By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Macmillan to Merge Higher Education, New Ventures Units
EdSurge, 2015/10/28
Macmillan is consolidating its learning division with some of its publishing products to consolidate around education. The affected divisions are Higher Education and New Ventures. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Who Owns Molecular Biology?
Yarden Katz, Boston Review, 2015/10/28
This is an excellent article that while not dealing with education technology directly deals with issues of patents and ownerships that will impact our field, and our society, for generations. At issue is ownership of the CRISPR-Cas system bacteria use to defend themselves against an attacking virus. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. “Peak indifference”: Cory Doctorow on surveillance in education
Annika Burgess, Online Educa Berlin, 2015/10/28
“In the educational domain," writes Cory Dopctorow, "we see a lot of normalisation of designing computers so that their users can’t override them. For example, school supplied laptops can be designed so that educators can monitor what their users are doing. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. No More Pencils, No More Books
Will Oremus, Slate, 2015/10/28
Good article with a lot of detail (and more than a little breathless enthusiasm) on adaptive learning software. "While the thinkers are arguing," writes Oremus, "textbook publishers are acting. With their traditional business models under pressure, they’ve begun to reinvent themselves as educational technology companies." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. What a Deep Neural Network thinks about your #selfie
Andrej Karpathy, Andrej Karpathy's Blog, 2015/10/28
This article is a reaally good indication of thee sort of thing that can be done with a neural network (I hesitate to classify these as deep neural networks, because as the article makes clear, they depend on training sets). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. What’s Happening in ‘Their Space’?
Jane Andrews, Mark Jones, Journal of Interactive Media in Education (JIME), 2015/10/27
This item was shared by Grainne Conole and Ana Cristina Pratas on Facebook, so I took a look, but must honestly confess to muttering "come on, really?" a lot while reading this item. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Lessons from the MOOC investment gold rush
Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, 2015/10/27
Martin Weller reflects on "this unprecedented amount of investment from universities and venture capitalists" on MOOCs. I'm not sure it was "unprecedented" - I think spending on sports stadia eclipses it by a lot. So did the money poured into technology transfer and commercialization divisions. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Smell of the Place
Sumantra Ghosha, YouTube | World Economic Forum, 2015/10/27
This is a terrific 8-minute video that applies as much to educational institutions as it does work environments. Basically Ghoshal argues that the environment, far more than the characteristics of employees, is what impacts productivity. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Sharing, Gifting, and the Moral Evolution of the Social Web
Tim Rayner, Medium, 2015/10/27
I really like the image at the top of the article, and that by itself makes this article worth sharing. But I wish to be on the record as saying that (a) 'gifting' should not even be a word, much less a concept, and (b) the concept of 'gifting' proposed here should not be seen as some sort special and privileged type of sharing. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. ESPN Clips Vanish From YouTube Due to Rights, Legal Issues
Jack Clark, Bloomberg, 2015/10/26
Remember how great YouTube was and how important its free and open access to everything was so important for education, spawning such things as the Khan Academy? Well that's all about to change as Google introduces YouTube Red subscriptions on Oct. 28. More...