Concentric Sky Announces BadgeRank - a New Search Engine for Digital Badges
Cision, Concentric Sky, 2018/06/14
Quoted, with useless adjectives removed: "Following the release of the digital badge stacking tool - Badgr Pathways - BadgeRank allows anyone to explore the digital badges published by Open Badges compliant systems around the world." More...
Developing world leaders agree education is their top priority
World Education Blog, 2018/06/12
This is a summary of a newly published report (120 page PDF) surveying priorities selected by citizens and leaders in the developing world. Education, along with peace and security, are at the top of the list. That said, "Poorer and less democratic countries are more concerned about ensuring access to basic public services — health, water, food, and energy." Interestingly, climate change just doesn't rank as a priority. More...
UF Online’s New Corporate Partner: Discover Financial joins Walmart with Online Education benefit
Phil Hill, e-Literate, 2018/06/12
As mentioned here last week, Walmart is getting into the business of providing access to education for its employees. One of its partners is University of Florida (through UF Online). Today Phil Hill reports " UF Online announced another partner: Discover Financial Services, issuers of the Discover Card and Diners Club International, with its 14,000 employees." UF Online calls this type of program Employer Pathways. More...
The Ad Hoc Government Digital Services Playbook
Kaitlin Devine, Paul Smith, Ad Hoc, 2018/06/12
This got passed around the office today and it's a pretty good guide (and required reading) for administrators of technical services. 'Ad Hoc' is the name of the company that drafted this. It's focused on understanding customer and user needs, designing simple solutions, and phased-in migrations. More...
Models for online, open, flexible and technology enhanced higher education across the globe – a comparative analysis
Dominic Orr, Martin Weller, Rob Farrow, International Council for Open and Distance Education, 2018/06/12
This large report (65 page PDF) is a survey of what the authors are calling OOFAT - 'online, open, flexible and technology enhanced' resources. The unwieldy acronym should perhaps be seen as a warning. The authors define an 'OOFAT Model' combining content, deliver and recognition. Then by evaluating them along two dimensions - organizational flexibility and procedural openness - they created six 'OOFAT Types', which I won't list here. More...
What makes a great leader, explained in eight counterintuitive charts
Shane Snow, Quartz, 2018/06/11
I'm not so sure the charts are counterintuitive, but the eight 'magic quadrant' tables capture aspects of diversity and adaptability that contribute to great leadership (or, maybe, great groups). Though there are eight charts, the theme is consistent throughout: it's better if individuals have diverse core values, because this brings in a variety of perspectives, but they need to stick to them (otherwise they're just panderers and opportunists). More...
CORE becomes the world’s largest aggregator
Balviar Notay, JISC, 2018/06/11
According to this report, "As of May 2018, CORE has aggregated over 131 million article metadata records, 93 million abstracts, 11 million hosted and validated full texts and over 78 million direct links to research papers hosted on other websites." There's a link to a table comparing CORE with seven other open access paper harvesters: BASE, OpenAIRE, Paperity, SHARE, 1findr, OneRepo, and Unpaywall. More...
Has Google Become a Journal Publisher?
Kent Anderson, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2018/06/11
The answer to this question is "no". But Google does publish a fascinating journal called Distill - this article on AI and Interpretation distracted me for a good fifteen minutes before I could finish this post. And Distill seems to bother Scholarly Kitchen writer Kent Anderson a lot. The Scholarly Kitchen is, of course, largely an advocacy blog for publishing companies, so the take is not unexpected. More...
Digital Portfolios and Content
Silvia Tolisano, LangWitches, 2018/06/11
This is a good article introducing issues and approaches to content in digital portfolios in schools. "The content created and chosen to include in a digital portfolio can be free flowing or follow a more rigid structure... it depends on what the learner craves and feels more comfortable with. The worst seems to be, when a portfolio owner feels a lack of ownership, is so paralyzed and constrained from a given structure or to the contrary, a lack thereof, that they don’t create and publish anything". More...
As Google for Education tools enter classrooms across Canada, some parents are asking to opt-out
Craig Desson, Josh Flear, CBC, 2018/06/11
Google is not only creating new consumers in schools, it's creating a new consumer database from schools. "According to Google's privacy policy for their educational products, the company doesn't collect student data for advertising purposes or sell them to third parties. The apps are also ad-free. More...
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