OLDaily

Tor Books Announces E-book Store: Doctorow, Scalzi & Stross Talk DRM-Free
Tor.com, 2022/06/09

Back in 2012 Tor Books, a science fiction publisher, announced that it would abandon digital rights management (DRM) and sell its works online DRM-free. There was the usual wailing and gnashing of teeth about the risk Tor was taking. But none of these fears came to fruition. "People worried, behind the scenes, 'What have we done?  Will this hurt backlist sales?'...  the opposite seems to be true... Fears about online piracy simply did not pan out: the books in question continued to sell just as well as before, if not better."

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How virtual work is accelerating innovation
Federico Berruti, et al., McKinsey, 2022/06/09

While we are now hearing from all sides how important it is to work and learn in person, we are also learning just how much productivity improved over the period where we all worked from home. "What's striking about these dramatic advances is that they largely entailed people collaborating remotely, leveraging technology in different ways, and being bolder with innovation, automation, and digitization than ever before." That's exactly what wasn't done in education, for the most part. Interestingly, by not emulating traditional methods of social interaction, organizations "widened the pool of minds that could come up with and share good ideas." Online learning widens that pool to include those that feel unsafe, fear the police, need transportation, have disabilities, and more.

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Why do open and distance education students drop out? Views from various stakeholders
Ayşe Bağrıacık Yılmaz, Serçin Karataş, 2022/06/09

What makes this paper unique is that it considers the question from a variety of perspectives: students, field experts, instructors, administrators, and support staff. The authors argue, "students decide to drop out mainly due to four main reasons: internal reasons, external reasons, student characteristics, and student skills." OK, nothing revolutionary there. But here's what's important: administrators, instructors and staff are not aware of all the reasons students drop out. For example, "it is worth emphasizing that the instructors did not mention student skills at all." Skills included digital literacy ("I do not want to install any application on my phone, I cannot deal with it, and drop out") and self-regulation ("It seems to students that everything is simple and easy in ODE; but it requires a serious effort to be honest").

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Moving Beyond SAMR with the Rigor Relevance Framework
Eric Sheninger, 2022/06/09

Part of my work in the coming year will involve looking more at techn ology adoption models, of which one of the grand daddies is the substitution augumentation modification replacement (SAMR) framework. In this article  Eric Sheninger describes an alternative, the Rigor Relevance Framework, which he argues is much less tech centered than SAMR and "provides a common language, constitutes the lens through which to examine all aspects of a learning culture (curriculum, instruction, assessment), and helps create a culture around a shared vision." Well I suppose, if we used technology adoption models only for (preserving) traditional education frameworks.

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A Standardized, Specification-Driven API Lifecycle
Kin Lane, InfoQ, 2022/06/09

Brisk terse article based on a presentation arguing for the use of application programming interface (API) specifications." One spec for an API can be used to generate docs, mocks, tests, secure that API, and then generate the code you're going to use to actually bring that API to life." These specifications become more important for learning technology as we move from single purpose applications (like an LMS) to platforms supporting a number of services from different providers, including financial and payment APIs, APIs from healthcare, travel, geospatial, automotive and insurance. Learning-specific services available via API include translation, recommendation, and evaluation.

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