My Adult Learning Principles for the 21st Century
Kristin Glavis, HASTAC, 2016/12/07
I like this article by Kristin Glavis, a student at Saint Joseph's University. She outlines three major principles of adult learning that have guided her through her education:

• Self-confidence - "confidence in their abilities, good self-esteem, support from others, and trust in others" (Merriam, Caffarella, & Baumgartner).
• Experience - "people draw from their experiences in all aspects of their life—not just in the formal education setting."
• Adaptability - "Adult learners seek out educational opportunities because they want to learn- they’re self-directed."

These are not going to be found on any formal curriculum, but they are at the heart of effective learning at any age. More...

Janwaar Castle - Skateboarding Challenge 2016
Ulrike Reinhard, YouTube, 2016/12/02
Another update from Janwaar Castle, which encourages youth development through skateboarding in rural India. More...

Modifying an Open Textbook: What You Need to Know
Cheryl Cuillier, et.al., Open Textbook Network, 2016/12/02
This is a very basic guide and if you know nothing about modifying open documents, this is a good place to start. But it focuses almost exclusively on the different technical formats (and a bit on licenses) and not at all on how you might adapt contents for specific purposes. More...

5 IDEAS for a pedagogy of online learning
Tont Bates, online learning and distance education resources, 2016/12/02
Tony Bates summarizes Lourdes Guardia's Next Generation Pedagogy: IDEAS for Online and Blended Higher Education. which summarizes emerging developments in online pedagogy with the acronym IDEAS: Intelligent, Distributed, Engaging, Agile and Situated. More...

Mass learning must mean web-based study
Laurence Brockliss, Times Higher Education, 2016/12/02
This was pretty much the theme at the Online Educa Berlin conference: "We have all the elements needed to make online courses succeed, but institutional inertia at well-established universities stymies progress." But it's not just here; the theme seems to be lurking in the background. More...

The Value and Price of Open Online Courses
Stephen Downes, Dec 02, 2016, OEB2016, Berlin, Germany
If open online learning can be equivalent or even superior to face-to-face education, what does this mean for the value and the price of MOOCs for institutions, for learning communities, for learners and for the creation of new knowledge. More...

Higher Ed Governance for the Real World
Rachel DeLauder, SlideShare, 2016/12/01
I could probably fill this newsletter with nothing but SlideShare presentations. Don't worry - I won't - but via Eraser I found this deck that's worth a look. It's a pretty accurate capture of the reality of the web site designer in a higher ed environment - different departments have different priorities and there's no one right way to do it. More...

Facebookers 2.5 Times More Likely To Read Fake News, Millennials Least Prone
Joe Mandese, Publishers Daily, 2016/12/01
Facebook isn't worth the time you give it, of course. That's one result from this report. The other is that it is not the millennials that are conned by and clicking on fake news, it's the older generation. More...

Containers: Are they worth the hype?
IDG Connect, 2016/12/01

Not a deep article, but it will give you the basic idea of container tools such as Kubernetes from Google, Swarm from Docker, and CoreOS. Containers are a tye of virtualization. More...

The push for Asian HE internationalisation indicators
Yojana Sharma, University News, 2016/12/01
As this story notes, "UNESCO has begun work on drawing up a series of indicators on higher education internationalisation in Asia to help universities and education policy-makers in the region to develop an international outlook and promote international higher education links against a set of solid, accepted, quality benchmarks." More...