OLDaily

This Two-Minute Morning Practice Will Make Your Day Better
Neil Pasricha, Harvard Business Review, 2021/01/22

I thought I would write a blog post responding to this, because the things recommended by Neil Pasricha are trivial mindset things (wherein you itemize what you will let go of, are grateful for, and will focus on). But I don't really have time. So here's a postlet on what you can do to really make your day (and your life) better:

• Get some exercise. It doesn't have to be a lot - walk a mile, cycle for half an hour, snowshow around the block, take a spin class (these are things I have done)
• Work on a hard problem. Be prepared to fail (after all, it needs to be hard) but really try to succeed. Do a NY Times crossword, repair something, build shelves, follow instructions on a how-to website, just make sure it's hard to do.
• Teach. Take something you know about (or are just learning about) and explain it to people - sometimes by writing an article, perhaps, but also in person, in a webcast, whatever.
• Explore and discover. Look for something new, something you're not familiar with, and explore it. Explore ways to grow mushrooms at home, travel to a nearby town and explore all the shops, listen to audiobooks, browse through random websites.

These won't make your life perfect, but they are concrete actions that will do far more for you what whispering "I'm grateful for..." at the start of each day. They will keep your mind sharp, in focus, expanding, and open.

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Principles for Remote Instruction: Notes from a #TLAC Masterclass.
Tom Sherrington, Teacherhead, 2021/01/22

This piece of advice stopped me: "Use a regular Orientation Screen." My first thought was, he should say "landscape", because people might not know what "regular" means. Then I read it again - and I realized that what he meant was that people should show the same set of instructions at the beginning of each live session to remind them about what they need and how the online session works. Ah! That makes much more sense. But it made me think about how difficult it is to write precisely. That would be my main criticism of this article; it's written in a way that assumes everyone uses the same terminology ('dissolve the screen', 'tracking tool', ' register checklist', 'cold calling', 'whole-class correctness', 'sync and a-sync lessons', etc.). Now most of this I can figure out from the context, but in general it's better to write more descriptively, especially in an international context. Don't use names for things, use descriptions. Otherwise, I though the author made a lot of sense. Via Mike Taylor.

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Opinion: Education must act on advances made during lockdowns
Jamie Beaton, Education Central, 2021/01/22

This opinion from the founder of an online high school in New Zealand expresses the view that there should be more online learning but that it should be a lot like offline learning. "For it to be effective it needs to be real-time, live teaching with small ‘virtual’ classes. Despite all the technology we have today, it’s still about a brilliant teacher leading a classroom and inspiring young minds." That would pretty much doom online education (and offline education!) for while there are no doubt many brilliant teachers, there are not nearly enough to support all the students who need them. That's why, for example, "in addition to their existing school studies, more students are accessing international curricula recognised by the world’s most competitive universities." What works in online learning is - as it is for everything - a mix that depends a lot on the learner, the subject, the materials available, and the context.

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This Week in Canadian #edtech w/ @jimcarroll Global Futurist
Robert Martellacci, Mindshare, 2021/01/22

The link in the title goes straight to the video but you can learn more about the 'This Week in Canadian EdTech' video series from the web page here. The series began July 15 of last year (at l;east, that was the earliest I could find). This episode, which reached me via an email suggestion, features speaker and broadcaster Jim Carroll, known to Canadians of a certain vintage as the author, along with Rick Broadhead, of the Canadian Internet Handbook in 1994. It hit my bookshelf just as I was setting up shop at Assiniboine Community College in Brandon and helped set us all down the wild ride that has been the internet in the new millennium.

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The Open Organization
Open Org, Red Hat, 2021/01/22

There's a lot to explore in this attempt to describe how to build an open organization, not the least of which is the discussion taking place as members work together on GitHub to pull together the core pieces. Right now participants are focused on the editorial process for content written by project 'Ambassadors'. "Ambassadors log article ideas as issues and track their progress in our editorial queue." There's also a Guide for Educators (319 page PDF) written in 2019, which I want to spend some time with in the future.  Via Laura Hilliger.

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