Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Put Your Baby Photos Online
Dimitri Tokmetzis, Matter, 2015/02/25

This is a sign of the growing backlash against use of the CC-by license, and may well spur additional backlash. The authors have set up a commercial website that sells coffee mugs with CC-by photos of other people's infants and children on them. "Initially, the recipients who saw those pictures were all users of Flickr — family members, friends, or maybe other amateur photographers. But by shifting the flow of information to a commercial platform, the recipients are now anyone who might be interested in buying a mug that has a picture of a kid on it. What has changed is the social context, and this is why it feels uncomfortable." Adding the 'NC' clause to your license makes such reuse illegal.

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Questioning the Data
George Couros, Connected Principals, 2015/02/25

"There are a few things that I question when I hear schools talk about solely 'data driven'," writes George Couros. "Nothing works for everyone. Nothing.  So when we look at “proven methods”, we are often looking at something that is more focused on the “system” than an individual." Also, "there are often so many things that are going on in school, how can we really compartmentalize the 'one thing' that works?" Finally, he asks, "what is the measure of success?" Education is a complex system designed for individual needs and to serve multiple objectives. Of course no single model can describe it, let alone determine how it should operate.

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6 Best Practices for Developing Competency-based Job Profiles
Unattributed, HRSG, 2015/02/25

This is advertorial content supporting marketing for HRSG’s CompetencyCore's profile builder, but it's also a good snapshot of where learning management is heading in the corporate space (and probably in the institutional space as well). That doesn't mean everything's going to be broken down into individual competencies (though that is the vision of some). But it does mean that the traditional metric of seat-time or the credit-hour is in the process of being disrupted.

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National Adjunct Walkout Day
Various authors, NAWD | Tumblr, 2015/02/25

As Gawker reports, "Today is "National Adjunct Walkout Day" [in the U.S. and elsewhere] when the overworked, disrespected, and underpaid adjunct professors of the world (the US, mostly) go on strike to raise awareness of the fact that, while colleges keeping getting more and more expensive, adjunct professors keep getting screwed." Or as Tiffany Kraft writes, "Over the course of 40 years, the profession devolved from one largely founded on respect and security to one that standardizes unfair labor conditions and creeping corporate gain. Clearly, the tolerance of this issue marginalizes all faculty. Foremost, we need an ideological culture shift, and then we may confront the real issues that undermine the profession, with restored ethos, voice, and action."

More: TakePart, America (national Catholic review), the Chronicle ("Will it make a difference?"), Slideshare presentation of the issues, the Daily Texan ("walkout begs reflection on state of US faculty"), CASA News, CPFA, Bryan Alexander ("a deeply exploited population attempts to make its voice heard"), a snippet and short article from Inside Higher Ed, Bleeding Heart Librarians ("even though universities are culpably mismanaged, there’s little reason to feel sorry for adjuncts"), the Atlantic ("activists are wondering how to galvanize a collection of workers who drift from campus to campus"), Ontario CAFA  ("growing use of contract faculty in Ontario traps many in precarious work, threatens quality of higher education"), Storify feed, adjunct walkout Twitter Feed and Facebook page.

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