By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life
Jon Ronson, New York Times, 2015/02/13

Around 13 months ago Justine Sacco was on her way to South Africa when she sent off a tweet from Heathrow that for all appearances was insensitive and racist. The Twittersphere descended on her while she sat unknowing on a 12 hour flight and by the time she landed she was vilified and fired from her public relations job. This article reports on the fallout. A related article, posted by Gawker Media's Sam Biddle has a similar theme. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Innovation Imperative: Meet Generation Z
Northeastern University, 2015/02/12
University Business tells us that, according to this report, Generation Z wants to design their own learning programs. "The majority of Gen-Zers think col­leges should allow stu­dents to design their own majors, should integrate practical experience into programs and should offer skills like financial planning." I happen to this this is a good idea so of course I'll take this uncritically as conforming my pre-existing beliefs. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Citation-Based Document Categorization: An Approach Using Artificial Neural Networks
Magali Rezende Gouvêa Meireles, Beatriz Valadares Cendón, Qualitative, Quantitative Methods in Libraries, 2015/02/12
Meaning, said Ludwig Wittgenstein, is use. So the meaning of an academic paper would be how it is used, and the most common use of a paper is represented via citations. So instead of categorizing papers through their contents, which mixes together the useful and the useless, a categorization system based on citations might be more interesting. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. COAR Roadmap: Future Directions for Repository Interoperability
Friedrich Summann, Kathleen Shearer, Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), 2015/02/12

Getting online resource providers to cooperate is like the pulling of proverbial teeth. Still, the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) has a roadmap which takes us a little further along that path. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Labour, property and pedagogy: Theory and practice for co-operative higher education
Joss Winn, Education, technology, labour, , property, 2015/02/11
There's a lot to like in Joss Winn's article about an educational co-operative in Lincoln (one of the coolest cities in England, IMO) but I fear it's one of these models that may work better as a single instance than as a replacement for the entire system. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Seven big myths about top-performing school systems
Andreas Schleicher, BBC News, 2015/02/11
I really have mixed feelings about this article, mostly because of how some of the things are phrased rather than the actual points made. For example, it says that it is a myth that "disadvantaged pupils are doomed to do badly in school." Yet we know that socio-economic status of a child's parents is the best predictor of educational outcome. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. What’s wrong with Facebook-sponsored Internet access?
Mark Calder, eLearning Africa, 2015/02/11
This column is an argument in favour of a new type of internet access which allows a Facebook and "selected health, employment and local information websites" to run without data charges, but which will see fees levied for any other sort of internet use. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. "Passwords are stored in plain text."
Eric Hellman, Go To Hellman, 2015/02/10
A nice explanation of password hashing and salting, and a rather interesting set of responses from various academic services about the manner in which they store their passwords (or entrust third party services to manage them as GET requests, storing them in access logs for later retrieval and reuse). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Lifelong learning in the digital age: A content analysis of recent research on participation
Alison J. Head, Michele Van Hoeck, , Deborah S. Garson, First Monday, 2015/02/10
According to the abstract, "This paper presents results from a cross-disciplinary content analysis of 185 recent research articles, published between 2008 and 2013." Nothing from me, or Wiley, or Levine, or Conole, and only one item from Siemens (from 2006), and exactly two paragraphs of discussion of MOOCs, in the introduction, all of which suggests some issues with the methodology. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Typology of Web 2.0 Learning Technologies
Matt Bower, EDUCAUSE, 2015/02/10

The 2015 Typology of Web 2.0 technologies on their website published by EDUCAUSE includes 212 tools arranged into 37 categories and 14 clusters. More...