By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Baby’s First Virtual Assistant
Felix Gillette, Bloomberg, 2017/01/05

After all the talk of digital natives and the live, what will we make of children who grow up with having had the services of a virtual assistant since birth? That's the scenario we face according to this article. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Best Practices for Long Scrolling
Nick Babich, UX Planet, 2017/01/16

It's worth taking note of how the display of page content has changed over the years. The rise of mobile devices and touchscreens has been influential. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Reimagining the Role of Technology in Education: 2017 National Education Technology Plan Update
United States Department of Education, 2017/01/19
This document might become obsolete very quickly, released as it was just a few days ago. But it's the first major update since 2010 and hence represents a landmark. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How Augmented Reality Enables Conceptual Understanding of Challenging Science Content
Susan Yoon, Emma Anderson, Joyce Lin, Karen Elinich, Educational Technology & Society, 2017/01/12
We're on the verge of getting a deluge of papers like this: "we hypothesize that students acquire a more accurate understanding of the Bernoulli’s principle, a challenging science concept, by interacting with an augmented reality (AR) device." There's nothing wrong with that; we need to know whether games, virtual reality, augmented reality, etc., actually improve the user's understanding. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How I Built that Free Microlearning Template
Tom Kuhlmann, The Rapid E-Learning Blog, 2017/01/24µ
'Microlearning' is the new buzzword in the rapid e-learning community, but be careful. As this article shows, it is often realized as a quick Flash animation. I, however, am viewing the internet on a 4K screen. These animations appear like postage stamps in the middle of my screen. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Norway to become 1st country to switch off FM radio
Thomson Reuters, CBC News, 2017/01/06
OK, so there's dab, but there's also DAB, which is changing the face of radio. DAB stands for 'Digital Audio Broadcasting' and it's doing to radio what HD did for TV - switching from analog radio signals to video. It's controversial. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. VRLearn: Virtual Reality and Learning
Bobby Carlton, Masie Center, 2017/01/06
Elliott Masie still understands branding as this 'VRLearn' report shows. Do yourself a favour, skip the user-hostile web presentation (unless you like simulated paper (complete with page-turning sounds)) and go straight to the 12-page PDF. More...