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By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. MOOC completion rates DO matter
Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, Jul 04, 2014
Martin Weller offers an argument to suggest that MOOC completion rates do matter. He argues that while MOOCs may be like a newspaper, they're "like designing a newspaper where you had to read a certain section by a certain time." And, he asks: "Most MOOCs are about 6-7 weeks long, so 90% of your registered learners are never even looking at 50% of your content. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Personal Learning Networks, CoPs Connectivism: Creatively Explained
Jackie Gerstein, User Generated Education, Jul 04, 2014
OK, with some or another of these analogies I would probably have issues because the metaphor is not exact. But it doesn't really matter because what I really like is the way the author finds different ways to creatively express the essential nature of communities of practice. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Online education is dead; long live Mentored Simulated Experiences
Mark Guzdial, Computing Education Blog, Jul 04, 2014

I'm not sure what is new about this proposal, except perhaps the name (which really just combines two things we already know quite well). Here's Roger Schank: "Universities have adopted online education wholesale. They are producing garbage. No, actually they are producing what they have always produced." So this, he says, is dead. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Complexities of Measuring Effectiveness
John Marschhausen, Connected Principals, Jul 04, 2014
If we actually understood this, and believed it, we would never assess learning using things like tests: "education is complex, challenging to measure, and impossible to show with a single measure. Each child in our care, every single student in our classrooms, is a unique person with different strengths, needs, and passions. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. PersonalizED :: A Guide to Personalizing Learning in the Classroom
Mary Ellen Beaty O’Ferrall, Sara Henschell, Margaret Roth, Fieldmarks Blog, Jul 04, 2014
According to the authors, "Personalized learning is an instructional philosophy intended to address the distinct learning needs, interests, aspirations, and cultural backgrounds of individual students to create an environment and experience that best facilitates their learning." This post is a fairly good overview of personalized education. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Conditional Release of Course Materials: Assessing Best Practice Recommendations
Lawanna S. Fisher, Justin G. Gardner, Thomas M. Brinthaupt, Deana M. Raffo, MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (JOLT), Jul 03, 2014
This is a pretty interesting paper up to the end of page four. It discusses the phenomenon of 'conditional release of material' - that is, showing students course content only after they have reached a certain threshold, such as passing a quiz. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Future is Open
Various authors, Creative Commons, Jul 03, 2014
Creative Commons has released their annual report as a picture book. I'm not sure what to think of that. Sure, there's text, but the presentation is mostly visual. The main highlight is the release of version 4.0 of the licenses - we are told they are "global licenses" that don't need to be adapted to each jurisdiction. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Jobs Charted by State and Salary
Nathan Yau, Flowing Data, Jul 03, 2014
Interesting presentation, sadly using U.S. data only, of every major job category, the size of the population employed in it, and the average salary. What I find noteworthy is that the slider only needs to move between $20K to $180K. It raises the question: who needs more than $180K to live? And why would incomes be higher than that? The vast majority of us earn something within that range. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Why Did inBloom Die? A Hard Lesson About Education Privacy
Daniel Solove, SafeGov, Jul 01, 2014

This article from a couple of months ago is making the rounds, and is well worth a look. As background, "Funded by $100 million from the Gates Foundation, inBloom was a non-profit organization aiming to store student data so that school officials and teachers could use it to learn about their students and how to more effectively teach them." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks
Adam D. I. Kramera, Jamie E. Guillory, Jeffrey T. Hancock, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, Jun 28, 2014
To borrow from an old quote, it renders quaint normal concerns about research ethics. Facebook is performing experiments to manipulate users' emptions. More...