Coursera and edX Hire New Executives: What about online experience?
Phil Hill, e-Literate, March 25, 2014

As Phil Hill writes, there have been some leadership changes at the top of some online course providers. " First, Coursera announced they had hired Richard Levin, former president of Yale University, to be the company’s new CEO.... On the same day, coincidentally, edX announced they had hired Wendy Cebula as the company’s new president and chief operating officer." Hill comments that none of the eexecutives as any real experience in online learning. More...

Wincton City
Beverly Leeds, University of Central Lancashire, March 11, 2014
Fropm a presentation at INTED 2014 today in Valencia - "It is a web-based learning resource modelled on a real UK high street community provided for  academic staff and students or others to use. It aims to meet the needs of a range of subject areas in Business Education by simulating the complexities of modern organisations within local communities with many interdependent and inter-related functions and processes." The city is composed of OERs, and the information supports various student activities. More...

Why I care about edtech
D'Arcy Norman, D’Arcy Norman dot net, March 5, 2014

It's interestging to see how in recent years the concept of 'innovation' is being rewoeked such that, if it doesn't involve some commercial component, it isn't innovation. But this post from D'Arcy Norman offers an alternative perspective. "Many in the edtech field see innovation as something like 'working out creative licensing deals with vendors and/or publishers,'" he writes. More...

Plan to move from #quantified self to Qualified self
Inge de Waard, Ignatia, March 5, 2014
OK, this is ambitious. "My ultimate scientific breakthrough dream would be the Qualified Self in the analogy of the Quantified Self." Given a provisional nod, what would such a qualified self look like? "All the gathered data would gather data on: emotions, creativity, understanding, progress, personal character." Well, I did a test like that recently (the Hermann Brain Dominance instrumnent) and while it was nice to test off the scale for creatity, the point here is that there was a scale. More...

Explaining the LRMI Alignment Object
Phil Barker, Phil Barker CETIS Blog, March 6, 2014
LRMI stands for 'Learning Record Metadata Initiative' and is a (yet another) mechanism for describing learning resources. See more here. This post describes the LRMI Alignment Object, which is intended to describe how a given resource fits into curricular or educational standards requirements, such as the US Common Core State Standards or the English National Curriculum (the article has a good set of links to similar standards). More...

iUpload Personal Publisher
As the new year rolls in, some very powerful personal publishing tools are being unveiled, such as the iUpload Personal Publisher, described here by Robin Good. Here is my test blog, made in about 30 seconds (including spell check). The interface is very smooth and fast, and although there's only one template it would be a snap to switch. But you can only customize them a little, and I didn't see any way to create your own. More...

Does Technology Enhance Inquiry-Based Learning?
This paper tries overly hard to be balanced, and in so doing obscures its most important observation: "If we expect all research studies on education innovations to provide a simple 'thumbs-up or thumbs-down', we are likely to avoid research methods that can yield important insights into the complexities of implementing major innovations in our schools." The context is discussion of the evaluation of the eMINTS program, a combination of learning technologies with constructivist methodology. More...

Rocketinfo First Search Engine to Release News Search API
Canadian-based RocketInfo has been providing a news aggregation and syndication for some time now, targeting a base of resources that is larger than Edu_RSS or Google News but smaller than the major RSS aggregators. The result is a targeted collection of news-centric resources that can be used to generate high-quality content feeds. RocketInfo also markets RSS aggregators and clients. More...

The Role of RSS in Science Publishing: Syndication and Annotation on the Web
The authors, who work for Nature Publishing Group, have been working on RSS content aggregation for a while now. The same group released Urchine, an RSS aggregator, on SourceForge recently. This article accompanies the soft launch of Connotea, "a social bookmarking tool like a kind of scientific 'del.icio.us' or 'CiteULike'," according to their email. The authors put the case bluntly in their second paragraph. More...