Evaluation of Edtech: What Technology Means to Educators Across America
Walker Sands Communications, 2017/08/18
This report (21 page PDF) is based on interviews with "500 U.S. education professionals". What do teachers want? Presentation tools, textbooks an d classroom technologies. What don't they want? Social learning, gamification, and maker tech. Barriers to tech include the concern that it is a distraction to learning and costs too much. More...
How SB Nation Profits Off An Army Of Exploited Workers
Laura Wagner, Deadspin, 2017/08/16
Full disclosure: I read one of the SB Nation blogs (Bluebird Banter) almost every day. I like it because it's a fan site; it's independent from the team in a way traditional news coverage isn't. So I'm reading coverage, not advertising and promotion. More...
Real talk: bullies, trolls and the troll tax
Michaela Smiley (Thayer) , Mozilla, Internet Citizen, 2017/08/16
The comparison of trolls with bullies is apt. "Imagine a walk home from school filled with fear. Imagine you feel the fear because of a bully. Now imagine your bully is online — and this bully, a troll, can get to you any time of day." I grew up with that experience and I learned that the only way to stop a bully is to fight back. But what if they enjoy fighting? Once you start fighting there's no way to stop. More...
Repositories of Open Educational Resources: An Assessment of Reuse and Educational Aspects
Gema Santos-Hermosa, Núria Ferran-Ferrer, Ernest Abadal, International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 2017/08/16
This study examines resources from 110 repositories. It should be clear that this post doesn't measure actual reuse, it measures only how suitable the resources are for reuse. Having said that, there are some issues with how the observations are presented (for example, licensing is divided between CC-by-NC-SA (42.4%) and "Any of the 6 CC licenses (27.1%)", which is an impossibility). But there are some interesting things. More...
Digital Learning Research Network
National Institute for Digital Learning, 2017/08/17
Helge Scherlund links today to the Digital Learning Research Network, part of Ireland's National Institute for Digital Learning (NIDL). The Network "fosters a network of leaders and strong communities of practice at the forefront of research on new models of teaching and learning." Projects include Mahara analytics, MOOCs in open education, Lego innovation, and more. More...
If I Ran a Newspaper….
Jeff Jarvis, Medium, 2017/08/14
Universities and news media face the same challenges from digital media, and if the news media house is on fire - to use the analogy Jeff Jarvis uses in this detailed post - then universities occupy the house next door, to which the flames have spread. More...
Useful xAPI Queries eLearning Designers Should Know
Anthony Altieri, Learning Solutions, 2017/08/14
Good article with real code examples showing both how xAPI data is stored in a Learning Record System (LRS) and how queries can be executed on this data. More...
Learning through the Open Creation of Knowledge
Allison Littlejohn, Little by Littlejohn, 2017/08/14
This is a quick read exploring the idea of students creating and organizing heir own learning. As Allison Littlejohn notes, "Some Massive Open Online Courses have been designed around every learner also acting as a teacher and bringing knowledge to the network." Students don't always follow present objectives. More...
Personal Data: An overview of low and middle-income countries
World Wide Web Foundation, 2017/08/11
I just mentioned the EDUCAUSE article comparing different student data protection schemas. That article should be compared with this one, and especially the chart on page 11 looking at different mechanisms, including trade agreements, Commonwealth provisions, OECD, APEC and European directives. "There are generally weaker data protections in low and middle-income countries, leaving their citizens at risk." This includes the U.S. (see the chart on page 12). More...
Algorithmic Accountability: Applying the concept to different country contexts
World Wide Web Foundation, 2017/08/11
I've been thinking recently about how we validate AI algorithms, this in light of over-enthusiastic press reports and questionable outcomes. More...
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