By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The college transcript of the future — and the processes holding it back
Brian Peddle, EdScoop, 2017/03/17
Discussion of the concept of a "modernized transcript". It's similar to what I have been calling a "personal learning record", with the main difference being that it is specific to a single institution, as opposed to incorporating data from multiple institutions and specific to a single individual. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. University of California researchers make lithium ion batteries last five to ten times longer
Jayson MacLean, CanTech Letter, 2017/04/18
Because of concerns about the availability of lithium I am not sanguine about this technology in general for the long term. I expect carbon (and more specifically, graphene) to offer a long-term solution. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Build a talking, face-recognizing doorbell for about $100
Lukas Biewald, O'Reilly, 2017/03/16
Even if (like me) you don't have the time and space in your life to construct one of these, just reading the article is enough to give you inspiration. It also gives you a 20-20 glimpse into the future. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Brace Yourself For The Bitcoin Hard Fork
Rob Blasetti, Decentralize Today, 2017/03/23
There's a lot of history behind this one, but essentially the split is between the original developers, who want to keep the size of a block limited, and Bitcoin miners (ie., the people who actually encrypt the blocks), who want the size of the block to grow. This can happen in distributed systems. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Voice Is the Next Big Platform, Unless You Have an Accent
Sonia Paul, Backchannel, 2017/03/23
I have mixed feelings about the importance of voice commands. Yes, we will need voice - we frequently need to communicate with a computer when we are otherwise occupied, as for example when we are driving. And a computer can be a participant in a conversation, as for example on Star Trek. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Getting Web Services Up and Running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Using Vagrant and the AWS CLI
Tony Hirst, OUseful Info, 2017/04/06
This is the sort of stuff I've been working on recently. This is a particularly useful project: "here’s an example of how to get a browser based application up and running on EC2 using vagrant from the command line." The description is pretty detailed and is probably not for everyone. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Cloud computing pushes into the classroom, but not without challenges
Ron Miller, Ars Technica, 2017/03/28
"Slowly but surely, in spite of the issues, cloud tools are coming to the classroom," according to this report. But infrastructure challenges remain. More...