The Histories of Personalized Learning
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, 2017/06/12
As Audrey Watters points out, these days the term 'personalized learning' can mean almost anything you want it to mean, and in a sense the ideas it encompasses go back to Rousseau, Aristotle, Dewey, and various others. But there's a more modern sense we generally comprehend, and the history of this idea, she says, is a relatively recent invention, replacing 'individualization' in the late 1990s. More...

Gaokao, A.I. and the New Era of Education in China
GETChina Insights, Medium, 2017/06/09
The Chinese Higher Education Entrance Exam, or ‘Gaokao’, took place this week, and while it is an event of key importance for Chinese students, this year's effort is marked by the participation of two AIs. More...

5 Tips For Choosing The Right Open Source Code
Jonathan Saring, ReadWrite, 2017/06/08
Ignore for the moment the fact that this article is about open source code, and pretend it's about open educational resources or something similar. The advice it give becomes spot-on. More...

Facebook, an Online Learning Platform?
Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed, 2017/06/12

It makes sense for a platform to want to be a platform, and so it's no surprise that Facebook would look with eager eyes at online learning. And it's integrated deep into Facebook functionality. More...

Sony’s New toio Wants to Inspire a Future Generation of Robotics Engineers
Johnny Strategy, Spoon & Tomago, 2017/06/12
According to this article, "Toio is the result of 5 years of research into developing a toy that’s simple enough for kids to use, but also sophisticated enough to create a figurative sandbox where kids can explore the inner-workings of robotics engineering." How simple. More...

Creative vs. Transactional Collaboration
Asha Curran, Stanford Social Innovation Review, 2017/06/07
This post essentially distinguishes between collaboration (which it calls 'creative collaboration') and cooperation (which it calls transactional collaboration) and then asserts that only the former is good. More...

Digital Badges Are Gaining Traction
Michael Feldstein, e-Literate, 2017/06/08
"Badges seem to be gaining the most traction in career readiness, particular for so-called 'middle skills' jobs that require more than high school degree but less than four-year college degree," writes Michael Feldstein. More...

Education Aid Eludes Countries That Need It Most
Julie Depenbrock, NPR, UNESCO, 2017/06/09

Aid to education is stagnating, aid to secondary education is actually declining, and aid is not reaching the countries that need it most, according to this UNESCO policy paper. More...

Neither Locked Out Nor Locked In
Martha Burtis, The Fish Wrapper, 2017/06/08

Martha Burtis discusses the use of "the Trojan Horse approach" to implementing Domain of One's Own (DoOO) at a college or university. More...

Equality of Educational Opportunity
Liam Shields, Anne Newman, Debra Satz, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2017/06/07
I'm surprised to find such an article in an encyclopedia of philosophy, but in fact philosophers have addressed the subject over the years, and it is a matter of current philosophical import (hence my own involvement in the subject). What emerges is a generally fair-minded discussion of the issues behind the concept and varying perspectives. More...