OLDaily

Digital Citizenship in Ontario Education: A Concept Analysis
Alexander Davis, in education, 2020/12/24

Good paper (17 page PDF) taking as its starting point the lack of an overall conception of 'digital citizenship' in the Ontario government coupled with its recent requirement that students take four online courses, which creates a need for one. Alexander Davis distinguished between 'personally responsible digital citizenship' and 'critical digital citizenship', noting that the former excludes "the potential of digital technology to be used for democratic processes (i.e., researching social issues, critically navigating  various news sources, signing and sharing digital petitions, etc.)." And yet, "Overwhelmingly, educational research examines digital citizenship within the personally responsible  framework," while "youth perceive such limited digital citizenship approaches to merely perpetuate a fear-driven narrative regarding digital technology use." We can see where this is going: "this study understands democratic citizenship as enacted through civic action and considers digital citizenship as similarly requiring elements of civic engagement." The question is: will the Ontario government agree?

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Forgery Protection of Academic Certificates through Integrity Preservation at Scale using Ethereum Smart Contract
Auqib Hamid Lone, Roohie Naaz, Scalable Computing: Practice and Experience, 2020/12/24

This article brings readers up-to-date with developments in blockchain-based academic certificates and provides a detailed framework for degree management using Ethereum (which may become more important as Ethereum migrates to proof-of-stake). The paper credits the University of Nicosia as "the first university in the world to issue academic certificates whose authenticity can be verified through the Bitcoin blockchain" and references João Santos's Hypercerts, a non-siloed blockchain-based certification service combining the Ethereum smart contracts and the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) (unpublished, but I found the GitHub reference) as well as pseudocode for core algorithms in the proposed framework.

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Virtual Training Guidance
Transport Canada, Multimodal Integrated Technical Training, 2020/12/24

This is a clear and straightforward set of guidelines (21 page PDF) for offering virtual training at Transport Canada. What's most significant is that it's based on the use of Microsoft Teams as a training environment (that probably doesn't eliminate the use of an LMS entirely but it's a compelling alternative, especially since (as the Guide notes) employees will already be familiar with the Teams environment from day-to-day work. Suggestions are practical (don't schedule 8-hour sessions) and useful (use Polly, a Teams plug-in, to conduct polls). There's a lot of focus on being useful (eg., send out MS Teams cheat sheets), engaging (limit lecture, employ andragogical principles), and considerate (respect learners' concerns about tech, don't record without permission and opt-out). It was a mailout but I'm making it available here with permission. Also available en français.

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The Netflix of Education, ad nauseum
Curtiss Barnes, e-Literate, 2020/12/24

I have said over and over (to little effect inside our own institution) that "education is not a search problem". Or, as Curtiss Barnes far more eloquently puts it here, "Simply providing 'consumers' with a playlist of educational content will not be the winning strategy. Education is something that is done by the learner, actively facilitated by the educator, rather than 'Netflix and Chill'." So why does the 'Netflix of education' tagline persist? Barnes offers some explanations for the literal use of the phrase, but more interesting are the figurative uses and a "new way forward" for the concept. Barnes writes, "for the Netflix of Education to work, the first issue is proper identification of the end user. I posit the most effective model suggests that is the educator."

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