CC and ME
Helen DeWaard, Five Flames 4 Learning, 2017/10/30
Helen DeWaard writes, "After viewing the conversations between David Wiley and George Siemens for the #OpenEdMOOC (Week 2 Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3) it becomes clear as mud that copyright and Creative Commons licensing has an impact on my work as an educator." I don't think that was the intend of the course. More...

My part in the battle for Open (universities)
Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, 2017/10/30
I didn't get a chance to see Martin Weller at ICDE last week but I'm still able to enjoy his throughts from the cconference in this post. It's a nice rethinking of his role in the promotion of open, and of large institutions like the Open University in the open learning ecosystem. More...

Information Disorder: Toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policy making
Claire Wardle, Hossein Derakhshan, Shorenstein Center, 2017/11/06
In view of the epistemic crisis in the U.S. today this report on informaation disorders (109 page PDF) is a timely contribution. But I fear it does little better than identify the problem; the solutions are stale, sterile, and would be ineffective. More...

Any computer that can be replaced by a teacher, should be
Steve Wheeler, Learning With es, 2017/11/06
The main point of this post isn't the silly headline, it's this: "humans have many characteristics it would be impossible to mimic, including empathy, emotion, appreciation for aesthetics, and most importantly deviance - also known as breaking or bending the rules... Teachers won't be replaced by computers because it is nigh on impossible to describe accurately what teachers do." This is wrong. More...

Why Moodle Supporters Should be Concerned
Michael Feldstein, e-Literate, 2017/11/06
Phil Hill and Michael feldstein have each taken to posting this week to defend their assertion that the rate of new installations of Moodle has declined significantly. The first, from Phil Hill, is a detailed description of the data used to construct the argument. More...

Against Allegedly
Diana Moskovitz, Deadspin, 2017/11/06
In addition to meanings, words have connotations. This is what the word makes you think over and above what the word actually says. My favourite, from decades of journalistic misuse, is "claimed". Compare "He said he was abducted" and "He claimed he was abducted". The use of 'claimed' injects doubt and scepticism into the sentence without ever changing the fact it describes. More...

‘Why does Canada have so much online learning?’
Tony Bates, online learning and distance education resources, 2017/11/13
Interesting post from Tony bates answering the question in the title. Well, first he responds along the lines of "aw, shucks, it isn't that much really." But when he gets to it he makes some obvious points (history and geography, government policy) and one really interesting one: "where there has been a large and important open university, this has resulted in slower growth in online learning." Why. More...