By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Making Sense of Blended Learning: Treasuring an Older Tradition or Finding a Better Future
John Daniel, Contact North, 2016/03/08
From the summary in the Contact North newsletter: "A consensus is emerging that blended learning, a term that embraces various combinations of classroom presence and online study, will become the most common approach to teaching and learning in higher education. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Behind the Headline: There Is No FDA For Education. Maybe There Should Be
Education Next, 2016/03/10
We get this sort of sentiment a lot. It's the thinking behind initiatives like the Campbell Collaboration which postulate that innovation in education should be (more or less) completely evidence-based. So here we have "NPR’s Eric Westervelt talks with Harvard education researcher Tom Kane about how and why American education research has mostly languished in an echo chamber for much of the last half century." First of all, who cares that it's a Harvard education researcher? Second, what do they mean by "American educational research"? It's not like there's one big monolith. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Want to Change Academic Publishing? Just Say No
Hugh Gusterson, Chroncile of Higher Education, 2016/03/10
The headline is definitely a mismatch for the content of the article. In a nutshell, the author argues that if he were a lawyer or physician, consulting fees could be hundreds of dollars a session, and as an author, he might be paid well by magazines, but as an academic, he gets nothing for writing or reviewing for academic journals. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. SXSWedu’s Opening Keynote, Temple Grandin, Revisits ‘Learning Styles’
Michael Winters, EdSurge, 2016/03/11
Although the concept of learning styles has been criticized for instructional ineffectiveness, Temple Grandin argues "that, when used effectively, these preferences can help teachers and parents find the right ways to engage kids in educational activities." The idea is to get beyond labeling and to find ways to help students focus on their strengths. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Next Generation Learning Analytics: Or, How Learning Analytics is Passé
Timothy Harfield, 2016/03/07
From last year, but the point remains valid: "The biggest problem with learning analytics in its most popular incarnations is that — particularly as it is applied at scale by colleges, universities, and in vendor-driven solutions — it sits on top of existing learning management architectures which, in turn, rely on irrelevant assumptions about what higher education looks like." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Real Future: A Female eSports Champion Speaks Out About Harassment
Kevin Roose, Real Future, YouTube, 2016/03/04

Interesting video that touches on a number of interesting topics: online gaming, Twitch, Hearthstone, gender issues, and more. From the video summary: "Kevin Roose visits Hafu and learns what life is like for a female eSports celebrity, and what she thinks could help eSports solve its gender problem. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Helping mainstream collaborative teaching and learning through the new CO-LAB project
Collaborative Education Lab, 2016/03/02
From the website: "CO-LAB is a new project launched in January 2016 which gives practitioners and policy makers the opportunity to experiment and better understand what Collaborative Teaching and Learning (CTL) means in policy and practice. The project aims to train teacher trainers, student teachers and teachers across Europe in how to integrate CTL into the 21st century classroom through a MOOC which will be open to all and available online in October 2016 on the European Schoolnet Academy." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web.  Connectivism in Learning Activity Design: Implications for Pedagogically-Based Technology Adoption in African Higher Education Contexts
Rita Ndagire Kizito, The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL), 2016/03/02
This is a "reflection on the process of designing learning activities that employ blogging in an experimental training intervention provides a unique context in which to try and infuse connectivist principles while outlining the challenges that surface." How does connectivism inform the work in this context. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web.  The Linguistics of Mass Persuasion Part 2: Choose Your Own Adventure
Chi Luu, JSTOR Daily, 2016/03/01
It's always appropriate to restate these points: "In the realm of political persuasion, sophisticated language use can be very effective in swaying an audience. We are encouraged to 'choose' out of a limited set of choices, to fill in obvious information, to resolve the cliffhanger in an already fully-framed narrative—all without necessarily being aware of it. As we engage with politics, it’s important to remember how powerful words can ultimately be, and how easily we can be persuaded by them." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 2016 Lecture Capture Survey
Unattributed, Duke University, 2016/03/01
The context of this article is mostly to serve as a platform to introduce Duke's own lecture capture product, but it's still a useful view of a dozen or so competing products - you can see them all listed in the 'Categories' list to the right. Click on them to find overviews of such products as Cattura, Echo 360, and Opencast. Interestingly, according to the author, "many vendors are working hard to replace the term 'lecture capture' with terms like 'academic video' that call to mind flipped classes, supplementary teaching modules created outside class, and recordings that are more highly produced and edited rather than automated recordings of a lecturer standing at the front of a room." More...