Study finds Reddit’s controversial ban of its most toxic subreddits actually worked
Devin Coldewey, Tech Crunch, 2017/09/13
According to the study reported here (22 page PDF), banning hate speech works. Not that it will eliminate hate from the world; hate will find its own nixious corners. More...

What matters for education reform? Lessons from the Partnership Schools for Liberia experiment and beyond
Pauline Rose, World Education Blog, 2017/09/13
Privatization and private investment are often seen as key to the creation of educational opportunities in the devleoping world. This article (4 page PDF) is a useful and fairminded look at some such initiatives in Liberia. More...

K-20 Series: Why Mastery Makes Sense
D. Scott Looney, EDUCAUSE Review, 2017/09/13
This article introduces us to the Mastery Transcript Consortium, which was launched with 54 independent (aka, private) schools. "Six months later," we read, "the MTC's roster has more than doubled and includes some of the world's best known prep schools." Why start with private schools. More...

How to Teach Pivotability, Not Stability
Alex Ellison, The Synapse, 2017/09/12
This is just a short post to highlight an article where the author hasn't throught the concept through. She wants to use the word "pivot", because it's the new buzzword among startups (and in the business press generally). It means, basically, to do something different when what you're doing now is failing. More...

Compilers are the New Frameworks
Tom Dale, 2017/09/12
Tom Dale argues that "what we call web frameworks are transforming from runtime libraries into optimizing compilers." The practical effect of this is that we will not be able to learn from viewing the source how the web page was created, because the source will vary from place to place, person to person, depending on how the page was optimized for delivery. More...

Nobody’s Version of Dumb
Sherri Spelic, edifiedlistener, 2017/09/12
Prompted by a recently-posted article on Twitter-based echo chambers, George Siemens tweeted that his own experience is similar, and commented "Sadly, bright and intelligent people are reduced to RTing pithy statements rather than thinking. More...

3 Crucial Elements of Being a Change Agent
George Couros, The Principal of Change, 2017/09/12
I have no particular desire to be a "change agent" but I know a lot of people in education technology value the concept. George Couros lists three essential principles to successful change agency:

• Show and model change in yourself.
• Relationships are the foundation... no one wants to feel they need to be “fixed”.
• Start the journey from where people are, not where you want them to go.

These principles are reasonable, but they come from the perspective of pushing somebody in the direction you want them to go. More...

Rewilding EdTech
Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, 2017/09/12
Yes, this is what I want. "Rewilding might be an idea we could take to ed tech. Much of the early enthusiasm around ed tech was that it was, as Brian Lamb used to characterise it, fast, cheap and out of control." Tony Hirst has a great idea in the comments: "Hmmm… so why not just install and then something like Binderhub?" Great idea. More...

It’s official - higher education students want staff to be better with digital, not to use more of it
JISC, 2017/09/12
One of the problems with of surveys telling us "what students want" is that they're surveys of students. And the population of 'students' is a highly selected population characterized by greater than average family social stanting and wealth, greater success in traditional academic systems, and greater orientation toward predefined academic goals. More...

Directories for Domains: a Community Approach
Jim Groom, bavatuesdays, 2017/11/29
I'm always watching Jim Groom & Co's Domain of One's Own project, and in particular how they approach content aggregation (a long-time interest of my own). Historically they have been using FeedPress (in WordPress) but in this post Groom describes a new approach using the WordPress API. More...