OLDaily

Welcome to the CDS Accessibility Handbook
Canadian Digital Service, 2020/01/16

This is a page from the Canadian Digital Services, the department that is building out our government's internet services. This particular resource, as the title suggests, is designed to help government departments incorporate accessibility principles in their web products. But of course it's of interest to a wider audience. While you're visiting the site, have a look at the CDS blog, which covers news and information for CDS as a whole.

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Thoughts on “Non-Amicable” Enforcement of CC Licenses
Diane Peters, Alexis Muscat, Creative Commons Blog, 2020/01/16

I suppose this was inevitable. People who use Creative Commons (CC) licenses to facilitate sharing sometimes also believe that they protect their rights as creators. After all, Creative Commons is 'some rights reserved' - including especially attribution. But as people use these works without respecting these limitations, creators are increasingly tempted to turn to automated enforcement services - such as, for example, an automated image search service that tracks down unattributed copies of your images. According to this post, Creative Commons is official neutral on such services - it's not in the business of enforcing licenses, just defining them. On the other hand, automated services acting like copyright thugs enforcing the terms of CC licenses doesn't look good for the organization.

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How artificial intelligence will impact K-12 teachers
Jake Bryant, Christine Heitz, Saurabh Sanghvi, Dilip Wagle, McKinsey, 2020/01/16

This article is a mixture of hoary old truisms (eg., "their role will shift from instructor to facilitator and coach") and generic 'technology will make things better' but which nonetheless reassure educators by saying that not only will tech not replace them, the demand for teachers will actually grow in the future. The premise here is that new technologies will reduce time spent on administrative tasks, allowing teachers to spend more time on teaching tasks (or maybe it will cut down on those 50-hour work weeks - either one would be good). But the link between artificial intelligence and these outcomes is pretty tenuous - it involves things like using AI assistance to grade papers and having AIs fill out forms. There's a lot of talk about AI enabling personalization - but the math doesn't work. If tech is saving 30 percent of a 50 hour work week, the it provides an extra 6 minutes per student per day. That doesn't really get personalization off the ground.

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Getting Started with Open Badges and Open Microcredentials
Kyle Clements, Richard E. West, Enoch Hunsaker, International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 2020/01/16

This is one of those articles that describes every possible step involved in the creation and issuing of badges and microcredentials while still leaving you not knowing how to do it. That's not to say this isn't a good article. It is. But there has been a disinclination in recent years to actually talk about technology in educational technology literature, leaving practitioners in a position where they have to figure out most of this stuff for themselves. Sure, I can see this article being a useful guide for a professor or administrator managing a technical team deploying a badge infrastructure. But they shouldn't walk away from it thinking that they understand how badges are developed and used. For contrast, consider this article and then my own article that opens up the tech and displays how it actually works.

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