Investigating the Yik Yak attack
Alex Reid, Digital Digs, 2015/01/30
From the moment an application came into existence that allowed people in the same general area to make anonymous comments to each other it became inevitable that students would use it to criticize a professor (hence, the 'Yik Yak attack'). It is also inevitable that within a few minutes to the incident the Chronicle would publish an article lamenting the behaviour. More...

Hotels Fight for the Right to Block Guests' Wi-Fi
Kate taylor, Entrepreneur, 2015/01/01
This story has been around for a while, but it points to the danger of commercial provision of essential services. As everyone knows, price is determined by the law of supply and demand - it is, essentially, whatever the market will bear. But the often unspoken corollary is that creating artificial demand is a reliable means of driving up price. More...

Techno Fantasies
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, 2015/04/01
Audrey Watters takes on Kevin Carey's book The End of College and does so with what is, I think, exactly the right tone, which is to say, distrust, scepticism and outright hostility. "The University of Everywhere is the response, led by venture capitalists and ed-tech entrepreneurs, to 'ancient institutions in their last days of decadence,' Carey argues. More...

Learning the Netflix way
David Hopkins, Technology Enhanced Learning Blog, 2015/04/01
I came back from my trip last night to find my Netflix payments had expired. This puts me into the mode of questioning whether I want to renew. More...

Apple and Education
Website, Apple, 2015/04/02
EdSurge reports that "Apple just released a fresh For Educators page, that scoops up apps, books, courses and collections all relating to education from iTunes U, the App Store and iBooks Store." There's a lot there, and Apple no doubt is a storehouse of resources, but the problem is as it always was: you have to use Apple's proprietary iTunes software to access most of the resources. More...

Gathering requirements for a student app for learning analytics
Niall Sclater, Sclater Digital, 2015/04/08
"What data and analytics should be presented directly to students?" This is the question posed by Niall Sclater in his review of a JISC workshop in London a month ago. More...

Online Test-Takers Feel Anti-Cheating Software’s Uneasy Glare
Natasha Singer, New York Times, 2015/04/09
More on ProctorTrack, the service that stares at you through your camera while you take an online exam. Not surprisingly, students don't like it. More...

Machine Learning Algorithm Mines 16 Billion E-Mails
Press Release, MIT Technology review, 2015/04/09
I'll leave aside the question of where they got 16 billion emails and pause for a moment to ponder the implications of this: "Human e-mailing behavior is so predictable that computer scientists have created an algorithm that can calculate when an e-mail thread is about to end." (I really thing 'created' is the wrong word here - I think the appropriate word is 'found'.) If we're that predictable, what does it say about us. More...

Can You Trust Your Ears? (Audio Illusions)
ASAP Science, YouTube, 2015/04/03
Optical illusions are common. Audio illusions are less so. But in a set of examples this short video show how we can hear the same tone or sound in different ways. For example, the McGurk effect demonstrates a case where the same sound is perceived as either 'bar' or 'far' depending on what you're looking at. More...