My Clyde Street Daily delivered some great links and leads today.
I was an hour late arriving for Martin Weller’s webinar, Open Scholarship and Online Identity. Fortunately as I was joining the Blackboard Connect room a colleague from the University of Canberra was signing out so I have been able to follow up on some of the discussion. I follow Martin’s work with great interest and his writings about Digital Scholarship have had a significant effect on my practice.
In his most recent post, Openness has won -now what?, Martin observes:
As we start the new year and survey the open education landscape, it’s hard not to conclude that openness has prevailed. The victory may not be absolute, but the trend is all one way now – we’ll never go back to closed systems in academia … Whether it’s open access publishing, open data, MOOCs, OERs, open source or open scholarship – the openness battle has largely been won.
After missing the webinar I followed up on another gem from Paper.Li: two Open badge videos shared by Doug Belshaw. I have been following Doug’s work as an advocate for Open Badges. (Doug lnked to this post from November too.)
I followed up on a post about personal learning environments that looked at space design.
Will Richardson gave me a lead to Ron Berger’s Deeper Learning post in which he records:
I travel with a heavy suitcase. Over my 35-year career as a public school teacher and educator at Expeditionary Learning, I have been obsessed with collecting student work of remarkable quality and value. I bring this work with me whenever I visit schools or present at conferences and workshops, because otherwise no one would believe me when I describe it.
The student work in my giant black suitcase is exemplary — beautiful and accurate, representative of strong content knowledge and critical thinking skills — but it’s not from “exceptional” students. It does not come from gifted and talented classrooms or from high-powered private schools. It’s the work of regular students in typical schools around the country. The difference is that these students’ teachers have helped them develop the skills and mindsets necessary to produce work of exceptional quality, and have built classroom and school cultures in which exceptional work is the norm.
Ron led me to the Centre for Student Work and has prompted me to think about curation in a more detailed way. I think this may be an approach that will inform lots of other professional development.
Andy Miah provided a link to a very helpful A to Z of social media. ResearchGate was included in this list. This was mentioned in Martin Weller’s talk too.
Howard Rheingold shared a link to NetSmart.
Just after finishing reading the Clyde Street Daily I received The Conversation’s daily update. In it there was a link to a post from three Risk scientists, A history of vulnerability: putting Tasmania’s bushfires in perspective. I thought this paper had insights to share about vulnerability generally but I found the specific data used on bushfire behaviour particularly pertinent at this phase of the fire season in Australia. The post reminded me too of the role long-term data plays in informing discussion about invariant and variant behaviour.
I concluded my early morning journey with another look at the New York Times. In it I found a link to a story about Junior Seau. The story discusses chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and the experiences of American Football. This discussion of the effects of concussion seems particularly timely with the approaching football seasons in Australia. There are guidelines for the management of concussion in Australian Rules, Rugby League, and Rugby Union. Caroline Finch and her colleagues have a recent paper (2012) about implementation of expert guidelines.
