Is the podcast bubble bursting?
Columbia Journalism Review, 2018/09/21
We may hear a lot about the "short attention span culture" but my favorite podcast runs more than an hour and other faves two hours long. More...

Has ‘Write Daily’ Become Dogma?
Chris Smith, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2018/09/19
The headline is a bit silly. But the subject of whether we should write daily resonates with me because that's what I tell people I do. Writing this newsletter every day is core to my professional development. The story covers the preliminary results of a our survey (that's still open) of academics on the subject. More...

Lessons on Disagreement from a Psychologist of Human Error
Justin Weinberg, Daily Nous, 2018/09/19
The Daily Nous (which despite appearances employs no fewer than 13 separate CSS stylesheets)  discusses an essay from psychologist Lee Ross describing "the illusion of personal objectivity." This is the belief we tend to have that our own beliefs were formed objectively, and that therefore other people would believe what we do if we explained it to them, and that if they persist in not believing they are being irrational and unreasonable. More...

Scientific Facts — Are they like Myths, Told through Fairytales and Spread by Gossip?
Anita de Waard, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2018/09/27
This paper caught my imagination despite myself, and then convinced me that the answer to the question in the headline is "yes". The key is in understanding the semantics in articles: "In stories and rhetoric, a statement exists not as a separate entity, but plays a role in the overarching narrative." When we look at scientific papers, this role is often signified by tense. More...

Eric Hellman, Go To Hellman, 2018/09/18
I have been investigating Crypto-Kitties as part of my wider work looking at distributed ledger technologies. So I found interesting to read Eric Hellman's discussion of our digital feline friends in the context of digital rights management. "What if were possible to 'CryptoKittify' ebooks?" he asks. More...

Amid Low Adoption, DoD R&D Will Keep xAPI Alive And That’s Good News
Cristian T. Duque, Moodle News, 2018/09/20
I'm not worried about the future of xAPI, even if the adoption rate has been low thus far. The value proposition of xAPI becomes apparent once you begin using multiiple e-learning applications and want a single activity record. That's not so clear a value when you only use one LMS, but as the technology landscape becomes more distributed, the benefits of xAPI (or something like xAPI) will be come much more clear. More...

The Side Effects of Education: Research and Practice
Beth Holland, Education Week, 2018/09/13
The author considers the use of scientific evidence in education research in the light of Yong Zhao's  new book: What Works May Hurt - The Side Effects of Education. The major argument is this: " educators, policymakers, and researchers need to acknowledge that "the effect of any treatment is the result of interaction between the characteristics of the treatment and characteristics of the individual" (p. 90)" (the use of the word 'treatment' speaks to the analogy people are trying to draw between health and medicine). More...

Work-Integrated Learning: We Can Do Better
Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates, 2018/09/12
The good news is that businesses are taking work-integrated learning (WIL) seriously. Hence the Business Higher Education Roundtable (BHER) letter to the Finance Minister on the subject. But I find myself in unusual agreement with Alex Usher in questioning the merit of advocacy for a national strategy. More...

The YouTube stars heading for burnout: ‘The most fun job imaginable became deeply bleak’
Simon Parkin, The Guardian, 2018/09/10
I can sort of relate to this article, because I do most of my work on the internet, but I havern't had anything really go viral, and I don't depend on having thousands of views for my faily income (good thing, too). But all that plus a deeply impersonal algorithm that rewards constant and sustained production while providing little or no support against the difficulties of an online life have left a lot of internet stars (it's not just YouTibe and Twitch) depressed and burned out. More...

Is Scientific American a Trustworthy Periodical?
Justin Weinberg, Daily Nous, 2018/09/14
If Scientific American is publishing really low-quality articles on things we know about, asks the author, how trustworthy is its reporting on other subjects. And 'low-quality' isn't really a judgement call here: " imagine an article on football in which the author uses “touchdown” to refer to a kind of tackle, or wonders how a “field goal” is possible since the crossbar of the goal is not on the field but 10 feet above it, and you’ll get the idea of what has been going on." I don't tknow how (or whether it's even relevant) to judge Scientific American as a whole. More...