By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. EdTech Journals is Seeking Volunteers
Jennifer Maddrell, Design for Learning, 2019/01/18
Jennifer Maddrell has passed along a request from Ross Perkins for volunteers to help look at and update this list of academic journals in the field of education. The list ran into difficulty late last year when the WordPress-to-GoogleSheet tool suddenly stopped functioning. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 2019: The year MOOC platforms start to die? Adieu Open2Study
Apostolos K., Multilitteratus Incognitus, 2019/01/18
Courses from Open2Study were being advertised on Class Central as late as this month, but I can confirm this report from Apostolos K. that Open2Study has shut down its free short courses service. The home page now has a notice saying "you can find undergraduate and postgraduate courses taught entirely online through 15 top Australian universities with Open Universities Australia. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web.Ontario Extend mOOC: the soft opening
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2019/01/18
Alan levine has just announce the 'soft launch' of the Ontario Extend mOOC (which officially starts January 28). "Because eCampusOntario wants to do further research and evaluation, the way inside the mOOC site is a link shared after completing a short online survey (for those who loathe surveys, we have an option to submit nothing and still get the link)." There's a link here to a form. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How to Study Online Courses
David Thompson, Saylor.org, 2019/01/17
The recommendations are: create a space, set achievable goals, form a group, get out a calendar, and have fun. All reasonable. So are the bonus tips: take notes, and quiz yourself. But there's one more thing, and it's really important. Do the work. Online learning is very different from traditional learning in that in online learning there's no such thing as 'getting by'. When you're in online learning, you're in it for yourself. Not for the school. Not for the teacher. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Let’s Save Blogging
Ernie Smith, Tedium, 2019/01/17
The message is this: "The independent blog has been in decline for years. It doesn’t have to be that way. Here’s why you should start a blog in 2019—and host it yourself." It's a longish read, looking at the 'early' days (2009), the impact of social media, the fate of Tumblr, covering your costs, and how federation might move blogging back toward independence. “The fediverse is built in such a way that anyone can create a new tool for it, and each one makes the network more useful to everyone in it,” Baer added. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The replication crisis is killing psychologists’ theory of how the body influences the mind
Olivia Goldhill, Quartz, 2019/01/17
The 'replication crisis' is the phenomenon afflicting the social sciences whereby research demonstrating significant results can't seem to be replicated by others. We've covered this issue before. The psychological theory called 'embodied cognition', meanwhile, is the idea that our bodies, as well as our brains, are implicated in thought (and learning, and memory). We've covered this as well. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Wikipedia - told you so!
Doug Johnson, Blue Skunk Blog, 2019/01/17
The best part of this article is the list of topics covered by Wikipedia that would never find their way into Britannica. " Wikipedia includes fine entries on Kafka and the War of the Spanish Succession, and also a complete guide to the ships of the U.S. Navy, a definition of Philadelphia cheesesteak, a masterly page on Scrabble, a list of historical cats..." and so on. But it also makes the point that Wikipedia has passed the credibility test. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 4 ideas to advance teaching in 2019
Thomas Arnett, Christensen Institute, 2019/01/17
There has to be a term for the placement of a controversial idea in the context of a set of widely accepted truisms (or, at the very least, messages your readers will want to hear, such as "put technology in service of teaching" or "prioritize student-teacher relationships"). The phrase "snake in the grass' comes to mind, but that isn't quite it. Anyhow, that's that we have here with the third idea: "decouple teaching and grading." Now this isn't anything that hasn't been proposed before (indeed, this set of 'disruptive' ideas resembles what you might have read in the 80s or 90s). But here's it's presented as a way to "advance teaching". Now, I don't disagree with separating teaching and grading. But this won't improve existing practice in teaching. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Why You Should NOT Quit Facebook or Twitter
Wesley Fryer, Moving at the Speed of Creativity, 2019/01/17
As most readers know, I quite Facebook about 2.5 years ago, but still use Twitter. Neither is particularly wholesome, but Twitter at least appears to try to be ethical. So why should we stay on these services? Wesley Fryer's list isn't exactly a wholehearted endorsement. Not everyone is a target for trolls, he writes. If we want to change bad corporate behaviour, we need group action, not individual action. The social network platforms, he continues, offer frictionless idea-sharing (I would dispute that, however...). More...