OLDaily

Gr. 10 Civic Students Address Real-World Issues
Mr. Mendez, St. Oscar Romaro Catholic Secondary School, 2021/12/24

I remember two projects from school particularly well. One was when I wrote to every embassy of countries along the Danube River for information about the river; they all eventually replied except for West Germany (yes, I'm that old). The other was for information on how to host a constitutional conference; the Governor General's office sent me everything I needed so I could preside as GG over our own conference. Getting involved in the real world is, to me, the most life-changing learning experience. That's what drew me to this post, which describes how a student researched and composed a letter on the need for mental health resources at her school, and received a short response from the Premier. I wish there would have been some way to integrate all this work into an actual plan to address the issue, like a student conference on the subject, for example. Via Doug Peterson.

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To tell stronger stories, don’t narrate the video. Explain it.
Al Tompkins, Poynter, 2021/12/24

In the course of delivering my course this fall I've produced something like fifty hours of bad video. Now my purpose wasn't to produce good video per se - as Matthias Melcher has observed, it's mostly an audio course; the video is just there because I can. And the point was to get the words out, to jump-start my thinking and writing process, so I can get my mind around the content of the course. Anyhow, the upshot is that I've spent a lot of time this fall thinking about what would be good video. And in that, this article is on point, suggesting that the narrator should explain what people are seeing on video, and not describe it. Great point. And from my perspective, now that I know what I want to say, if I wanted to make great video, I'd go out and find scenes in the world that are explained by the things I'm saying. Wow, but that would be a lot of work!

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Avoiding Technical Bankruptcy: a Whole-Organization Perspective on Technical Debt
Einar Høst, Ben Linders, InfoQ, 2021/12/24

'Technical debt' is a software development term, but it seems to me it could also describe an institutional practice generally. The term refers to "a process where developers make a conscious decision to ship code with known limitations into production." This is done in order to get something out there quickly and to get early feedback. The rapid deployment of 'remote learning' could be thought of as the institutional form of technical debt; it was a rapid response, but it created a requirement to later come back and address the limitations the initial rush to production didn't address. Institutions may feel their technical debt may be discharged by the end of the pandemic, but that way of thinking about it creates the risk that they'll never catch up - technical bankruptcy. Image: ProductPlan.

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