OLDaily

World History Commons - Annotated Primary Sources for Students
Richard Byrne, Free Technology for Teachers, 2021/07/27

This article points to a great resource that could serve as the basis for any number of educational activities, allowing students to "locate primary sources, including images, objects, media, and texts. Annotations by scholars contextualize sources." The annotations are brief and to the point, and I'm sure there's a lot of room to dig deeper (so I would use these as starting points and ask students to do more research). What, for example, would we say in 2021 about the Misión San Lorenzo de Picuris where "priests not only supervised the native peoples during worship, but also taught them to work and live according to Spanish customs" and which was "built with indigenous labor in the late-eighteenth century"?

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Cyndi Mcleod, Global University Systems Canada
Viggo Stacey, The PIE News, 2021/07/27

This is a look at a skills training provider that has been recently expanding in Canada. "Its focus on preparing students for employment and its role in filling the country’s labour shortages." The article is structured as an interview with chief executive officer Cyndi Mcleod. "One of the focuses for GUS Canada right now is very much around technology, business and the creative industries. And those are the areas where Canada is looking for skilled professionals.We’re also very focused on micro credentials."

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YouTubers are making a living on videos about Microsoft software
Jordan Novet, CNBC, 2021/07/27

The focus of this article is of course on whether people can make a profit making YouTube videos, but I'm more interested in the way we can increase access to learning resources with or without monetary gain. "People often turn to YouTube when they want to get a better understanding of Microsoft software, and while Microsoft has plenty of its own videos available on YouTube, they don’t always come up at the top of the site’s search results." That is how it should be; one of the major issues with Microsoft's help function is that you end up with help from Microsoft, which more often than not isn't very useful.

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The Ultimate Guide to Online Learning
Kris Taylor, TaughtUp, 2021/07/27

This article - marketing copy for a company called TaughtUp - is one of those that reads best from bottom to top (not word by word, obviously; section by section). It's a standard overview presentation of online learning, for those few who have never heard of it before. And no, not the ultimate guide to online learning. It serves to introduce Kris Taylor, who appears to be a good writer - scroll down on this page to see more articles (rss here) which are more focused and more useful. I found them quite hard to read though: I couldn't stop looking at the BIG BLACK BAR at the top of the page, which created a horrible reading experience. Here are some principles of design to help them out.

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A virtuous cycle for analytics
Jon Udell, 2021/07/27

Jon Udell dives into the weeds of supporting database queries for instructors using Hypothes.is as an anotation tool in their classes. He describes what was needed in order to allow instructors to formulate their questions without relying on developers, an endeavour that grew more complex as the number of queries grew.  As certain types of questions take longer and longer to answer, an underlying function is written such that the question now becomes a noun in an evolving query language. This forms the "basis of a virtuous cycle," writes Udell. "The team member formulates a question and does their best to answer it using Metabase; the toolsmith captures the intent and re-expresses it in a higher-level business language." Image: Dunn.

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