By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Every Post is a “Selfie”: The Desire for Social Approval
Eric Olsen, Higher Ed Live, April 30, 2013
It's always interesting to observe people thinking that "there must be some reason" for doing things online, because they cannot comprehend that the thing in itself is worth doing. I have binders full of original writings from the pre-internet days that prove that I would be doing this even if there weren't an audience to see it. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Prix Minerva 500.000 $: La #educación tendrá pronto su premio Nobel... L’éducation aura bientôt son prix Nobel...
April 30, 2013
Translation: "The # education will soon have a Nobel prize ... " See the NY Times article. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Discovery Loved, Cause Hated
Andrew B. Watt, Andrew B. Watt's Blog, April 30, 2013
This is a great story - kids, trying to track down why their 3D printer is making errors, figuring out things like x-axis and number lines and the rest. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. MOOCs, History and Context
Arthur Levine, Inside Higher Ed, April 29, 2013
This is a bit of an odd article, describing as it does the history of post-secondary education in an America-centric and sonetimes inconsistent manner. The term "Democracy's College", for example, is a parochialism that misrepresents both college and democracy. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Major Players in the MOOC Universe
Nigel Hawtin, Xarissa Holdaway, The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 29, 2013
There's some interesting on the Twitter about how the Chronicle has "jettisoned" any reference to the original MOOC authors (and somehow promoted Khan Academy to MOOC status. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Outsourcing Blogger Comments to Google+
Alex Chitu, Google Operating System, April 29, 2013
I think Blogger is probably on the way out. The evidence for this (beyond the demise of other Google products people actually like) is the development of Blogger's new comment system, which is essentially Google+ comment system (with all the weaknesses that entails). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Rage at the Dying of the Light! Restore RSS for .@Evernote Notebooks
Miguel Guhlin, Around the Corner-MGuhlin.org, April 29, 2013
People ask me sometimes what the difference is between the sort of system I advocate and cloud-based note-taking services such as Evernote. Here it is, in a nutshell: I advocate that people own their own software, so features they rely on don't disappear because the service provider decides they're too much trouble. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The unsung local heroes who are really changing Africa
eLearning Africa News Portal, April 29, 2013
This is really intersting; I wish there were more sources of inffermation about what's actually happening in East Africa (I have to depend on the blogs and reports writtern by the World Bank and other such agencies, exactly the opposite of what's being presented here). More...