OLDaily

Making an Impact in Canada
2020/02/06

In a classic case of burying the lede, the Google Canada blog today announced "a $2.5 million grant for NPower Canada, a charitable organization that launches underserved young adults into meaningful and sustainable careers." I'm not thrilled by the idea of a US-based charity coming in and doing private education in Canada, but they're getting good press and obviously filling a need that our own education system seems not to be filling. They put participants through a 15-week course that provides technical skills, industry-recognized certifications such as CompTIA A+, and professionalism skills in the workplace.

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The Seven Spaces of Learning
Ewan McIntosh, notosh, 2020/02/06

This article, though it has a list near the end, is much more than a listicle. Ewan McIntosh begins by observing that "the media world has worked out how to harness the user — education’s got a thing or two to learn from it." He cites Aleks Krotoski’s treatment of the BBC’s Virtual Revolution as an example. The list kicks off with Matt Locke's six spaces of digital media, from 2007. These include secret spaces, participation spaces, performing spaces, and more. McIntosh adds a seventh, data spaces.  " When we apply the principles of digital development to physical learning spaces, we can imagine a totally different means of designing and constructing new schools," he argues.

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Social Listening on a Budget
Alexandra Simone, Brain Waves Blog, 2020/02/06

This article is not an ad for Campus Sonar, even though they do the same sort of thing. It describes how to do 'social listening' essentially for free using IFTTT and various other applications. I use IFTTT for a number of things, though I could probably use it more effectively on the listening side. The article looks at a very specific example (saving tweets with keywords to Google sheets) but it gives you a sense of how you can automatically keep track of a lot of stuff fairly simply.

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What Is TikTok, and Why Are Teens Obsessed with It?
Matthew Hughes, How-To Geek, 2020/02/06

I've been - I'm not sure what the right verb is here - watching? TikTok for a while now (it's good easy viewing on the spin cycle during commercials on the morning news). Participants upload short videos either with live sound or with soundtracks. There's a wide range of content. Some do lip-sync, some do dances. Whatever. There are some ads, but they're brief, and you can make them disappear. My own thinking is that teens like TikTok because it isn't full of influencers and self-promoters. Or that might just be why I like it. And no, I'm not worried about it being owned by a Chinese company. I can't imagine Facebook or Twitter being any less helpful to their own governments than TikTok would be to its own government.

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OER in Oregon Shrinks Cost of Course Materials by Three-Quarters
Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology, 2020/02/06

In actual numbers, what that means is that "the 112,462 students in the 10 highest-enrollment classes saved an estimated $1.1 million in 2019 compared to 2017, due to greater use of no-cost and low-cost class content." Of course, many professors don't care, and choose more expensive options. This is "a reminder of the impact of faculty choices and the importance of prominently designating courses in the class schedule to make savings information readily available to students."

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Notice of consultation and call for comments on AI consultation paper
Occife of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, 2020/02/06

The Office of the Privacxy Commirrioner (Canada) is calling for comments on a consultation paper. They write, "The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) is currently engaged in legislative reform policy analysis of both federal privacy laws. We are examining artificial intelligence (AI) as a subset of this work as it relates specifically to the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). In our view, AI presents fundamental challenges to all PIPEDA principles and we have identified several areas where the Act could be enhanced." You have until March 13 to make your views known.

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