OLDaily

Working With/in the Tensions: Educational Technology as Feminized Craftwork
Tanya Elias, Digital Culture & Education, 2022/10/28

Tanya Elias argues, "the literature of feminized craftwork offers insights for instead understanding educational technology as a tension-negotiating practice through which we might learn to see and experience alternate possibilities in our field." She seeks to "reconstitute not only the missing links in academic practices, but also and especially the missing people," and to this end to "draw into this paper the experiences of globally dispersed women engaged in 'traditional' craftwork, including sewing and weaving, whose expertise as skilled technologists has historically been overlooked." She draws on three examples to illustrate the idea:  n open online course entitled Phonar (Photography and Narrative),  the Domain of One's Own (DoOO), and the FemEdTech Quilt of Care and Justice in Open Education. This is a dense rich paper (19 page PDF) that resonates well with my own experiences as a learning technologist working on a craft in a community where we as "craftworkers co-constructed both material and meaning in ways that changed their social, cultural, economic, and material worlds."

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X5GON Discovery
X5GON, 2022/10/28

There has been a very good discussion over the last few days on an OEG Connect discussion list on the subject of OER repositories, and from it I found this resource. Now, while it draws from an impressive list of sources, searching with it reveals many of the problems faced by this community. I did a search, for example, for 'Pluto' (my favourite planet). On the first page (of 436), after a link to the Connexions chapter on Pluto and Charon, we get numerous other links from the same resource, with titles such as 'Review Questions', 'Index' and 'Summary'. Several pages in, we begin to get other resources - a physics lecture from Yale (addressing 'the Pluto problem'), a Geology book from eCampus Ontario (addresses 'pluton problems'), 'Energieträger im Überblick' (Energy sources at a glance), and more. I appreciate the open search and API support, but the resource demonstrates how difficult it is to provide subject-based OER searches.

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A Learning Design System
Tim Klapdor, Heart | Soul | Machine, 2022/10/28

This article summarizes a presentation to a local UX group, Design for Humans, and after sharing how he missed presenting, Tim Klapdor outlines his work to "move from the artisanal designs – the one-offs that were handcrafted that had made our name – to a much larger scale of design – bigger batches that meant more production, more hands and larger quantities."

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Purpose Powered Education | Getting Smart
Tom Vander Ark, Getting Smart, 2022/10/28

I have two thoughts about the core proposal of this article, which is this: making purpose central to education, where purpose is "a future-directed goal that is personally meaningful and aimed at contributing to something larger than the self." On the one hand, I think having a sense of purpose is one of the things you really need to learn. It's basically the tenth item on my list. On the other hand, if you leave out the other nine points (and especially 'how to value yourself') then the 'purpose-driven education' becomes a recipe for 'education as a recruitment tool' for various 'larger than the self' organizations.

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What it takes to drive effective design for complex skills in the workplace (The practice)
Mirjam Neelen, 3-Star Learning Experiences, 2022/10/28

I like the slide that illustrated this article, and especially the point about 'knowing what good looks like'. Mirjam Neelen offers various ways to achiev e this: "We could use existing scientific studies as well as business case studies as 'success stories; examples that demonstrate that desired results were achieved. We would also need to highlight the elements that led to the desired results." I don't think we take enough time in general to think about what sort of outcomes we're trying to achieve. For example: in open learning, are we trying to 'get every child in school' or are we trying to 'ensure they learn to read'.

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Janice Min: The Hollywood media executive betting big on newsletters
William Turvill, PressGazette, 2022/10/28

Who could have predicted that newsletters would be an effective way to reach an audience with news and information? "(Janice) Min reveals that Ankler Media now has more than 30,000 newsletter subscribers. With a staff of four, she says the business is profitable and expects it to generate millions of dollars of revenue this year." Here's the number that counts: "Paid subscriptions cost $149 a year or $17 a month." That's revenue of $510K a month, or $4.29 million a year. Maybe I'v e been sitting on a gold mine all these years, but frittered it away publishing content for free.

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What does the ‘metaverse’ mean for education?
Javeria Salman, Hechinger Report, 2022/10/28

The gist of this story is that while schools are traditionally slow to technology, which is often criticized, they should nonetheless be cautious in embracing the metaverse, because "much of what we see marketed as the metaverse from education technology companies isn't actually the metaverse." Specifically, the metaverse isn't simply virtual reality. "In a true metaverse experience, your digital identity travels between the physical and virtual worlds... With the help of blockchain technology, that identity - your preferences, your achievements, your educational records, other elements of who you are -€” is maintained across platforms and applications."

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