By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 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. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 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. This article describes his efforts to understand and test the limits of constant observation, including the impact it has on the observers. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 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...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Old Literacies and the “New” Literacy Studies: Revisiting Reading and Writing
Norm Friesen, Seminar.Net, 2015/01/01
Norm Friesen takes an entire essay to get to making this point, but it's worth the wait: "A curriculum –whether in Nippur or New York-- is not a description of development, it is a prescription for it; and this is the difference that separates a relativist study of inscriptive and expressive practices from the practical realities of education." More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 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:
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 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. More...
By . I am aware that this chapter may appear somewhat abstract and theoretical, but in any subject domain, it is important to understand the foundations that underpin practice. This applies with even more force to understanding media and technology in education, because it is such a dynamic field that changes all the time. What seem to be the major media developments this year are likely to be eclipsed by new developments in technology next year. In such a shifting sea, it is therefore necessary to look at some guiding concepts or principles that are likely to remain constant, whatever changes take place over the years. See more...
By . In Section 8.2, ‘A short history of educational technology’, the development of different media in education was outlined, beginning with oral teaching and learning, moving on to written or textual communication, then to video, and finally computing. Each of these means of communication have usually been accompanied by an increase in the richness of the medium, in terms of how many senses and interpretative abilities are needed to process information. See more...
By . I have struggled quite a lot with this section, partly because interactivity is a very large topic at the heart of quality learning, but also because although media and technologies do differ in how they handle interaction, there are no clear winners or losers in the sense of providing ‘better’ or ‘worse’ interactivity. So as I write in this section, the aim here is more to sensitise readers to the differences between media and technologies on this dimension, while emphasising that the design of activities is more important than the actual medium used. See more...
By Audrey Watters. Much like my annual look at the “Top Ed-Tech Trends,” in previous years I’ve selected what I thought were the “Top Ed-Tech Startups.” (See 2011, 2012, 2013.) It’s something I started doing in 2010 when, as a tech blogger at ReadWriteWeb, I was assigned to write the year-end Top Startups article.
At the time, I made up some rules to limit my selection (mostly so my list didn’t end up being dominated by the likes of Facebook and Twitter). More...
/https%3A%2F%2Fprofilepics.canalblog.com%2Fprofilepics%2F1%2F0%2F1076071.jpg)
