OLDaily

eCampus Ontario’s H5P Studio
Geoff Cain, Brainstorm in Progress, 2020/03/06

Geoff Cain writes, " I am interested in this because I am looking for resources to replace inaccessible learning objects. Many free widgets that faculty use cannot be read by a screen reader but H5P is mostly accessible and they are quite transparent about that, unlike other companies." I found them responsive and easy to use (though my attempt to lable the parts of the human heart demonstrates conclusively whyt I should not be a doctor). Try for yourself: eCampusOntario H5P Studio.

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Why is open education resource creation, management and publishing important?
Phil Barker, Sharing and learning, 2020/03/06

The answer to the question is, "OER made sense as a means of sharing the effort of creating learning resources, dividing work between partners with different skills and viewpoints." But more interesting to me was this comment at the end: "I would stress that David Wiley’s ALMS framework is as important as his 5Rs (“Poor Technical Choices Make Open Content Less Open“) and highlight the interoperability of ePub in this context." The ALMS Framework suggests that we ask about the following four items: access to editing tools, level of expertise required, is it meaningful editable, and is it self-sourced (as opposed to requiring processing into a final consumer version).

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Virtual Teams: Moving parts
Martin Hawksey, Maren Deepwell, MASHe, 2020/03/06

I think that this is a really good idea - an online resource in which the two authors "openly share our approach to leading a virtual team." It's just the sort of thing you want to see modeled and demonstrated. That said, this post is almost unreadable. Most of the problem is presentation: the conversation back and forth (which, let's be honest, wanders) is presented in big huge blocks of text, a presentation style that has never worked online. Did they forget how to use paragraphs? Now to be fair, they've been doing this since 2018, so maybe it's just me being a grumpy old man with bad eyesight. But I think they know better - look at this post, which is a model of white space and illustration.

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Step-by-Step Instructions on Making the Paper Airplane that Broke World Records
Grace Ebert, Colossal, 2020/03/06

This post embeds a short 7-minute video and links to a longer resource. It is yet another example of how the internet is being used to teach pretty much everything you can think of. What I like is that the images and description are clear. It doesn't hurt to have the current record-holder for paper airplane flight doing the explaining. And there's a lot more that could be instigated from this starting point - why is the suggested design the mist successful? Why does a tube-airplane fly at all? Why does the stunt plane return like a boomerang?

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Woman Took Care of Succulent for Two Years, Then Realized It Was Fake
Jelisa Castrodale, Vice, 2020/03/06

The headline tells the story, and the article expands on whether this is the sort of news we need right now. But I want to use it for a thought experiment. Suppose it is good to take care of a plant (or suppose it was a plastic baby, in case you are ambivalent about plants). Now, was her act of watering a fake plant for two years ethically right or ethically wrong? We feel like we want to reward her. She says, "I put so much love into this plant! I washed its leaves. Tried my hardest to keep it looking it’s best." Surely that's praiseworthy! But she wasted all that time she could have spent caring for an actual plany (or baby), and surely she should have noticed that the plant was fake. So she was wrong, wasn't she? It's a classic conundrum: what to say about someone doing the wrong thing for the right reasons.

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Agency and self-knowledge
Brie Gertler, The Routledge Handbook for the Philosophy of Agency, 2020/03/06

This isn't a long paper, and it will reward a reasonably careful reading. It discusses the concept of agency as it relates to self-knowledge. As Brie Gertler notes, these are two sides of the epistemic coin: "Agency typically involves affecting some object or phenomenon, whereas knowledge typically involves being affected by some object or phenomenon." The paper looks at how we come to have the agency we do - how do we imagine what we imnagine, and how do we come to believe the things we do, either for reasons, or for no good reason at all. Gertler argues, "The well-established fact that attitudes are often shaped by non-rational factors challenges the epistemic basis of rational agency accounts of self-knowledge." Note that this link is to a 13 page MS-Word document.

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