HowToons
Various authors, 2017/06/26
The people at O'Reilly write, "this is brilliant! An amazing kit in the mail each month, with an interesting project each time. It's given me some priceless moments with my nephew. They're not so long that the kid loses interest, nor so mundane that you lose interest." The kits contain basic materials and comic-style instructions and you can build things like toy guitars, cars, and whatnot. More...

Preparation for Open Ed SIG webinar on shared values of the open community
Teresa MacKinnon, JISC Open Ed Sig, 2017/06/23
In view of the conflicts between open education communities in recent months JISC's Open Ed Sig is planning a webinar. More...

Drive to get children back to school failing worldwide
Rebecca Ratcliffe, The Guardian, 2017/06/23
This article reports on a UNESCO position paper (16 page PDF) asserting that the number of children not in school is remaining steady. More...

US court grants Elsevier millions in damages from Sci-Hub
Quirin Schiermeier, Nature, 2017/06/23
Most of this is not at all surprising. But I want to raise one point. “Sci-Hub is obviously illegal,” says structural biologist Stephen Curry at Imperial College London in the United Kingdom. More...

The Future of Social Learning: A Novel Approach to Connectivism
Holm Smidt, Matsu Thornton, Kaveh Abhari, Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences , 2017/06/23
This is an interesting paper seeking to extend and apply connectivism. If I were picky I would complain about the interpretation of connectivism (for example: I don't think it's really true that "Connectivism largely treats technology as a tool independent from its context and its users." But no matter. More...

Why EdTech Sucks
Graham Brown-Martin, Learning {Re}imagined, 2017/06/23
Over the last few months Graham Brown-Martin has authored a number of posts critical of the existing education technology (edtech) industry, and it's hard to disagree with his core points. More...

Iris.ai
Iris AI AS, 2017/06/23
The idea behind Iris.ai is that you provide it with the URL of a research paper and it provides you with a set or related papers (from a database of 60 million open access papers)  organized by category. For example, I gave it New Models of Open and Distributed Learning and got 259 related papers grouped by concept. More...

Relaunching E-Learn: A magazine and online platform designed for and by the teaching and learning community
Laureano Díaz, Blackboard Blog, 2017/06/23
This should not be confused with eLearn Magazine, which has long been published by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and in which my paper E-Learning 2.0 appeared all those years ago. It is the E-learn Magazine, a product of Nivel Siete, a Blackboard company. More...

The Worst Approach to Teaching Students About Social Media
Connected Principals, 2017/06/21
A good comment from George Couros: "This is what is so hard about social media in education. If you are too intrusive, kids will block you out (could be literally or figuratively), or they will move somewhere else." P.S. he needs to give his meme-posts a second thought. More...

Micro Learning in the Workplace and How to Avoid Getting Fooled by Micro Instructionists
Christian Glahn, LO-F.AT, 2017/06/21
"This post," writes Christian Glahn, "is a response to Mirjam Neelen and Paul Kirschner's post that comes with a lot of references but leaves out the most important aspects of micro learning and argues that micro learning is a meaningless concept. More...