OLDaily

Presentation
The Future of Education
Stephen Downes, Oct 24, 2019, eLearning Africa, Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire

The future of education needs a massive rethink, not a tinkering round the edges, to make education robust and relevant for the world learners will face in 2050. We need to redesign education systems to address persistent inequalities, social fragmentation and political extremism, and take into account the impact of the fourth industrial revolution. Chairperson(s): Michelle Selinger, EdTech Ventures, UK. Speakers: Stephen Downes, National Research Council Canada, Canada; Mark West, UNESCO, France, Introducing UNESCO’s New Futures of Education Initiative; Matias Matias, HP Inc, USA, Classroom of the Future: From Concept to Execution. Image: ADEAnet.

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News: Arise All Ye Notebooks
Tony Hirst, OUseful Info, 2019/10/24

Tony Hirst describes (in detail) some arising alternatives to Jupyter Notebooks. First, "Netflic have announced a new notebook candidate, Polynote [code], capable of running polyglot notebooks (scala, Python, SQL) ." Next, he writes, "Streamlit.io is another new not-really-a-notebook alternative, pip installable and locally runnable." Third, he notes, "Wolfram have just announced their new, “free” Wolfram Notebooks service, the next step in the evolution of Wolfram Cloud (announcement review], I guess?"

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Futzing and moseying: interviews with professional data analysts on exploration practices
Adrian Colyer, The Morning Paper, 2019/10/24

I mentioned this article during my workshop yesterday. It examines what people actually do when they do exploratory data analysis’ (EDA). The answer i in the title: futzing and moseying. What that means is that, once they've collected the dat, they follow an informal and unstructured process of looking to see what's there. "A lot of putzing, a lot of trying to parse our text logs to see if I could find anything helpful… I don’t know, just poking around with things and see what happens." This post is a summary of Futzing and moseying: interviews with professional data analysts on exploration practices Alspaugh et al., VAST’18.

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Nuance, feedback, and disagreement — reflecting on OpenEd19
Rajiv Jhangiani, 2019/10/24

Because I haven't been to OpenEd for some 15 years I guess I am not part of the 'the open education community'. So the firestorm over that panel missed me completely, or it did, at least, until I saw a headline for a Chronicle paywalled article. But you don't need to pay for this story; it's all over the #OpenEd19 Twitter space. The gist: the organizers of OpenEd19 in Phoenix decided to convene a panel of commercial publishers. There could be questions, but they would be pre-screened and vetted. There was a storm of protest, and then organizers cancelled the panel, citing "posts that were abusive and harassing" (I read the full Twitter thread and confess I didn't find any such. Doesn't mean it didn't happen). See also this article and this article for more coverage.

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Rethinking Open Universities: What Makes Them Unique?
Hanmo Jeong, International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 2019/10/24

According to this article (15 page PDF), in order to address the perception of quality, the UK Open University (UKOU), "structured regional networks with shared responsibilities, to offer all the elements that make up a university including headquarters, regional offices, and even spaces for students. This form of networked university is what differentiates open universities from the traditional university model and constitutes a unique feature of this type of educational institution." Image: The Conversation.

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The Second Wave of Preprint Servers: How Can Publishers Keep Afloat?
Rob Johnson, Andrea Chiarelli, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2019/10/24

This article points to a massive surge in the number of article pre-print platforms (illustrated) and asks how more traditional journals can survive. The authors write that "Our interviews with authors indicate that early and fast dissemination is the primary motive behind preprint posting. In addition, the increased scope for feedback seems to be highly valued, with much of this interaction taking place via Twitter and email, rather than via direct comments on preprint servers." Also free access. Let's not forget free access. Anyhow, journals can respond, they say, by beating them, joining them, or waiting them out. None of these is likely to be successful, in my view.

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