By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Leaving Lynda.com

Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed, 2017/01/26
When companies acquire each other they create debt out of nothing, which creates from thin air a new urgency to increase customer revenue. This is what has happened to universities subscribing to Lynda.com as they face double digit increases after Lynda was acquired by LinkedIn, and LinkedIn was acquired by Microsoft. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Canada’s accidental brain drain
Adam Crymble, University Affairs, 2017/01/26
According to this article, "Canada has relied upon its supposedly self-evident and enduring allure to bring expats back," it is losing too many of its best and brightest, and "ending the brain drain should be a priority for the federal minister of innovation." I don't agree. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 3D TV is finally, blessedly, mercifully, dead — will VR follow suit?
Joel Hruska, ExtremeTech, 2017/01/26

I wonder how many pundits predicted that virtual reality would be one of the big trends for education in 2017. I wasn't one of them. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Top 10 IT Issues: 2000–2017
Susan Grajek, EDUCAUSE, 2017/01/26

EDUCAUSE released its annual list of the top IT issues in education last week and the article - though chock-full of useful analysis - is the usual mélange of IT angst: information security, student success, leadership, management, funding, the like. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Cognitive bias cheat sheet
Buster Benson, Better Humans, 2017/01/26
This is a really nice use of Wikipedia to create a useful learning resource. The subject is cognitive bas and the author's intent is to bring together and categorize the various sources of bias, then provide some simple heuristics to comprehend them. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Why Are We Still Using LMSs?
George Kroner, edutechnica, 2017/01/30

Good question. The author offers responses in terms of convenience, consumerization, connectedness, and compliance, but none of these responses seems to satisfy. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Continuous, Curated Learning: The Business Case
Stephen Walsh, Modern Workplace Learning Magazine, 2017/01/30

Sometimes people call what I do here 'curation', but I really dislike that word, because it's not what I do. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The State of Personalized Learning
Philip Hickman, Ken Eastwood, , Eliot Levinson, Ed Tech Digest, 2017/01/30

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The state of Jupyter
Fernando Pérez, Brian Granger, O'Reilly, 2017/01/30

If you've been doing any work in data analysis you might have run across references to the Jupyter Notebook. Essentially this is an application that allows you to embed running bits of code into a text document. More...