By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Top Ten Makerspace Favorites of 2016
Laura Fleming, Worlds of Learning, 2016/12/22

Fun toys: a list. I like the one where you saw your own balsa wood planks and build stuff. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Death of the Textbook, Really
Ryan Petersen, Jared Pearlman, EdTech Digest, 2016/12/22

The use of digital textbooks in academia has faced two related problems: first, the textbooks are still more expensive that other options, such as buying and reselling physical textbooks, and second, students are in increasing numbers simply not buying the required texts. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How to Replace Windows Essentials 2012 After Support Ends in January
How-to-Geek, 2016/12/30
Some of these are my most-used applications, so I thought I should pass this along. The following will no longer be supported (which means no downloads, no patches, no security updates - but you can still use them). Here are the apps impacted: Movie Maker, Photo Gallery, OneDrive, Family Safety, Mail, or Live Writer. Two of them - Family safety and OneDrive - are built into Windows 10. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Fast Topic Matching
Brave New Geek, 2016/12/30
I've always had in mind the idea to allow OLDaily subscribers to pick the topics they're interested in, and send them only that. I haven't, for two reasons. This article addresses the first: actually makng it work for thousands of topics and/or thousands of subscribers is a bear. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Be Healthy or Else: How Corporations Became Obsessed with Fitness Tracking
Cathy O’Neil, Backchannel, 2016/12/30

I've talked quite a bit about the Personal Learning Record (PLR) over the last few years as part of the overall concept of the Personal Learning Environment (PLE). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Second Life's creator is building a 'WordPress for social VR'
Nick Summers, Engadget, 2016/12/29

Virtual worlds and virtual reality are natural partners. So there's no real surprise that Second Life is looking to develop to support Oculus Rift and similar technologies. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. xAPI: Beyond the What
Myra Roldan, GP Strategies, 2016/12/26

Short article, maybe a 2-minute read, that will give you a good overview of xAPI. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The broken edtech ecosystem investors once avoided is changing
Charles Wiles, TechCrunch, 2016/12/26

According to this article, " innovative apps have been unable to displace archaic, inferior technologies in schools because of restricted funding and a general unwillingness of schools to disrupt the status quo." This, however, is beginning to change. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Education Technology and the Year of Wishful Thinking
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, 2016/12/12

This is the first of Audrey Watters's series on trends in education for 2016 and it's pretty good, even if I disagree with the main metaphor. More...