OLDaily

Competency Badges: the tail wagging the dog?
Serge Ravet, Learning Futures, 2020/03/04

This is a really really good article on the topics of both badges and competencies and the point where they intersect. The idea of 'competency badges', writes Serge Ravet, is that they apply badge thinking to competencies, when in reality our thinking about competencies has changed a lot in recent years with a recognition that competencies are context-specific and practice-based. "Taking Scout badges out of context, like creating an accessible 'fire maker' competency badge that would be 'recognised' by Scouts, would be a complete heresy." Instead, he proposes "the concept of RE/VE (Recognition of Experience / Validation of Experience), whose object is to play on the dialectic (dialogic) recognition-validation." This is very much on the right track, in my view. Image: Class Hack.

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2020 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report | Teaching and Learning Edition
Malcolm Brown, et.al., EDUCAUSE, 2020/03/04

The good news is that this report is much improved over previous editions. It has a wider scope, now taking into account social, economic and political trends. It is more international, with sections on (for example) Canada, Australia and Egypt. It offers four distinct scenarios: growth, constraint, collapse and transformation. On the minus side, it's still a little self-centred (you can't describe your own initiative (specifically, NGDLE) as a 'trend'). And almost all of the examples are from the U.S., making it almost myopic. It's also some near- (or rear-) sighted, keeping its gaze firmly on the present and the past. Three of the technological 'trends' are versions of the same thing: adaptive, AI and analytics, which narrows the field of vision to exclude wider, much more interesting trends (like decentralization, sovereign identity, open practices). Overall, though, it was an engaging read and actually distracted me from the baseball game.

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tota11y - an accessibility visualization toolkit
Jordan Scales, Khan Engineering, 2020/03/04

As the announcement notes, tota11y is "an accessibility visualization toolkit that aims to reduce the friction of a11y testing." What it does is highlight areas on a page relevant to accessibility guidelines - for example, colour contrast, input elements, labels on photos, etc. It's easy to use - drag a bookmark into your bookmarks toolbar, and then it will run on any site with a small but of Javascript at the bottom. Here's the bookmarklet to drag into your bookmarks toolbar (I think it will work straight out of this post, if you're reading it in a web browser). And I've set it up on my home page so you can see how well (or poorly) I fare with respect to the guidelines - try it out.

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How We Created a Static Site That Generates Tartan Patterns in SVG
Paulina Hetman, CSS-Tricks, 2020/03/04

If you wanted to teach someone about Scottish tartans, how would you do it? Well, you could give them a bunch of tartans to look at and have them memorize them. That would be the 'content-knowledge' instructivist way. But if you really wanted students to learn about tartans, you'd use something like this page. You could approach the topic at several levels, from several directions. You could understand how tartans are defined, and how to express these principles in code. You could even make your own tartans and design something using it. Of you could explore the history of the tartans already listed. Whatever. Open-ended, where your imagination is the limit - that's how I prefer to learn. Image: the Downes tartan, by Kevin Downs.

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Whatever Happened to Interactive Whiteboards?
Larry Cuban, Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice, 2020/03/04

Larry Cuban suggests " implementation of the device was hampered greatly by complicated software" and adds "IWBs inherently reinforce teacher-centered instruction at a time when the rhetoric among educators and school practitioners is student-centered instruction" (it's not just 'rhetoric' - I hate weasel words like this). But I have a better explanation, the evidence for which is the illustration accompanying the article. Tiny text. People just put up computer screens, or something similar, thereby creating the world's worst slide presentations. But to have text large enough to see al the way at the back of a 30+ student classroom, you need the surface area of a blackboard (or whiteboard). So the IRBs were pushed to the side, so real work could get done.

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