By Audrey Watters. I still shudder at the thought of having to choose a reading assignment from among the multi-colored tabs in the big box of reading assignments at the back of my elementary school classroom.
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Vloggers increasingly target children with ‘covert advertising’
Chris Green, The Independent, 2015/03/20
I think advertising messages are the most pernicious sort of content children can access, and in the long run far more harmful than content typically hidden behind 'restricted' ratings. So at a minimum I think advertisers should be regulated. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Coding is not the new literacy
Chris Granger, 2015/03/20
"Being literate isn't simply a matter of being able to put words on the page," writes Chris Granger, "it's solidifying our thoughts such that they can be written. Interpreting and applying someone else's thoughts is the equivalent for reading. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Pearson, PARCC, Privacy, Surveillance, & Trust
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, 2015/03/20
The Audrey Wattrers column on the Pearson spying case raises more questions than answers, but that's OK. And it still carries the inimitable Watters style. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The difference between social learning and social collaboration
Jane Hart, Learning in the Social Workplace, 2015/03/18
"Social learning," writes Jane Hart, "is too often deemed to be achieved primarily through an organised educational or training experience that involves people brought together explicitly to learn from one another." This presumes that learning objectives and the rest have been defined in advance. More...
By Denise Restauri. In August 2012, my daughter Ally was in India, spending the first half of her gap year at Shanti Bhavan, a boarding school for the most vulnerable children of India’s “lowest caste.” After five months at Shanti Bhavan, Ally would head off to Nepal to join (then 25-year-old) Maggie Doyne who runs a home for over 50 orphans and a school for more than 300 children. More...
By Barbara Fister. I’m slowly making my way through Bruce Schneier’s new book, Data and Goliath, and recommend it highly if you’re looking for a concentrated dose of paranoia delivered in a calm, clear, totally reasonable voice. It’s divided into three parts – a description of the situation we’re in, an outline of what’s at stake and (the part I haven’t gotten to yet) what to do about it. Read more...
By Matt Reed and Susanna Williams. In the Wild West future of unbundled higher education that has been proposed in various forms by Kevin Carey, Anya Kamenetz, and Jeff Selingo, the targeted student seems to be a solo outlaw, a confident autodidact who hungers for the unbound autonomy of a “DIY” bespoke education. Read more...By Matt Reed. Okay, that’s a little exaggerated, since Coastal Carolina University is a non-profit. But the logic is very much the same. Apparently, it has challenged its faculty and staff to improve student retention numbers, with raises dependent on the results. The more retention improves, the more everyone gets paid. Read more...By Matt Reed. For the last couple of weeks, the home printer/scanner simply refused to communicate with the laptop. I’ve been trying to deal with some travel receipts, and it has been a real headache. A few days ago, I got a popup message on the laptop noting that the driver wasn’t compatible with the latest version of Windows, and that the incompatibility was “a known issue.” Read more.../https%3A%2F%2Fprofilepics.canalblog.com%2Fprofilepics%2F1%2F0%2F1076071.jpg)
