OLDaily

College Board sold student data for 47 cents each, lawsuit claims
Betsy Foresman, EdScoop, 2019/12/17

According to this article, "College Board, the nonprofit that develops and administers SAT and Advanced Placement exams, is being accused of selling more than five million students’ personal information, according to a lawsuit filed in Chicago last week." Lovely.

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Introducing the redesigned Microsoft Education blog
Microsoft, 2019/12/17

I don't know whether readers were saying "I want more animated gifs - maybe five on a page, moving blindlingly fast - to distract me while I'm doing nothing important." But that's what Microsoft delivered in this post announcing the redesigned version of its education blog. There may also have been words on this page, but who could tell?

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Pubfair: A distributed framework for open publishing services
Tony Ross-Hellauer, Benedikt Fecher, Kathleen Shearer, Eloy Rodrigues, COAR, 2019/12/17

Something to keep an eye on. "Pubfair is a conceptual model for a modular, distributed open source publishing framework, which builds on the content contained in the network of repositories to enable the dissemination and quality-control of a range of research outputs including publications, data, and more." This is a link to version 2 (I covered version 1 last September) of the white paper (19 page PDF) proposing the initiative. As Kathleen Shearer writes in an email, "With decentralization, comes tremendous power. It takes us beyond an environment with many silos, in which every organization maintains its own separate system; to a global, interoperable architecture for scholarly communication."

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Announcing a Lesson-level Interoperability Standards Effort
Michael Feldstein, e-Literate, 2019/12/17

"I'm delighted to announce a project aimed at making it easier to share interactive digital content at the lesson level," says Michael Feldstein. I don't want to be too critical of something before it has had a chance to take form. At the same time, I have to ask, don't we have standards bodies (IEEE-LTSC, ADL, IMS, ISO, Dublin Core) for things like this? And don't we actually have standards for things like learning objects, which seem to be approximately this? Normally I wouldn't ask, but Feldstein generally knows what he's doing, so I'm puzzled.

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Content systems not content packages
Clark Quinn, Learnlets, 2019/12/17

I like this post from Clark Quinn but I feel some of his suggestions need updating. I mean, I agree that "MOOCs showed that folks want to drill in to what they need." But what sort of system would make that possible? Not this: "with a model of the learner, the context, and the content, you can write rules that put these together to optimally identify the right thing to push." Think about it: if you know only one thing about each of these, you have to write eight rules. No, there is no rule-based system that is going to capture the complexity of such a system, not with thousands of content items and millions of learners. Yes, you could develop a system that might learn, but who will train it? Ultimately, it will have to be the learners themselves. But how? Activity data? Preferences? Your content system will not be semantically based. A lot of what it 'pushes' will actually be pulled, and a lot of it won't be content at all. Because ultimately - still - supporting learning isn't about pushing content.

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