By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Google Operating System
Alex Chitu, Google Operating System, April 16, 2013
Alex Chitu, who is nornally pretty positive about Google, is experiencing a warped Catch-22 world in the land of DMCA takedowns. To begin, he received a takedown for a Blogger web page about a Greasemonkey script that allowed you to show music lyrics in the YouTube interface (pictured). The takedown (which he had to search for on Chilling Effects, they don't actually send it to him) states, "The URL listed below is one of nearly 20 song lyrics sites who have attempted to post lyrics for the song titled 'Alden Howell' by the artist Inspection 12." Fair enough, but the page doesn't post Alden Howell lyrics and the blog doesn't mention 'Alden Howell' at all, ever. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. MOOCs Changing the Way We Think About Higher Education
Helen Hu, Diverse, April 16, 2013
Good overview of the arrival of MOOCs, from their first instntiation by George Siemens and myself, to later university versions, to some of the fallout. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Fair Dealing for Educators
Matthew Johnson, Media Smarts, April 19, 2013
The Canadian 'Media Smarts' website has added a 'Fair Dealing for Educators' section to the site ('Fair Dealing' is the Canadian equivalent to 'Fair Use' in the United States). The section responds to recent changes in the Canadian Copyright Act. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Apple's Virtual University Patent Finally Comes to Light
Jack Purcher, Patently Apple, April 19, 2013
Ever since iTunes University we've all seen this coming, but it is interesting to finally see the lid removed from Apple's "Virtual U" patent application (it's interesting to me that not even the name is original, as longtime ed tech devotees will recognize the name from a Canadian project in the 1990s (and several other projects worldwide more recently)). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How Can MOOC Platforms Be More Dynamic?: A Comparison of Major MOOC Providers
Adam Heidebrink, MOOC News & Reviews, April 19, 2013
It's interesting to watch someone who has no experience with the gRSShopper cMOOC platform wrestle with the same discussion board issues we faced, and then come up with some of the same solutions. More...