OLDaily

Can Publishers Maintain Control of the Scholarly Record?
Danielle Cooper, Oya Y. Rieger, Roger C. Schonfeld, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2021/01/12

Although the products publishers offer are books and journals and such, their greatest asset is, as the headline suggests, control of the scholarly record. This is why they are so concerned to define what counts as 'scholarly' as 'what is published by scholarly publishers'. But this control is being challenged. This article focuses on two specific areas: academic preprints, and research data. To control the scholarly record, publishers will need to control these; conversely, if they lose control of these, they risk losing their greatest asset. Obviously my view is that publisher control over preprints and data would be bad, but the wider perspective here is that this will have to be an area of renewed focus for publishers, and hence, for the people who produce and use preprints and research data.

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In Dying Brazil, Is Open EdTech Dying As Well?
Sill Pontes, LMS Pulse, 2021/01/12

Sill Pontes asks, "Did we spend a whole year improvising at a time when the greatest lesson to learn was about the perils of not having sound and sustainable systems capable of managing risk?" The experience in Brazil during the pandemic, says Pontes, feels like a step backward for learning technology. "On the verge of madness or collective hysteria, people still take time to place blame on the 'new' model of living and learning." But in fact, Pontes argues, the blame has little to do with technology. "The precarious situation of education in Brazil right now - not unlike most of the developing and even parts of the industrialized world - is due to a very 'old' model." I think there's truth to this. Learning online uses new technology, but it also demands a new (and arguably more effective) pedagogy.

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How Portable Learning Records Will Unlock Education And Employment Opportunities
Tom Vander Ark, Getting Smart, 2021/01/12

This post is related to the item on microcredentials, also in today's newsletter. "Imagine completing a course and earning a credential and automatically unlocking work-based learning opportunities and receiving college entrance invitations." It's an interesting idea, and the trick is to make it work without surveillance and tracking, but in such a way that the learning records are reliable indicators of learning and skills. In addition to discussing the concept, Tom Vander Ark lists a number (seven) specific projects working on some version of portable learning records.

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The continuing rise of virtual private neighbourhoods
Matt Webb, Interconnected, 2021/01/12

I don't think the term 'virtual private neighbourhoods' is helpful, because the abbreviation - VPN - is the same as that for the much wider technical concept of the 'virtual private network', which is a type of software security system. But the concept being discussed, whereby "people are increasingly hanging out in small, private communities," is a useful one. "Global timelines and newsfeeds won’t come back," argues Matt Webb. What we will get instead is "private Discords, private Slack channels, and a flurry of spatial interfaces in development," to which I would add distributed communities like Mastodon and decentralized web such as indieweb. It feels, in a way, almost like going back to the days of MUDs and discussion boards. Maybe that's nostalgia talking, or maybe it's a genuine rejection of the influence of - and the values of - large commercial media. (p.s. the original title of this article was 'Dunbar Spaces', and I think that's a pretty good name for the concept generally). (Image: Vancouver Public Library, Dunbar branch, which is what I got when I looked up 'Dunbar spaces').

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The 2021 Edu-Scholar Public Influence Scoring Rubric
Frederick Hess, Education Next, 2021/01/12

I have of course zero chance of being included in a list of U.S. Edu-Scholars, nor would I want to, but that doesn't prevent me from criticizing the rubric, if only because it reflects a lot of what is wrong with academia today. Quickly, then, here are the metrics: university-based faculty in the U.S. are researching education weighed by Google scholar score (H-index), book points, Amazon ranking, syllabus points, newspaper mentions, education press mentions (Education Week, the Chronicle of Higher Education, or Inside Higher Education), web mentions, congressional record, twitter score. These metrics heavily bias the ranking toward traditionalist perspectives; three of the scales have to do with publishing books. The selection of 'educational press' is obviously biased. A social media score (if it's relevant at all, which it probably isn't) should reflect other social media. But even more to the point: the weight of a person's influence isn't any of these. It's in their ideas: how far they travel, what gets built on them, how long they endure. And what's wrong with academia - or at least, the academic press - is that we've lost the focus on these ideas, and made the story about factions and personalities

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Is This as Good as It Gets? Two Reasons Why E-Learning Isn’t Better
Tom Kuhlmann, The Rapid E-Learning Blog, 2021/01/12

I'm not sure whether I agree with Tom Kuhlmann but I'll put his views out there. The first reason e-learning isn't getting better, he says, is that e-learning designers don't hgave the skills. Not the technical skills, necessarily, since software does a lot of the work. But "many organizations buy the easy-to-use software and then place the burden on a single person." And second, he says, companies don't invest the resources, especially since so much of it is compliance training, and "it doesn’t make sense to spend more than you need in time and money to get courses developed and delivered."

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Ten Facts You Need to Know About Micro-Credentials
TeachOnline.ca, Contact North, 2021/01/12

This is a good overview of the concept of micro-credentials and adds information about how these are being understood in Canada (and especially Ontario). Here, "it is widely agreed that a micro-credential is “transcriptable” meaning it will appear on a learner’s college or university transcript and will be deposited to her or his digital wallet or e-portfolio." The author mentions the eCampusOntario framework for micro-credentials, as well as the EU Commission draft definition: "A micro-credential is a recognized proof of the learning outcomes that a learner has achieved following a short learning experience, according to transparent standards and requirements and upon assessment." I know there's no definition of 'short' but let's be clear about scale: if 'short' means the equivalent of typical course, then we're looking at stacking 40 microcredentials to be equivanet to a degree. If they're even shorter, like say a one-hour class, then we're looking at stacking 1600 of them.

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