By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Ed Tech Investment & Exit Report – 2014 On Track for New Funding Record
Unattributed, CB Insights, 2014/09/26
Interesting set of statistics related to venturer capital investments in education technology. The first overall trend is that money is pouring into the sector at a record pace. Second, the list of must well-funded ed tech companies might surprise you - leading the way are companies like Open English, TutorGroup and lynda.com. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. That’s Just, Like, Your Opinion, Man
Rebecca Schuman, Inside Higher Ed, 2014/09/26
Fun read in which Inside Higher Ed and Slate education writer Rebecca Schuman defends herself against a long criticism authored by by Cornell writing lecturer Charles Green. "I think she crafts fundamentally anti-academic arguments, anti-academic in that they rely heavily on unsourced and unsupported generality clothed in hyperbole," he writes. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Problem: Teachers Better at Using Tech than Digital Native Students
Dian Schaffhauser, T.H.E. Journal, 2014/11/03
One of the problems with a term like 'better than' is that it is context-free. Even when pinned down to some extent, as in the headline "Teachers Better at Using Tech than Digital Native Students", we still don't know what is meant by 'better', and the end result is nonsense. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Personal Learning in a Connected World: Learning and Performance Support Systems
Stephen Downes, [Sept] 18, 2014, Future of E-Learning Environments, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
This presentation outlines the NRC's Learning and Performance Support Systems program as an instance of a personal learning environment. It situates this program in a context where education depends on the development and refinement of critical literacies, which are in turn fostered by the interactive and communicative capacities of the PLE.
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Digital Storytelling: Power to the People
Sandy Brown Jensen, League for Innovation in the Community College, 2014/09/16
This post briefly outlines digital storytelling and makes the direct link with literacies, listing a set of five literacies invoked by the concept: digital, global, visual, technology, and information (presumably it also invokes good old traditional literacy). More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Licence information in schema.org and LRMI
Phil Barker, Sharing, Learning, 2014/09/16
The LRMI (Learning Resources Metadata Initiative) had from the start a property called useRightsUrl, "The URL where the owner specifies permissions for using the resource." But as Phil Basrker notes, Schema.org skipped useRightsURL when it adopted most of the LRMI properties, pending further review. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. On the false binary of LMS vs. Open
D'Arcy Norman, D’Arcy Norman dot net, 2014/09/16
I'm happy to accept D'Arcy Norman's contention that "We have a responsibility to provide a high quality environment to every single instructor and student, and the LMS is still the best way to do that." But I think he goes overboard i8n his defense of it, and in particular, I think this is wrong. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. POSSE
Unattributed, Indie Web Camp, 2014/09/19
During my recent talk I discussed the POSSE model, which describes owned, bought and earned media (POSSE = produced, owned, seeded, social, earned). More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Balance is an Illusion
Tim Klapdor, 2014/09/19
This isn't directly related to educational technology, but it's a point that lies at the foundations of how we thing, and it's important to address a misconception. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Dungeons and Dragons vs the art of business strategy
Simon Wardley, Bits or pieces?, 2014/09/15
I think I'm pretty good at business strategy - I certainly have managed thus far to organize some reasonably large projects. But I didn't learn my skills from business school (I doubt my ethics and policits would permit me to graduate from such a place). More...
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