How to Soft Launch Virtual Reality in Schools
Kipp Bentley, ConVerge, 2018/04/12
Short article with some advice that seems, on the face of it, obvious. Start with the cheap cardboard VR headsets and maybe have some students do demos for their classes. After experience with this, purchase one or two higher-end headsets and do some exploration projects. Have some students support those teachers who may be interested. More...

A Taxonomy of Asynchronous Instructional Video Styles
Konstantinos Chorianopoulos, The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 2018/04/09
I suppose somebody had to write this article, and the taxonomy represents the prototypical apex of educational research, and it's in IRRODL so I'm sure the formatting was perfect. But really? Well, OK, it is interesting to see the list of different instructional video 'styles'. It would have made a good blog post, though I do have my criticisms. More...

Elsevier launches Mendeley Data to manage entire lifecycle of research data
2018/04/09

While this appears to be a good announcement, my fear of course is that Elsevier will somehow clamp down on access as it tries to monetize this offering. More...

Design of a Personalized Massive Open Online Course Platform
Junfu Xi, Yehua Chen, Gang Wang, International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning, 2018/04/09
You might think (as I did) that this has to do with personalized access to MOOCs, but the article is in fact about building an analytics engine into a MOOC platform. It's still an interesting article. More...

Agent-based Individual Network Teaching System for Modern History Outline of China
Xianguo Jia, International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning, 2018/04/09

This approach makes me think of Marvin Minsky's Society of Mind, where an intelligent system is composed of a set of interacting task-specific agents. More...

Evolving Learning Paradigms: Re-Setting Baselines and Collection Methods of Information and Communication Technology in Education Statistics
David Gibson, Tania Broadley, Jill Downie, Peter Wallet, Educational Technology & Society, 2018/04/09This paper reflects a shift in the data-gathering priorities in educational statistics. The authors write, "Sustainable development goal (SDG) 4, for example, moves beyond measures of access and increasingly focuses on the sustainability of education including issues of educational quality and student outcomes." I'm seeing this in my own work in business intelligence. More...

When virtual reality feels real, so does the sexual harassment
Jessica Buchleitner, Reveal, 2018/04/09
We may have new technology but we have the same old problems: “unbridled misogyny that spawns from gaming anonymity.” As this article notes, this type of poor behaviour has a long history: "Julian Dibbell’s 1993 Village Voice article A Rape in Cyberspace; A decade later, reports of avatar rapes began surfacing after Linden Lab’s virtual world Second Life launched in 2003," and misogynist comments "while then-17-year-old Gittins was playing World of Warcraft". Then there's gamergate, which erupted in the 2010s. More...