Measuring the impact of OER at the University of Georgia
Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed, 2018/07/16

This article reports on a study (15 page PDF) reporting that students who receive open educational resources (OER) earlier in the course obtain better course grades. More...

HTTPS explained with carrier pigeons
Andrea Zanin, freecodecamp, 2018/07/16

Web security is one of those arcane topics that defies simple understanding. This article tries to bring it down to earth using pigeons. "Bob sends a pigeon to Alice without any message. Alice sends the pigeon back carrying a box with an open lock, but keeping the key. Bob puts the message in the box, closes the locks and sends the box to Alice. Alice receives the box, opens it with the key and reads the message." Now of course there's mathematics involved in the design of the lock. More...

Science / Fiction
Carol Black, 2018/07/16

I think this is a really important article, and not just because of the more contentious statements it makes when it discusses "'evidence-based' education, scientific racism, & how learning styles became a myth." As readers know, I have addressed the topic of learning styles over the years and have clashed with learning styles debunkers who seem to think its really important that we treat them as a myth. My analysis is slightly different from Carol Black's, but we agree on the basics: there is widespread agreement that there are differences in cognitive style, and the argument that "learning styles don't exist" is based on bad science. More...

Still Amusing Ourselves To Death
Dean Shareski, Ideas and Thoughts, 2018/07/16

Dean Shareski reflects on how Neil Poistman's warnings about television also apply to social media. The warnings were certainly accurate for television, as the emergence of fake news channels and mass delusion have shown. What aboutonline media? These magnifiy the falshoods spread by television and have offered little remedy. More...

Merging work & learning to develop the human skills that matter
Joe Deegan, Nathan Martin, Pearson, 2018/07/16

This report (44 page PDF) posits that we're entering a Now marks the transition to a "third wave" of education. The first wave was about access, the second wave was about quality, and now the third wave is about what the authors call "'demand driven education'  — where programs focus more strongly than ever on ensuring graduates are job-ready and have access to rewarding careers over the course of their lifetimes." That actually sounds like the opposite of demand-driven education, but let's continue. More...

The Fabrication that is OER
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, 2018/07/16

We have created a beautiful world of billions of images, videos, articles and messages that we've shared back and forth with each other since the 1980s and this world is our heritage and our legacy. More...