We'll take it from here: letting the users take charge of the evaluation and why that turned out well
Cosmin Munteanu, Hélène Fournier, Jean-François Lapointe, Irina Kondratova, Bruno Emond, Academica.edu, January 24, 2013
Slide presentation from a number of my colleagues at NRC describing the MINT project - Multimodal INteractive Trainer - they developed in cooperation with the Canadian Forces. The project set out to build  "a low-cost, portable, yet flexible and configurable mixed-reality, serious gaming, training simulator  based on natural interactions." The point of the presentation is to descrbe the role of the participants themselves in the evaluation of the technology as it was developed. More...

Help us Edit the Learners Bill of Rights
Philipp Schmidt, P2PU, January 23, 2013

P2PU is launching a campaign to create and in some sense ratify a 'Learner Bill of Rights' for online learners. All very well, though I think the idea of a Bill of Rights is a bit of an Americanism - I contrast it with the 'Cyberspace Charter of Rights' I authored back in 1999 and which I think still reads well. Of course, I never had the means (nor inclination) to round up a biunch of famous people to sign it, so it never received a whole lot of traction. More...

Half a Million DVDs in Your DNA
Robert F. Service, ScienceNOW, January 23, 2013

I saw this in a couple places today (here and here): "Researchers in the United Kingdom report today that they've encoded these works and others in DNA and later sequenced the genetic material to reconstruct the written, audio, and visual information." Several other initiatives are underway to accomplish the same thing. More...

Boundless, the free alternative to textbooks, releases its content under Creative Commons
Jane Park, Creative Commons, January 23, 2013

The story is in the headline. Boundless "has released 18 open textbooks under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA), the same license used by Wikipedia. Schools, students and the general public are free to share and remix these textbooks under this license." The company expects to make money selling premium features. More...

World's Largest Natural Sound Archive Now Online
Anita Li, Mashable, January 23, 2013

So I spent the better part of an hour listening to loons on Mason Lake and a chorus of birds in Queensland, Australia, thanks to this Mashable link to the free natural sounds archive, now available online from the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. More...

Valve boss Gabe Newell calls Windows 8 a 'catastrophe'
BBC News, January 22, 2013
To understand why Valve would consider Windows 8 a catastrophe, it's helpful to understand that Valve has set up its own software store and service. So when you buy, say, Civilization V from them, you basically install Valve, which then downloads Civilization V from the internet and runs it on your system - and indeed, any computer you own, even your Macbook, since you are running it from the internet. More...

A Reference Model for Learning Analytics
Mohamed Amine Chatti, Mohamed Amine Chatti's ongoing research on Knowledge, and , Learning, January 22, 2013

This is a good overview of learning analytics, beginning with the concept of the recommender system as it developed in the 2000s through to more contemporary work. More...

It was just a matter of time... Google plans to kill passwords
Katina Michael, Uberveillance, January 22, 2013
Nobody would be happier than I to see the end of passwords - as it stands right now I have more than a hundred different passwords for home, office, web and other applications (I have an algorithm I use to make sure they're all different, but can be remembered). More...

Time for an evolution
Catherine Lombardozzi, Learning Journal, January 22, 2013

If we think of online learning not as the provision of a process (as we would see in a classroom) but rather as an environment (such as we might see in an application like Word or even a game like Sim City) then instead of 'learning design' we get 'learning environment design'. More...

Introducing version control & git in 1.5 hours to undergraduates
Dan Scott, Coffee|Code, January 22, 2013

HTML slides (nicely done) and a git repository used in this presentation have been made available online. I dare say it would be useful not only to undergraduates but to git-impaired people like me. More...