? Standard funders and publisher policies and standard terms, e.g. using Persistent Identifiers were required, such as DOIs for each book were also required.

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Eight Habits of Expert Software Designers: An Illustrated Guide
Marian Petre, André van der Hoek, The MIT Press Reader, 2019/10/08

I do most of these things, so I thought it was a good list (or maybe I jut liked the list because it affirmed in my mind that I am an expert because I do most of these things). The big ones, for me: looking around, reshaping the problem space, and thinking about what I am not designing (developing, writing about, whatever). I won't 'focus on the essence' or 'design elegant abstractions' but I will look for patterns and trends.

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