By Quirin Schiermeier. Research clusters emerge as the big success of Germany’s Excellence Initiative — despite its focus on elite institutes. More...

Japan International Cooperation Center (JICE), Educational Development Office Abu Dhabi-Japan will host a four-day 'Study in Japan' informational event along with traditional cultural activities in Abu Dhabi, UAE. More...

By A. Ruban. Local students are being forced to give up on plans to study in the US and UK due to the spike in costs caused by the ringgit’s sharp devaluation, according to placement centres here. 
Prior to the plunge in the value of the Malaysian currency, both countries had been the preferred destinations for local students continuing their tertiary education abroad, but continuing to do so now meant paying an average of RM70,000 more for a course in US. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web.  Mapping Our Pangea
Robert Schuetz, Nocking The Arrow, 2016/02/15

Metaphors are fraught with the risk of misunderstanding, but this one is among the more imaginative I've seen recently, and the risk is far outweighed by the reward of a new way of thinking about the way we use digital technologies More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Sentiment analysis of student blog posts
David T. Jones, The Weblog of (a) David Jones, 2016/02/15
One of the more interesting types of analytics to be developed in recent years is sentiment analytics. At the National Research Council, for example, we have developed a mechanism for detecting the sentiment of a tweet. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. New Textbook Liberation Fund Aims to Save College Students $1 Billion
Press Release, Market Wired, 2016/02/15
I'm not sure the target is attainable by this fund alone, but the objective is laudable. This press release announces the launch of the Textbook Liberation Fund which will provide $500,000 in "grants to faculty members or departments who want to transition their courses away from high-priced textbooks." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. US professors aren’t getting any more accepting of online learning—but students definitely are
Amy X. Wang, Quartz, 2016/02/15
I've often said that change in learning and development will come from outside traditional institutions, not from within it. This short but telling article makes it clear why. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Calling out Pearson on Open Badges
Doug Belshaw, Open Educational Thinkering, 2016/02/15
There's nothing good, it seems, that commercial publishers won't spoil. The latest object of their attention is open badges. As Doug Belshaw writes in this article, Pearson is developing badging system called Acclaim that is an Open Badges Infrastructure (OBI) compatible. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How an Alaska Teacher Improved Student Attendance with Minecraft
Cindy Duncan, EdSurge, 2016/02/12

Throughout most of my educational career, the early morning subject was mathematics. Then, later, formal logic. It is as though someone figured our abstract brains work best in the morning. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Coupling Pre-Prints and Post-Publication Peer Review for Fast, Cheap, Fair, and Effective Science Publishing
Michael Eisen, Leslie B. Vosshall, it is NOT junk, 2016/02/12
The title says it all. This is, in my view, the future of academic publishing, and of educational publishing in general, if we can break the publishers' hold on the marketplace and especially the distribution system. More...