OLDaily

The Choices of Others
Wendy M. Grossman, net.wars, 2019/11/22

This post is about the author's reaction when her neighbour placed a doorbell camera that their door that captures (and records, and sends to Amazon) all the comings and going through her own door. "It never occurred to them that a 180-degree camera watching their door is, given the workings of physics and geography, also inevitably watching mine. And it never occurred to them to ask me whether I minded." Now this is a fairly narrow example, but it raises the more general question of how your privacy decisions may impact on others. Should your insurance company be able to rely on your sister's DNA to set insurance rates? Should your brother's test scores be used by a company deciding whether to hire you? Image: Big Brother Watch.

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Some recent work in the feed reader and discovery space
Chris Aldrich, 2019/11/22

Chris Aldrich writes, "I’ve noticed a lot of quiet, but very interesting and heartening feed reader and discovery work going on in the IndieWeb and related communities lately, so I thought I’d highlight it briefly." In this post he lists a number of nascent resources, including Inoreader, which will make following social feeds a lot easier, the FraidyCat reader, and continuing work on Microsub readers, among other things. Image: Indieweb.

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More needs to be done to support teaching online in Canada
Clint Lalonde, Ed Tech Factotum, 2019/11/22

Clint Lalonde comments on the recently released research report (67 page PDF) by the Canadian Digital Learning Research Association and associated summary offered by Tony Bates. He keys in on one finding: "79% of institutions reported inadequate training for faculty as one of the main barriers to online learning." One wonders how this can be the case after some 25 years of online learning! Like Bates, Lalonde points to the lack of mandatory training for prospective online instructors, but from where I sit this requirement seems likely only to produce a shortage of online instructors. And from where I sit, I wonder about the apparent inability or unwillingness of today's professors to teach themselves how to use a computer to teach. Higher education doesn't have a training problem, it has a culture problem.

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Business OER Environmental Scan:Summary Report
Kyle Mackie, et.al., eCampus Ontario, 2019/11/22

This report (17 page PDF) overviews the availability of open educational resources (OER) for business. It surveys a fairly wide range of sources, 24 in all, finds a smallish set of results (169 openly-licensed textbooks, and 76 other resources, mostly aimed at introductory courses), and recommends a set of 16 textbooks that would get a person started on an education in business. The authors note, "a key finding of this environmental scan project isthe need for access to high-quality ancillary learning materials."

If we look at this report - and, for that matter, scan through the results offered by either federated search engines, such as The Mason OER Metafinder (MOM), or aggregation-based search engines, such as OASIS - you encounter what I think is the key weakness of the OER ecosystem, and that is that it is focused on institutional repositories, and thus overlooks the huge body of content (including everything I've ever done) outside the domain of these repositories. How do we create equity not only of access but also of voice when the only resources we count are those contributed by already-established authors and institutions.

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