Translating and implementing the Khan Academy in Brazil
Michael Trucano, EduTech, 2015/01/02
Fascinating look at a project to implement the Khan Academy in Brazil. The usual problems surface (19 computers for a school of 650 students, etc) but reading between the main points we also see a transformative impact. More...

An educational Fitbit?
Doug Johnson, Blue Skunk Blog, 2015/01/02
Doug Johnson illustrates both the promise and the peril of measurement in education. Drawing on the popularity of health and fitness devices such as FitBit, he speculates as to where an educational analogue could be developed. But look at the sort of things it might measure:

• Pages read
• Math problems solved
• Words written

Is this what we mean by educational health and fitness? These measures are (at best) inputs to the educational process, related to the practice, but not the purpose. More...

OpenSocial and the OpenSocial Foundation: Moves to W3C
Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus, 2015/01/01
The Open Social Foundation is moving standards work to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). There will be two groups, as described by Brian Kelly:

• The Social Web Working Group, which is defining technical standards and APIs to facilitate access to social functionality.
• The Social Interest Group, which is coordinating development of social use cases, and formulating a broad strategy to enable social business and federation.

Kelly describes one case of interest, cross-platform commenting on (for example) photo uploads. More...

6 Tips To Turn Your Presentation Into An Interactive eLearning Course
Christopher Pappas, eLearning Industry, 2015/01/01
The six tips aren't especially interesting, and the relentless overlays begging you to subscribe or like are annoying. But the first 'tip' is actually a pretty good list of what are called 'rapid e-learning tools' - basically authoring suites that allow you to create traditional e-learning. More...

Ai Weiwei is Living in Our Future
Hans de Zwart, Medium, 2015/01/01
So what is life like in the surveillance state? Ask artist Ai Weiwei. He lives under constant observation courtesy of the Chinese government. More...

Hotels Fight for the Right to Block Guests' Wi-Fi
Kate taylor, Entrepreneur, 2015/01/01
This story has been around for a while, but it points to the danger of commercial provision of essential services. As everyone knows, price is determined by the law of supply and demand - it is, essentially, whatever the market will bear. But the often unspoken corollary is that creating artificial demand is a reliable means of driving up price. More...

Curator
Unattributed, Twitter, 2015/04/01
Twitter is accepting applications to use Curator. "Curator enables media publishers to discover, curate and display the best Twitter content on any screen." I put my name in but I probably don't qualify. More...

Techno Fantasies
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, 2015/04/01
Audrey Watters takes on Kevin Carey's book The End of College and does so with what is, I think, exactly the right tone, which is to say, distrust, scepticism and outright hostility. "The University of Everywhere is the response, led by venture capitalists and ed-tech entrepreneurs, to 'ancient institutions in their last days of decadence,' Carey argues. More...

3 Important Shifts in Education
George Couros, Connected Principals, 2015/04/01

I honestly don't think any of these three shifts is a real thing. I could be wrong of course. But they have the air and feel of representing things that (some) people would like to happen, rather than what's actually happening. Here are the shifts:

• from 'digital citizenship' to 'digital empathy'
• from 'student voice' to 'student leadership'
• from 'growth mindset' to 'innovator mindset'

It's not that I actually oppose any of these. More...