Information Underload and OER Leverage
David Wiley, iterating toward openness, 2017/09/05

I'm going to agree with David Wiley today. The problem of education (and of open educational resources (OER)) is not a search problem. More...

Why Higher Ed Needs to Bridge the Critical Thinking Skills Gap
Frank Connolly , EdSurge, 2017/09/05
I agree that "providing appropriate guidance in critical thinking needs to become a central part of the college value proposition," but I don't think this article makes the case very well. It's based on a Wall Street Journal examination of the Collegiate Learning Assessment Plus (CLA+) test, described as "a standardized testing initiative designed to measure college students’ critical thinking skills." Examples here. More...

Silicon Valley Courts Brand-Name Teachers, Raising Ethics Issues
Natasha Singer, New York Times, 2017/09/05
I've seen this cited in a bunch of places (eg. Larry Cuban, Tim Stahmer, Doug Levin), and I've seen any number of the teacher-brands the article refers to (they're also the one's getting their students to vote for them in various contests). The tenor of the article (and most of the commentary) is that what they're doing is wrong. More...

Invitation to Join: CC Open Education Platform
Cable Green, Creative Commons, 2017/09/05
I've signed up or this (specifically: the email list, the Slack channel, and the draft working document) mostly because I advocate open education, and a little bit less because I think an organization like Creative Commons can deliver on it. It's part of CC's new "platforms" initiative. "Part of the new strategy is to establish defined areas of focus, or “platforms,” which will drive CC’s global activities. More...

Neural Nets for Generating Music
Kyle McDonald, Medium, Artists and Machine Intelligence, 2017/09/04
This is an interesting and very detailed examination of attempts to create music using artificial intelligence. It tracks what are (to my mind) two major stages in the evolution of this work: first, the shift from symbolic representations of music to actual samples of music; and second, the shift to convolutional neural networks. More...

We need to nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon. Here’s why
Nick Srnicek, The Guardian, 2017/09/04
This post has been making the rounds recently, and it was no doubt calculated to generate the negative response it's receiving. And let me jump on board and agree that nationalizing social media is a dumb idea. We would never generate the value for the money we'd spend. But. More...

Give it Up for Let’s Encrypt
Jim Groom, bavatuesdays, 2017/09/04
There is a push afoot - led by Google but supported by multitudes - to move the entire web to encrypted communication. Websites which use 'https' are encrypted, but the others aren't. Encryption requires a certificate, which has always been the stumbling block, because these require verified identity, and they can be expensive, especially if (like me) you're running a number of domains. More...

Translating course descriptions from XCRI-CAP to schema.org
Phil Barker, Sharing and learning, 2017/09/04
One of the things I've learned working with the new version of mooc.ca is that course providers pay very little attention to syndicating their content (and typically even those that syndicate would really rather you simply stayed with their site, and many absolutely won't let you export content out of their environment). And of course there's little to no consistency in course syndication formats. More...

How many people believe learning styles theories are right? And why?
Daniel Willingham, Science & Education, 2017/09/04
Why does Daniel Willingham continue to rail on about learning styles theories? After more than a decade, most people wrap up a discussion and move on to a different topic. He is, in fact, arguing against something very specific. More...