By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. MOOCs in Workplace Learning - Part 3: Launching a MOOC
ID and Other Reflections, Sahana Chattopadhyay, 2015/02/06

This is a continuation of the series on MOOCs and focuses principally on launching a MOOC. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Standards Based Grading Gamified With Badges
Kyle Pearce, Tap Into Teen Minds, 2015/02/06

This is quite an interesting article that will reward careful reading and will reward even more following the background reading and working with the samples yourself. But be prepared to spend some time on it. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Coursera sets sights on universities
Tim Dodd, Financial Review, 2015/02/06

According to this article, " Coursera was rebuilding its ­platform “from the ground up” to allow students to commence courses “on demand” and to give university ­instructors access to student data on progress and performance." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Everything You Need to Know About Becoming a Better Listener
Sarah Green, Harvard Business Review, 2015/02/06
This explains in part why lectures are so ineffective. "In a study of thousands of students and hundreds of businesspeople, they found that most retained only half of what they heard — and this immediately after they’d heard it. Six months later, most people only retained 25%." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Managing Open Access Publication: A System Specification
Charles W. Bailey, Jr., DigitalKoans, 2015/02/06

This is interesting. The document describes the management of administrative data related to open access publications. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Privacy challenges
Larry Hardesty, MIT News, 2015/02/04

This story has been making the rounds (I heard it on BBC world last night): an MIT research project is determined that you can positively identify a person with only four data points across a set of anonymized data. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. You’re probably using the wrong dictionary
James Somers, the jsomers.net blog, 2015/02/04
This is a fascinating item looking at the old Websters 1828 dictionary, and the editions that followed in its line. While today's dictionaries publish terse and matter of fact definitions that strip the nuance from the word, the original dictionary was elegant and detailed, presenting the word in all its flavours. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Educational Technology Strategies
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, 2015/02/04

I've been at the Education Technology Strategies conference in Toronto, for the last two days. Here are my notes - Day One, Day Two. Good conference, interesting. I liked the mix of elementary schools and post-secondary. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Google Brain’s Co-inventor Tells Why He’s Building Chinese Neural Networks
Caleb Garling, Medium, 2015/02/03

Basically this is a look at Coursera founder Andrew Ng's next venture. He's now working with Baidu and still focused on massive - “only interested in tech that can influence 100 million users” - and in particular on using neural networks for analytics. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Copyright Manifesto: How the European Union should Support Innovation and Creativity through Copyright Reform
Various authors, Copyright for Creativity, 2015/02/03
16 page PDF. Here's the problem: "Europeans discover regularly (and with increasing frustration) that they cannot access the same content across the EU." So this manifesto proposes that European copyright should be simplified and harmonized. More...