OLDaily

Quick Tech Event List
2020/03/18

If you are hosting a live webcast or online event intended to help people create an online community, class or conference, and if this event is FREE, then please be sure to submit your event listing here. To view the events calendar, click on this link (I've been having issues with the calendar permissions, so please let me know if you're having difficulties accessing this).

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Lake: As Schools Shift to Virtual Learning, Educators Worry That Online Instruction Is Inequitable. But No Learning at All Is Worse
Robin Lake, The 74, 2020/03/18

I took part in an online panel yesterday and the general tenor of the questions and comments was that online learning is inequitable. Concerns were raised about the exploitation of adjuncts, the need for accessible resources, and how we support those without internet access. This seems to be almost the unanimous response from the educator community; I'm hearing these concerns over and over. And they are valid concerns, and our failure to address them properly over the last 25 years is reprehensible.

But my concern today is that constant expression of these concerns will freeze well-meaning people into inaction. Things like this: "Washington’s higher-poverty districts are simply closing. With no plan. In large part, this seems to be in response to the conundrum over requirements under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act." And that's exactly the wrong thing. Instead of voicing complaints, we should be responding like Heather Ross does regarding academic integrity: when we raise a concern, calmly describe how to address it. And do so in a way that allows everyone to be able to address the concern, not just those with resources.

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GitHub to Acquire Npm in Effort to Give It Continuity and Improve It
Sergio De Simone, InfoQ, 2020/03/18

NPM stands for 'Node Package Manager' and it's a key piece of the Javascript infrastructure. If you need to add a function to your platform, you can type 'npm install whatever' and it does the job. But there have been concerns expressed recently about the stability and longevity of NPM. This acquisition by the Microsoft-owned GitHub addresses that concern. Now I have no doubt that a non-corporate alternative to NPM will be rolled out. That's as it should be. And the innovation can take place on this edge system, while NPM remainst mainstream and stable.

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Please License Your COVID-19 Resources CC-BY or Public Domain
Michael Feldstein, e-Literate, 2020/03/18

Michael Feldstein is sponsored by David Wiley's Lumen Learning and then we see a perfectly predictable appeal to eschew non-commercial licensing. I would hesitate to draw a line between the two, but I've never seen Feldstein concerned about licensing one way or another (he seems fine with it here), while the anti-NC campaign has long been a Wiley signature. Feldstein writes, "we should reduce the friction of sharing as much as possible. One source of friction is licensing." Well, that's true. But the main source of friction is charging people money for content. That's what non-commercial licensing prevents. And if your big worry during this crisis is that you can't sell openly licensed resources, then you are worrying about exactly the wrong thing.

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Serious Game Design for Children: A Set of Guidelines and their Validation
Matheus V. Valenza, Marcelo da S. Hounsell, Isabela Gasparini, Educational Technology & Society, 2020/03/18

This article (13 page PDF) identifies a significant issue in serious game design for children: "games whose primary objective is not solely entertainment... end up being far from children's expectations, especially when compared to entertainment-only games." To counter that, this article sets out a list of some 40 guidelines divided into four categories: input, output/interface, content, and control. The validation takes the form of expert review. The principles are mainly common sense, such as "prefer recognizing than remembering" and "use interfaces and conventions that are known by the users." The article is useful in listing them, referencing them, and validating them.

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Crisis communications content design checklist
Canada.ca, 2020/03/18

These are really good content design practices all the time, not just in a time of crisis. The tips are practical: follow a news-based page structure, use headings as answers, keep track of common wording and terms, create web content, not documents. I wish schools, corporations and governments would use them all the time. But now is as good a time to start as any.

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