How online 'chatbots' are already tricking you
Chris Baraniuk, BBC, June 11, 2014

OK, so chatbots that lure people to dating sites or convince bitcoin users to give each other tips are not going to impact most of us. But with as much as 65 percent of online chatter being generated by bots, chances are you've read or interacted with one. Of course, it really depends on how you define 'bot'. More...

Do the new anonymous social media apps encourage us to overshare?
Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian, June 11, 2014

I guess the answer to that question is, "who knows?" What we do know is that there has been a negative response to the Facebook dictum that " The days of you having a different image for your work friends [and] for the other people you know are probably coming to an end… " But there are certainly downsides to anonymity. More...

The Revolution Will Not Be Monetized
Will Bourne, Inc., June 11, 2014

This is becoming an increasingly loud trend. "For years, the internet's biggest players have hoarded your personal data and sold it for billions. Now, a band of angry startups is demanding privacy and aiming to overhaul the social-media business forever." This article introduces us to Wickr, with the slogan,  "The Internet is forever. Your private communications don't need to be." It also mentions a number of other "ephemeral chat" tools - Privatext, TigerText, 
Whisper, Mark Cuban's Cyber Dust, and so on. More...

ProQuest Case Study: Using the Oscillation Principle for Software Development
Nancy Dixon, Conversation Matters, June 11, 2014

This is an interesting and extended look at the software development methodology employed by ProQuest (you may have seen their online maps). They use what Dixon calls the "oscillation principle" meeting three times a year for three days. More...

Man trademarks Pi, tries to cut out geeky T-shirt designers
Kevin Poulsen, Wired, June 11, 2014

I wish I could say that the headline is a joke, but it appears instead to be an all-too-real example of an IP regime gone off the rails. More power to those people ignoring the law and using PI for their own purposes. More...

Looking at Link Between Violent Video Games and Lack of Empathy

Nick Bilton, New York Times, June 16, 2014

OK, I'll confess, I watch 'fail' videos on YouTube. If you're not familiar with the genre, it consists generally of people doing things which end badly. Sometimes you just know the person felt some pain at the end of it. In my case, at least, there is an empathetic response - I experience an involuntary shudder as though it were me about to experience that fall. More...

Qualt
Qualt, June 16, 2014

Qualt advertises "Free mobile courses in internationally recognised professional qualifications. Anytime, anywhere." The courses are available for mobile devices only. The first course, which started in May, is based on a professional accounting course. More...

Going All In: How to Make Competency-Based Learning Work
Katrina Schwartz, Mind/Shift, June 16, 2014

Examination of the employment of competency-based learning in New Hampshire and a discussion of the issues around competency-based learning in general. For my own part, I think something like competency-based learning is the way of the future, but not for the reasons suggested. More...

Ed tech behaviorism

Scott Mcleod, Dangerously Irrelevant, June 16, 2014

Although behaviourism has several flavours, it is in general the idea that you can (only) talk about mental phenomena, such as learning and cognition, in terms of behaviour. The mind in behaviourism is treated as a black box, to which we do not have evidentiary access. This for the most part remains the case today, which means that most all educational theory belongs either to the category of (a) continuing to use the black box, or (b) making stuff up that we think characterizes cognitive phenomena. More...

Theory of Change in Education
Oliver Quinlan, June 16, 2014
So here basically is the basis for instructional design: "Start with what you want them to learn, design an experience that will cause them to learn it, build in some checks that this is happening along the way and has happened by the end. This is one of the core lessons of teacher education, and something all effective teachers master, whilst they may decide to tweak it and experiment later." In this post about change Oliver Quinlan looks how this core idea gets lost as, say, new technology takes centre stage. More...