By Danielle S. McLaughlin. Is there a difference between putting pressure on government and on a non-governmental agency? And what, for these purposes, IS government? Should a university, which guarantees academic and artistic freedom, capitulate to pressure put on it by a generous donor? Should an activist organization make policy decisions based upon what may or may not appeal to funders? Should a political party. More...
By Tom Spears. A generation that grew up on computers can now type faster than it can think — with bad results.
Typing fast doesn’t just cause typos, the University of Waterloo found. It also allows students to write before they formulate their ideas fully.
In other words, fast typing undermines the content of their writing. More...
By Douglas Quan. As a toddler, Nick Sousanis’ first word was Batman. In high school, he produced and sold his own comic book called Lockerman.
Then reality set in. At university, he traded in his pencils for a calculator and studied math. After all, who studies comics at university? But a career in numbers just didn’t compute. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. When a $100M Installation Doesn't Go as Planned
Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed, 2016/02/12
One of the comments to this article suggests that it isn't news that a college system is having trouble converting from a home-grown to a PeopleSoft administrative software system. Maybe it isn't. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Meet the Robin Hood of Science
Simon Oxenham, Big Think, 2016/02/11
This is the story of "Sci-Hub, a website that bypasses journal paywalls, illegally providing access to nearly every scientific paper ever published immediately to anyone who wants it." It's the internet's solution to a problem that has existed for many years. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Thousands of students caught up in major college collapse
Henrietta Cook, Sarah Danckert, Sydney Morning Herald, 2016/02/11
Following "a federal government crackdown on the scandal-plagued vocational education sector," thousands of Australian students have been left with large debts and unable to complete their studies. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. So You Just Bought an Arduino Starter Kit. What Now?
Joel Lee, MakeUseOf, 2016/02/09
I think kits like this, properly done, are among the best learning tools out there. When I was a child you could buy crystal radio kits, but at $25 they were out of reach. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. When the scaffolding shifts under your feet
Giulia Forsythe, G-LOG, 2016/02/09
Is this true? Sean Michael Morris writes "Any effort on my part to scaffold (and effort to scaffold learning at all) would be colonial, patriarchal, and disempowering." It's a challenge that flies in the face of the educational enterprise as a whole (and especially the learner-empowering constructivists who employ scaffolding as a proxy for didacticism). More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Extending a little thought experiment
David T. Jones, The Weblog of (a) David Jones, 2016/02/05
At what point does something personal - like writing a nice note to congratulate someone - become something impersonal - like writing a script that automatically selects and congratulates people. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Slow or Sophisticated? Squandered or Sustainable?
David Wiley, iterating toward openness, 2016/02/16
David Wiley takes publishers to task for not comprehending the threat of open educational resources. And with $3 billion of financial aid money in the U.S. spent on textbooks and proprietary learning materials, publishers have a lot to worry about. But I'm not sure I agree with his exact argument. More...
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