OLDaily

The Case for Teaching about Sharks and Mummies, Not Captions and the Main Idea
Natalie Wexler, Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice, 2019/11/14

I invite readers to consider the model of persuasion in evidence here as the author contrasts two classes, one boring (focusing on captions and main ideas) and another exciting (focusing on mummies). The point being made (and how often have we seen this?) is that "cognitive scientists have known for decades that the most important factor in comprehension isn’t a set of generally applicable skills; it’s how much background knowledge the reader has about the topic." Well. They say this; I wouldn't exactly say they know it. And that's because, first, you don't know any reading without abstract knowledge. And second, it doesn't really matter what content knowledge is being taught - mummies, sharks, the New York Islanders, whatever floats their boat. Because the content is (and has always been) the McGuffin.

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The College of the Future: Progress Report
Independent Commission on the College of the Future, 2019/11/14

The U.K.'s Independent Commission on the College of the Future has published a progress report containing preliminary findings (19 page PDF). While some aspects of the report make sense to me. For example, "Colleges will increasingly need to act as an essential service to people and employers in every community" if they are to survive. But other parts left me asking "why?" For example, "The college of the future must sit at the centre of a coherent education ecosystem." Why? Is there a need (independent of the needs of the college) that makes this a requirement? In fairness, the report attempts an answer - but I think it could consider the question more deeply.

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Cacophony: Open Ed, Digital Pedagogy Lab, and the Challenge of Education Conferences
Sean Michael Morris, 2019/11/14

This post reflects on the recent Open Education Conference and considers the question of educational conferences from the perspective of the Digital Pedagogy Lab, which offers its own conferences. Sean Michael Morris writes, "What is the pedagogy for conferences now, in a landscape where keynotes should be something more than talking heads, where organizers who are white and male need to cede not just the stage but the design of events to make way for new ways of knowing, teaching, and learning?" Fair enough, but these questions are neither new nor based on more recently-evolved ideologies. I remember writing about how I would organize a conference back in 2007 with suggestions based on (what I thought was) nothing more than common sense. (P.S. if somebody gives me enough money I'll organize a conference - but not until then).

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FraidyCat
Kicks Condor, 2019/11/14

FraidyCat is content syndication without the syndication. It's a Firefox and Chrome plugin that allows you to follow individuals across multiple social media accounts (at present: blogs, Tumblr, Medium, Mastodon, micro.blog, Wikipedia, Kickstarter, Stack Overflow, Twitter, Instagram, SoundCloud, Pinboard, YouTube and Reddit, and even TiddlyWiki). Even better, "Fraidycat doesn't communicate with a central server, so it's not capturing all this user data for some company. It's open source; find it here. What I'd really like to see is something like this in its own application; an Electron app, for example. Caution: this is "brand-new, quite experimental", so don't just install it without expecting any side-effects.

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Web Almanac
HTTP Archive, 2019/11/14

As CSS-Tricks reports, "The HTTP Archive dropped this big 'state of the web' report called Web Almanac with guest writers exploring data from 5.8 million websites." According to the website, "The Web Almanac is a comprehensive report on the state of the web, backed by real data and trusted web experts. It is comprised of 20 chapters spanning aspects of page content, user experience, publishing, and distribution." Needless to say, I haven't read it all (though I did read CSS-Tricks' summary of the chapter on CSS, which was quite detailed). The Almanac focuses on quantities, for example, "we (the web as a whole) use 373 KB of JavaScript at the 50th percentile, or median." There are no doubt thousands of nuggets to be mined in the Almanac that talk about web usability and interactivity.

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Standardization vs. Differentiation
Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates, 2019/11/14

Good article from Alex Usher pointing to an inherent contradiction in criticisms of Canadian universities. Ther criticisms are these:

1. “Universities should stop being copies of each other and start differentiating themselves and offering more niche courses”.
2. “Universities should make credits fully portable”.

Usher writes, "If you want credits to be transferable, you need standardization. If you want differentiation, you can’t expect full transferability." But the goodness in the article is what follows, a quite nuanced view of how universities design programs and make decisions in a way that results in a lot of variety even for common credentials.

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FemEdTech Quilt of Care and Justice in Open Education
Frances Bell, ALT, 2019/11/14

This post is a call for contributions to a 'quilt of care' to be completed at the conference. "We want to invite all, sewists and non-sewists, artists and dabblers (like me) to contribute to our quilt by supplying fabric, quilt blocks, found objects, words and stories." The theme of the OER20 conference as a whole is 'the care in openness' and the proposed quilt reflects that theme. Image: embroidering digital commons.

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Can Geowalling Save Open Access?
Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2019/11/14

The answer to the question in the title is "no", and the reason for this - which you get to if you read far enough into this article - is that geowalling is not open access. Geowalling is the practice of blocking access to 'open' content by location. If you're in the wrong country, you don't get access. As the author notes, geowalling would require that authors give up their copyright, that licensing would have to change, and funders would have to give up their opposition to 'hybrid' publishing (that is, charging subscription fees for 'open' content). The article is in response to a Times Higher Education report quoting Jean-Claude Burgelman, the European Commission’s open access envoy, who floated the idea before saying “in a digital world that argument doesn’t make sense”.

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