By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. New Learning
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, June 14, 2014
A recent post describes "8 Ideas That Will Permanently Break Education As We Know It," by Terry Heick in TeachThought. Sheila Stewart addresses one of these points, the idea that 'parents are the sleeping giants' in education. "Hopefully parents can also work with teachers, principals and policymakers," she writes, rather than "redirecting anger". More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Digital News Report 2014
Nic Newman, Reuters, June 14, 2014
The disruptions to news reporting caused by the internet and social media are just beginning, according to this report released by Reuters. Facebook is vital worldwide for news distribution, Twitter in the US, UK and Spain, and WhatsApp in many other parts of the world. Sharing is widespread in the US, Brazil and Spain (though much less so in the UK. So, in related news, we are seeing that the next five years will see a major revenue shift for news agencies. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Adapt Learning
Adapt Learning, June 14, 2014
Interesting effort devoted to, as their website says, "create, as a community, the leading e-learning authoring tool for producing responsive content... to develop a freely available authoring tool for organisations that wish to develop their own responsive e-learning content... [and] to encourage a large, global community of end users and developers." Version 1.1 of their framework has just been released. Interestingly, the code available is all Javascript and Less (CSS). More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 'Can I Tweet That?'
Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed, June 14, 2014
Summary of a conference session on the issues raised with respect to professors' use of social media. Normal rules of online postings - such as, for example, a disclaimer stating that the views of the professor are not those of the institution - do not work when there are only 140 characters to work with. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Will competency-based degree programs come to Canada?
Rosanna Tamburri, University Affairs, June 14, 2014
As Academica summarizes (with helpful links), "An article in University Affairs examines the potential for the growth of competency-based education (CBE) programs in Canada. CBE models offer credentials based on demonstrated proficiencies, not on time spent in the classroom." More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Google announces Google Educator Groups - great resource for educators
David Andrade, Educational Technology Guy, June 14, 2014
David Andrade writes, "Yesterday Google announced the launch of Google Educators Groups. This is a program made up of communities of educators who can connect with each other to learn, share, and help each other. While it is mainly online, there are real-world meetups and events as well." Of course, educators have been doing all of this before Google Educators Groups - but now Google owns it. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. #YesAllWomen and Ed-Tech Conferences, or Why ISTE is Unsafe
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, June 14, 2014
I'm still dealing with backlog, so I didn't see it when it came out 9 days ago, but it's important enough to pass along. Audrey Watters writes, "Ariel Norling published an incredibly brave article — an incredibly difficult to read article — chronicling predatory behavior and sexual assault at last year’s ISTE conference." She then relates her own experiences in the field, and the "utterly dismissive, if not utterly disgusting" response offered by ISTE's Brian Lewis. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Dean at M.I.T. Resigns, Ending a 28-Year Lie
Tamar Lewin, New York Times, June 14, 2014
My first reaction to this was to laugh. Yes, of course, she should not have misrepresented her credentials. But it turns out that she did not even have an undergraduate degree. What does it say about the need for a university when you can even be a successful as a dean at MIT without having earned a degree? "Ms. Jones had received the institute’s highest honor for administrators, the M.I.T. Excellence Award for Leading Change." More...
By Phil Hill. In Michael’s most recent post on Unizin, the new “learning ecosystem” initiative driven by Indiana University, he asked the question of who would be threatened by the proposed consortium (with the answer of edX). This question assumes of course that Unizin actually succeeds in large part, but what are the primary risks for the initiative to succeed in the first place? Based on the public information we have available to date (primarily in the two posts linked above), I see two near-term risks and one long-term risk that rise above the others. Read more...By Phil Hill. Last week Harvard and MIT released de-identified data from their edX-based MOOCs. Rather than just produce a summary report, the intent of this release was to open up the data and share it publicly. While it is good to see this approach to Open Data, unfortunately the data set is of limited value, and it actually illustrates a key problem with analytics in higher ed. From MIT News description. Read more.../https%3A%2F%2Fprofilepics.canalblog.com%2Fprofilepics%2F1%2F0%2F1076071.jpg)
