Nowhere to Turn
Kevin Kiley, Inside Higher Ed, January 21, 2013
A while back I wrote something along the lines of, "the financial crisis for higher education is slowly developing, through when it arrives it will seem like it happened overnight." Well, it's just about dawn, according to this article describing a Moody'sreport saying essentially that traditional revenue streams for the sector are drying up and will not return. More...

The Learning Technologist Becomes A Luddite
Lanny Arvan, Lanny on Learning Technology, January 18, 2013

Lanny Arvan has never learned to write concisely (I've written to him about this - he says it's his style) so you'll have to wade through mounds of verbiage to get to the essential point. Which is this: "you're a Luddite if you are ok in using the technology but think it largely should be a complement to face-to-face instruction, not a substitute for it." He's responding to a post by Nathan Harden in American interest touting the end of the university as we know it. More...

Implementing strategies to encourage deposit
Rebecca Kennison, Repositories Support Project, January 17, 2013

Recording of a webinar (Adobe Connect) on strategies to encourage faculty to deposit resources into an institutional open access repository. Presented by Rebecca Kennison, Director of the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship at Columbia University. More...

Peeragogy
Jay Cross, January 16, 2013

Jay Cross introduces a new handbook and resource guide authored by a group of people including himself and Howard Rheingold called Peeragogy. "This project seeks to empower the worldwide population of self-motivated learners who use digital media to connect with each other, to co-construct knowledge, to co-learn." It's a nice concept, and something that has been at the core of the work we have been doing here on MOOCs. More...

Toward Better Conversations
Anil Dash, A Blog About Making Culture, January 15, 2013.

They're probably getting publicity just because they're from the right circles (ie., Princeton) but the concept is sufficiently sound to pass along - with some caveats. The idea here is to build better conversation - something the web has been short on recently. What we want is a way to create and (just as importantly) manage online conversations. More...

Unthinking Technophilia
Jennifer Cost, et. al., Inside Higher Ed, January 15, 2013.

A collection of Six community college faculty members have taken it upon themselves to denounce MOOCs on the grounds that "MOOCs are designed to impose, not improved learning, but a new business model on higher education, which opens the door for wide-scale profiteering." I thought about writing a reply, but I thought instead about this article, also in Inside Higher Ed, which states (to quote the newsletter) "Union College in Kentucky typically loses half its freshman class before the second year begins, so its new president has made students a promise: If they stay, work hard, and get involved, they won't see a bill for their last semester before graduation." And I'm thinking, who exactly are the profiteers here. More...

The Science of Why Comment Trolls Suck
Chris Mooney, Mother Jones, January 14, 2013.

We'll use the word 'science' a little loosely here, but meanwhile there's an interesting survey on the consequences of comment trolls: "it appeared that pushing people's emotional buttons, through derogatory comments, made them double down on their preexisting beliefs." The author offers an explanation, "the psychological theory of motivated reasoning," akin to Hume's dictum, but I think the interplay between thoughts and feelings (if they are even distinct things) is a lot more complex than that. More...

Why Aaron Swartz's Ideas Matter
Will Knight, MIT technology Review, January 14, 2013.
I don't want to write a long post about Aaron Swartz, because that's been done already by a bunch of people who actually knew him, but his career and mine intersected one or twice and I always recognized him as a brilliant and generous contributor to our field. His suicide is a tragedy and a loss and touches close to home to many of us. More...