Engage Your Community with Parent Digital Citizenship Academies
Ben Cogswell, George Lopez, Common Sense Education, 2018/07/19
This is advocacy for Common Sense Media, so read it with that in mind. That said, I like the idea of setting up a 'parent digital citizenship academy' to healp teach parents about the same resources and practices their children are being taught about. More...
The Seven Myths Keeping Teachers from Designing Makerspaces
John Spencer, 2018/07/19
This is a listicle, yes, but it's worth keeping the idea of makerspaces in mind as it reinforces the idea that learning technology isn't simply about what we display on computer screens for students to read. The idea is that students should be finding, making and sharing with each other. More...
Analysis of 450 MOOC-Based Microcredentials Reveals Many Options But Little Consistency
Laurie Pickard, Class Central, 2018/07/19
A microcredential "is any one of a number of new certifications that covers more than a single course but is less than a full degree." According to this article, EdX launched the first microcredential (which, of course, is false - microcredentials existed long before MOOCs, as my Boy Scout sash full of badges attests). But it may have been the first MOOC platform to do so. More...
Bad Romance
Sarah Jeong, The Verge, 2018/07/18
This is a long and occasionally racy read about collusion and competition in the Amazon Kindle romance novel self-publishing industry. It's an important read because the patterns of behaviour are not unique to romance novels - they are characteristic of our information landscape in general. More...
How to choose and deploy a service mesh
Nikki McDonald, O'Reilly, 2018/07/18
This is a short article and podcast discussing a new report outlining the service mesh. You might not need to deploy a service mesh yourself, but it's a good idea to be familiar with this trend. More...
Storytelling And The Technological Nothing
Kin Lane writes, " 90% of what you are being told about AI, Blockchain, and automation right now isn’t truthful. It is only meant allocate space in your imagination, so that at the right time you can be sold something, and distracted while your data, privacy, and security can be exploited, or straight up swindled out from under you." This is sort of true, but it's also sort of misleading. More...
Looking Ahead at IT and Higher Ed: An Interview with Vernon Smith
Susan Grajek, Vernon Smith, EDUCAUSE Review, 2018/07/18
In this interview Vernon Smith sees some significant challenges for higher education. " The funds for higher education are not going to be the same. They're literally in competition..." and moreover, "the profession itself — the underlying culture of higher education — is going to be held up and questioned." Technology won't solve these issues. More...
Google Launches New Feedback Tool ‘Course Kit’ to Eliminate Assignment Uploads
Tina Nazerian, EdSurge, 2018/07/18
The story cites Phil Hill as saying “Positioning collaborative Google Docs and Drive to be easily integrated with the pervasive LMS is a clever judo move—stop fighting the LMS and instead use its momentum to their advantage.” I agree that it's a clever move. More...
The Best Digital Audio Workstations for Windows
Cameron Summerson, Review Geek, 2018/07/18
Music isn't the only use for a digital audio workstation (DAW), of course, as educators producing audio recordings and podcast products know well. My own tool of choice (listed in the 'cheap' section of this article) is Audacity. More...
Is Blackboard dying? The latest instalment in LMS wars.
Tony Bates, Online learning and distance education resources, 2018/07/18
There's been a fair bit of discussion in the e-learning trade press about e-Literate's recent article noting that Canvas has overtaken Blackboard in the LMS space. The tipping point here is meaningless, but Tony Bates notes "Much more significantly, Feldstein claims that Blackboard is in serious financial trouble, needing to make increasingly large interest payments to its private equity owner, Providence Equity, arising from the time that Providence Equity bought Blackboard. To quote Feldstein: 'So because of its financing, Blackboard’s continuing loss of market share is at the tipping point of changing from a serious problem to an existential threat.'" Maybe, but so what. More...
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