By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. SCORM and Tin Can API: The difference between DVDs and Netflix
Melanie Moffett, eLearning Industry, 2014/11/24
I'd like to think that we can go a bit beyond Nedtflix, but I appreciate the analogy behind this post comparing SCORM and xAPI. SCORM - the Sharable Content Object Reference Model, was designed as a way for published products, like courseware, to report back to a host system, like a learning management system (LMS). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Doing Better With Open Access Advocacy
Jill O'Neill, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2014/12/30
Jill O'Neill argues that Open Access advocates shouldn't casually appear to the needs of the visually impaired as an argument in favour of open access. It never bothered them before, she says - "such incompatibility hadn’t surfaced in earlier open access manifestos — Budapest, Berlin, Bethesda" — and now seems a convenient issue to use to make the point. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Salon Culture: Network of Ideas
Andrian Kreye, Edge, 2014/10/03
The first three quarters of this article offer an interesting outline of the history of salon culture, that is, the fomenting of ideas through the social gatherings of thinkers and intellectuals. The last quarter devolves into dreck promoting things like TED. Leaving aside the (paid?) placement, however, the article is worth a look. And leave aside the idea that salons are reserved for intellectuals. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Google unveils Drive for Education
Charlie Osborne, ZDNet, 2014/10/03
Google continues its push to commoditize learning management. It "said Tuesday that the academic version of its online storage solution can be used with Google Apps for Education and boasts unlimited storage with transfer support for files up to 5TB in size. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. New York Times Plans to Eliminate 100 Jobs in the Newsroom
Ravi Somaiya, New York Times, 2014/10/03
The New York Times was one of the earliest and most prominent news sources to set up a paywall and opt for subscription-based online services. Though the newspaper has consistently claimed that the move was a success, it's not clear that it has been. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. LinkedIn University Rankings
Various authors, LinkedIn, 2014/10/03
This has to be better than the made-up rankings provided by entities like U.S. News & World Report, or Macleans in Canada, but even so the purpose remains the same: the rankings reflect the values held by the ranker, and are intended to push the rankees into pursuing those metrics (hence, the U.S. News rankings, for example, push universities away from opening access to lower income students). Just so, the LinkedIn rankings are "based on career outcomes". The LinkedIn blog defines outcomes based on "desirable jobs," for examples, where "we define a desirable job to be a job at a desirable company for the relevant profession. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Hack This Book: Announcing Open Music Theory
Kris Shaffer, Hybrid Pedagogy, 2014/10/03
While I still have my criticisms of this textbook (music notation is not my thing) I think it represents a useful innovation and, I hope, further undermines the traditional publisher paradigm of university textbooks. It's not just that the published books cost money (though there is that) but also that they convey a single authoritative voice. These open textbooks disrupt that. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Academy of Art University student's CS6 licenses canceled
David Lawrence, Creative Cow, 2014/10/03
You used to buy software on a disk and it would always run. But software companies are convcerting to an annual license model, where there's no disk, and like content streaming, you get to use the software only so long as you keep paying for it. I've bought movies this way, but to this day I can't even watch the movies I've paid Microsoft for (which to me means that they've simply stolen several hundred dollars from me). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Ed Radio Reimagined
Stephen Downes, Ed Radio, 2014/10/03
I find it interesting to note that audio podcasting has almost dropped off the internet map. For someone like me, audio is a lot more useful than video, and almost any time of the day, unless I'm actually in a meeting, I'll be listening to something online (in my car I still listen to radio, but my mobile phone connects to it by Bluetooth and gives me a lot more content). Bryan Alexander has listed a number of podcasts he listens to, so I'm not alone.
So. I've been puttering away off and on for the last few months to convert Ed Radio into something that's fresh and valuable, and not just playing canned content. So I've set up my aggregator to harvest a number of ed tech podcasts; these in turn are used to create a single podcast feed you can subscribe to, an M3U and PLS file you can download as a playlist, and a live Shoutcast stream you can listen to over your computer or mobile phone. I've also set up an AudioBoo account as one of the sources. There's new content every day, and I have the capacity to broadcast live events. I love radio, and even if nobody ever listens, I love being able to create something like this.
[Link] [Comment]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The myths about Canada’s skills gap
Chris Sorensen, 2014/10/02
Reasonably coherent article about the skills shortage in Canada. Here's the first major data point: “There are increasing calls by employers for educators to do more job-ready training. But these calls have been increasing at the same time employers’ spending on training has been dropping.” Why would this be. More...